April 25th 2018 (Nyamilepedia) – South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir Mayardiit has vowed to stay on in power despite opposition calls to quite over failure to achieve peace with others in the opposition.
President Kiir was speaking to the people at Dr John Garang de Mabior Mausoleum where he paid his last tribute to body of the Late army chief of staff Gen. Ajonga Mawut who died in a military hospital in the Egyptian capital Cairo on Friday when he responded to the opposition demand.
Kiir said the opposition at the peace talks wanted him to step down after signing the peace agreement being negotiated in Addis Ababa.
“They [opposition] want me to sign the agreement and step down immediately. What is my incentive in bringing peace, if it is peace that I will bring and then I step aside? Nobody can do it,” he said making Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir as an Example. Al-Bashir who signed a peace deal with the then SPLM/A rebel group didn’t step down as the opposition wanted from the beginning.
“Bashir didn’t do it [step down] when we were fighting with him,” he said labeling the opposition demand to step down as unreasonable.
Last month, the Opposition Alliance in Ethiopia proposed that the South Sudanese leader and the former First Vice President Riek Machar should be excluded from any future governance in South Sudan.
“They think that I am obstacle to peace and if I am removed after signing the agreement, then there will be no problem. They want me to sign the agreement and then step down immediately,” he said.
Kiir regret saving Machar and Pagan’s life
Kiir also in the same occasion said he regrets saving the life of Riek Machar and that of Pagan Amum and his group.
“But when I watched television after I released them on the same day, I saw them being received on the red carpet by that country and they started talking politics after leaving Juba, so that’s why I regretted for saving their lives,” Kiir said on Pagan and his group.
He accused Machar of going to his office with a gun in order to “finish me” and take-over the leadership of the country.
“The same in 2016, when Machar went to my office with his cooped pistol trying to finish me in the office to declare himself the president of South Sudan, which he didn’t managed,” he said adding that “After all when Machar’s bodyguards were completed during J1 fighting, I asked Vice President James Wani Igga to offer protection to Machar by covering him with our bodies until we escorted him to his car and we saved him and now Riek is alive. I saved him just like the same way I saved his colleagues who participated with him in a coup attempt in 2013”.
