Mandela was a man of steel who went for the substantive but a man who understood that when it comes to the pursuit of the big thing there were times when symbols were just as important. And he always played the game in such a manner that it was easy for opponents to dimiss or underrate him.
One night as they slept a group of girls, aged between 12 and 16, were abducted from the campus of their elite school in a village 25 kilometers outside the northern city of Lira in Uganda. For 4 brutal days they were frog marched through the bush into virtual slavery by the LRA, the rebel army that was marauding in the region.
Just days before Christmas 2012 there took place in the northern city of Lira (Uganda) a gathering of the tribe. The Langi, a major nationality group in Uganda numbering some 3 million converged on the war ravaged city from all corners of the land and from around the world. Decades of conflicts in Uganda had produced a disproportionately large Lango Diaspora.
The Sudan that Mo Ibrahim knew came into independence on January 1, 1956 waving the visionary horizon of being the bridge between Black Africa and Arab Africa. From its northern border with Egypt to its southern border with Uganda it hosted the River Nile and its mission of robbing rich soils from the highlands of Ethiopia and East Africa and hauling it to fertilise and support crop-growing agriculture in Egypt.