In Pyongyang the uncle is dead, but in Juba the matriarch is safe

O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!  King Lear, I, V.34-35

By Donald B Kipkorir

NAIROBI, KENYA: The last two weeks have seen political upheavals in Juba and Pyongyang. South Sudan and North Korea are so dissimilar, yet so alike!

In the ashes of WWII, Korea was partitioned to create Communist North Korea and democratic South Korea.

The Sudan was partitioned to create the Islamic Sudan in the North and democratic South Sudan. The results of these partitions haven’t followed the script of the creators.

When North Korea came to being in 1948, its founder, Kim Il-sung intended to create a workers paradise. Instead, he created an absolute monarchy.

His grandson, Kim Jong-un, who is now the Supreme leader, has taken cultic leadership to surreal levels. North Korea, a country endowed with abundant natural resources including rare earth worth trillions of dollars, has most of its people outside Pyongyang living in abject poverty and at times feeding on grass.

The 30-year old Supreme Leader of North Korea allows only one centre of adulated power: himself. His uncle, Jang Sung-thaek, thought he was still the beloved regent in the palace.

The uncle was universally recognised as steering the country to some baby-steps in economic reform. On December 8, he was publicly removed from all his state offices and then executed.

Familicide is a forgotten ritual of royal families, but the Kim dynasty of North Korea is a relic of the past. If the Emperor can kill his uncle, then no one is safe.

South Sudan got its independence in July 2011, to world ululation and drumbeats. Like North Korea, South Sudan has even more abundant natural resources. It is said that wherever you drill in South Sudan, oil oozes out.

The country has one of the biggest forest covers in Africa, and big rivers crisscross it. Wildlife teems. If ever there was Garden of Eden, it is South Sudan. But then, like all other resource-rich countries of Africa and Asia, leadership takes leave of absence.

In the first week of December, Juba was thrown into chaos. As the initial dust settles, we now know that the army has been split into two camps: one part supports the President, Salva Kiir, and are mainly Dinka-speaking, like him; the other supports the dismissed Vice President, Dr Riek Machar, and like the Vice President, are those who are Nuer-speaking.

Basically, the army has been divided along tribal lines. The war has now spread to other towns.

While the civil war in South Sudan has just begun, the two ringleaders of the attempted coup d’état are out of harm’s way. And maybe for a long while as soldiers kill each other. Dr Machar has taken refuge in safe diplomatic compounds of the United Nations.

President Salva Kiir will have to negotiate with Dr Machar as an equal. Next to the President’s Palace is the other coup conspirator, Rebecca De Mabior, the widow of Dr Col John Garang, the Founding Father of South Sudan.

Though Dinka, Mrs Garang doesn’t have much love for Salva Kiir. But as the Winnie Mandela of South Sudan, Salva Kiir cannot even dare touch her hemline.

North Korea and South Sudan, countries founded on blissful ideals of independence, and so much blood having been shed, took wrong turns thereafter.

North Korea became a large closed gulag instead of the envisaged paradise. And there uncles get killed for daring to assist the nephew Emperor.

South Sudan, which is yet to even turn two, has been lost to curse of negative tribalism. Both countries are the only ones in the whole world with no tarmac roads outside their capital cities.

In Pyongyang, the Uncle is dead; in Juba, the Matriarch is safe, but again, as William Shakespeare in King Lear says: “O, that way madness lies: let me shun that; no more of that.”