By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Kenya has sent former Prime Minister Raila Odinga to de-escalate the growing tension between President Salva Kiir and his longtime rival, First Vice President Riek Machar—frosty relations which the UN warns put the country on the edge of a fresh civil war.
Odinga’s spokesperson, Dennis Onyango, confirmed that the former Prime Minister would travel to Juba on Friday as a special envoy.
Kenyan President William Ruto, who chairs the East African Community (EAC) bloc, said he had spoken with Kiir about Machar’s detention and was sending a special envoy to help defuse the situation and report back.
Machar has been under house arrest in the capital, Juba, since Wednesday night, his party SPLM-IO says, a development it added voids a 2018 peace deal that ended a five-year civil war that killed about 400,000 people.
The peace pact brought Kiir and Machar into a fragile power-sharing government, though there have been constant clashes between forces loyal to both men.
Their administration has been slow to adopt key provisions of the peace pact, including an election to usher in a democratically elected government and the unification of their two forces into one national army.
Machar’s detention took “the country one step closer to the edge of collapse into civil war,” a spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Thursday.
Machar’s party denies government accusations that it backs the White Army, an ethnic militia largely comprised of Nuer youths, which clashed with the army in the northeastern town of Nasir this month, triggering the latest political crisis.
Ruto said he had also consulted Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, who sent troops to South Sudan at the government’s request to help secure the capital, Juba, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia, which has hosted South Sudan peace talks in the past.
