By William Madouk Garang
Young people all over five counties of Northern Bahr el Ghazal State (NBGs) are urged to be peace ambassadors and resolve conflict using peaceful approach.
This call came during a public awareness on Healing and Reconciliation conducted by a local organization – Empower Youth Africa (EYA) through funding from the UNDP and Sweden Sverige government.
The public discourse was meant to build their capacities on how to manage local conflicts in the communities and over 300 youth attended the event.
Mariak Lual Alich, Community Liaison officer, said youth are mechanisms of stability as such they should be peace disseminators and come up with tactics of solving skirmishes.
“We know that youth are components of stability in our Country and so, we want you to be peace ambassadors. You should have ideas of resolving conflict in peaceful means,” Alich said.
“They should enable peace to expand and grow; we want to implant the new thinking of conflict resolution,” the peace official added.
He stressed that though young people still face quite a number of challenges that push them to violence, there is still a high time to reconstruct and learn from the peacebuilding experience.
“We have a broad-based holistic approach that the ministry is thinking about, focusing on sustainable livelihoods skills for the young people not only creating jobs in the cities but strategizing on how to help to engage locals on peacebuilding,” he added.
He revealed that Empower Youth Africa needs to add value to the young people and help them on how they can support in nation building.
Meanwhile, Francis Bol Marach Anoou, Youth Representative said the meeting was able to bring youth together to discuss ways to give peace a chance.
“We know that the youth are core factors of development basically for our Country; and so, we brought them together, over 300 of them to be able to share with them some aspects of conflict through peaceful means in three countries. The peacebuilding skills were missing among the youth and she hopes the youth will use the knowledge to enable peaceful society,” Anoou said.
He added that the idea is that at the end of the workshop, they should be able to have that thinking in their own communities and be advocates of peace-building and non-violence.
However, Garang Tong Wol, one of the beneficiaries said that the environment and its surroundings have continued to challenge the youth and this is why it has been difficult to adapt peacebuilding strategies.
He then said they are now going to take lead in preaching sustainable peace since they now have the skills.
“These skills are important to wake us up. Personally, I will help in preaching peace among the South Sudanese. We need to love ourselves as one people. We shall form a group that can speak on peacebuilding in our locality, “he lamented.
“If we can get two to five people, who believe that peacebuilding is the solution to conflict then peace will be definitely achieved among us the young people,” he added.