Guns and cattle are major causes of communal deaths
On Monday, the Jonglei State government said 32 people had been killed, and 21 others wounded in a cattle raid in Baidit Payam, Bor County.
The state minister of information, Veronica Williams, said the attackers went away with an unknown number of cattle.
“The bandits attacked Baidit Payam and left serious losses as the wounded people have now been brought to the state hospital while the search is ongoing,” she said.
Although no suspects have been arrested, several sources in the area have blamed armed youth from the Pibor Administrative Area for being behind the attack.
The deaths stemming from cattle raids have become so rampant in the country that South Sudan is leading in the number of cases compared to other countries in the region.
There is a serious need to address this issue in order to promote peaceful coexistence among the citizens.
Despite the several inter-communal dialogues and conferences, there seems to be no prevailing peace among countries because there have been killings after killings.
This proves that the leaders need to come up with new strategies rather than waste resources on conferences now and then.
Cattle rustling and child abduction have become a culture in South Sudan that cannot be eradicated through dialogue or conference.
We need to borrow the knowledge from the Karamoja to find out how the Ugandans have managed to resolve the cattle raid between the Karamojong sections of Bokora and Matheniko.
Guns and cattle were the major causes of conflict in the Karamoja, but in the year 2000, the government launched a mass disarmament campaign that is still going on to date.
This exercise made it possible for the authorities to eradicate guns from the hands of the civilian population, thereby reducing the hostility in the area.
Bride-price inflation itself was both a cause and an effect of the Matheniko raid against the Bokora. However, since the reduction in the bride price, parents now don’t need to pay a huge amount of cattle as in the past.
Just like in most pastoralists’ communities in South Sudan, high bride prices are putting more pressure on the youth to at least possess cattle.
Bridal price inflation is an extremely difficult and slow process for village youth to complete dowry payments through traditional mechanisms.
Thus, the high cost of marriages is an added incentive for herders with few cattle to invest at least some of their animals in modern weapons (AK 47) which can then be used to mount raids to procure the requisite cattle.
Thus, the community that is less well-armed becomes a favourite target. We need to disarm our communities to reduce the number of cattle death-related incidents.
