“The lambs of sacrifice for a country are the best of its sons, just as the unblemished lambs are offered on the sacrificed as narrated in the Old Testament and as practiced in our traditional rites,” Father Saturnino Lohure.
By Kut Alier Apollo, Nairobi, Kenya
I was taught to understand that to become a real Doctorate holder, critical thinking and objective assessment of events and issues would have to be second nature. Indeed, I never for once doubted this comprehension, which Dr. John Garang, Prof. Ajuoi Magot, and others clearly epitomized. Unfortunately, a few years after attending Law School, the likes of Dr. Bior Kwer and Dr. Riek Machar have cast some doubts on this understanding of the sense of judgment of the Doctorate holders.
Just towards the end of last year and beginning of this year, I read the literary salvos being fired by Dr. Bior Kwer Bior Jr against Dr. John Garang’s family, the political detainees in Juba and anybody else who has taken their time to assess where the truth lies in south Sudan’s privations. I was so distraught that this giant and pre-eminent South Sudanese scholar took to the internet to exchange the literary pugilism. How devoid of ideals and how ignoble is the whole contemporary system! The fact that scholars like Dr. Bior join in committing this sin against the image of intellectuals, even though they continue to emphasize the dignity of that image, is quite in keeping with his present activities. He talks about the just government measures, but fails to acknowledge the atrocities it has perpetrated against its own constituents.
However, Dr. Bior is not a man willing to run away from controversy. He seems to relish controversy, not that this really matters. But what is difficult to explain is his choice of the above victims as the epicentre of his controversy. I am quite aware that scholarship knows no bounds, and that true academics are citizens of the world. No area of study or the world is taboo to their microscopic scrutiny. The only pain, however, is the distortion of facts, the positing of imaginary theories that bear no similarity with reality, and the throwing of truth, objectivity, and humanism to the mongrels. Dr. Bior has recently been guilty of the latter.
He compartmentalized the major South Sudan tribes into ‘vocational groups,’ by overlooking the big picture, using the mentioned victims as his slogan of scrutiny; he has vigorously encouraged the injection of “cell anatomy” into the legal system (although South Sudan is far from stem cell technology and its controversies.) leave the legal matters and interpretation of the statutes to the legal minds, they need not be approached literally only, a single sentence can alter the case!!
In the course of finding out what makes Dr. Bior tick, I discovered that he is a lecturer at John Garang University, Jonglei State; a confidant to Prof. Aggrey (former chancellor of that university) and had courted the so-called mighty and powerful in the state and Juba as well. Thus, Dr. Bior believes that south Sudan is well known to him so much that he wants to be a part of the history that is reshaping it. One has no doubt that Dr. Bior, being the intellectual that he projects to be, knows that South Sudan and its government is sick to the bones. His friends rule South Sudan and virtually brought it to her knees. Could it be that Dr. Bior is part and parcel of those who are bleeding South Sudan? Is this why his lenses are blurred; his sense of truth and humanism perverted and one-sided? Only God knows the answer.
Otherwise, how can Dr. Bior be so open and willing to be surrounded by the military kleptomaniacs’ mentality, which is virtually paralyzing South Sudan? If Dr. Bior were indeed an academic of high repute, would he not have been introspective about the source of $ 4,000,000,000.00 (that’s a four with a hell lot of zeros) to South Sudan, and its sudden disappearance among 75 public officials and other grassroots beneficiaries? Is it out of place for Dr. Bior to see the inverse logic of having a lecture series in John Garang University, whilst most South Sudanese Universities, including his teaching post, are just like glorified high schools? Needless to say that his powerful friends contributed in no little way in making university education unattractive in South Sudan. Something isn’t right. There is more than meets the eye!
Without a doubt, Dr. Bior with his penchant for controversy, determination to covertly mesh in an illogical way ethnicity, politics, and education, is not doing a favour to the cause of scholarship. Rather than continue on the path to illuminate by being a beacon of objectivity, strong moral character, and humanism; Dr. Bior instead has settled for the very antithesis of what a distinguished Doctorate holder should be. “Tell it not in Gath”, it appears that Dr. Bior is heading towards the fate that befell and awaiting some of his ‘mighty friends’ in the Government. History indeed has not informed the Dr.
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