What are the Prospects of South Sudan Turning Over a New Leaf?
By Apioth Mayom Apioth
There are two African proverbs which go: “A snake becomes a useless rope when its head has been cut off”; and, “a herd of sheep led by a lion can defeat a herd of lions headed by a sheep”: in these two proverbs, having a capable leader or someone who is overly ambitious can mean a great deal to his/her followers. In South Sudan, since the rise of Salva Kiir to the helm of the Juba government in 2005, we have had a nightmarish time, making us question where our central government has been hiding all this time, while our civil populace was busy shouldering one crisis after another. It has been known throughout history that stable states are created after going through detrimental humanitarian disasters and wars, because history allows states to reflect and chart new paths to improvisation of their people. Furthermore, the people of South Sudan came out of the war that claimed 2.5 million of their people, and fell prey to yet another devastating civil war. I guess history wasn’t so kind to us this time around in that it made us turn against one another after we freed ourselves from our common enemy Mr. Umari.
Much of the developmental debate in Sub-Saharan Africa has been centered on our inability to catch up to the developmental standards of the rest of the world; for example, a country like Ghana is often compared to South Korea, who both had the same GDP in the 1950s, and now is often ranks among the top thirty countries in the world. South Africa is not seen as a leading example to how Sub-Saharan Africans have fared in the international economic pecking order since the dawn of the modern African state because our adversaries always say, “if wasn’t because of the Western people who initiated the developmental projects, South Africa would not be the same today.” People around the world sometimes ask, “Why are people endowed with numerous natural resources seen struggling like they don’t know how to take care of themselves.” We, Africans, pride ourselves as dignified peoples with a cleared character, however, one of the most embarrassing contaminated habits we have been recycling for many decades now, is the stealing of foreign aid resources.
We talk about how we were terribly wronged by past grievances caused by enslavement and colonization of our peoples, and yet now our leaders go around the world charming donors to pass the begging plate to our impoverished peoples, and once they do give us a little, our leaders turn around and divert the same monies to their Swiss banks. How long are we going to do this? Kenya just turned 50 this year, and, are our next breed of leaders going to continue on the same path of robbing charities of the poor for the next 200 years? The donors’ moneys we receive in our home countries are tax deductibles and hard-earned income from ordinary people just like us; they see people stricken with poverty, and a pity of conscience runs through their veins to give a helping hand; and yet we come around embezzling these funds as if we grow them on trees in our own backyards. Where has the so-dubbed “African Pride” gone? We want our future generations to be able to stand up and go head to head with whoever he/she is conversing with and say, “I am an African, my people are a down to earth bunch, and our achievements are known the world over.” It has been over half a century already and we are still dragging our feet continuing to pass the begging bowl around. History is being written as we speak, and by the prospects of things, history books will remember us as peoples who depended on foreign aid for some two hundred years.
I believe it has become crystal clear to everyone by now that high-powered economic development is coming to Africa, but the way it is progressing is too slow to make everyone restless. With the exception of South Sudan, countries like Kenya, Zambia, and Ivory Coast, are the typical African states with slow economic growth; before the current political malaise, South Sudan was some fifty years behind these countries, and at this moment in time, we are about sixty years behind, because we took a step or two backward toward our future prospecting chances of development.
By my estimates, it is going to take the above typical African states some two hundred years or more to reach the current developed stage of Singapore. It took Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, about 31 years to take his country from a third world ghetto status to a first world poster boy of the rags to riches’ story of the developing world. Kuan Yew employed the following five strategies to change the fortunes of Singapore: (a) He maintained the currency from plunging into the pitfalls of deflations and inflations (b) He said “No” to foreign aid: The advice of our late Burkinabe brother, Thomas Sankara, rings true here, “He who feeds you, controls you” (c) He established first-class private enterprise environment, where free trade was the norm (d) He made sure his government was accountable to human security, public order, and respect of the private property (e) To achieve all these goals, he created a tiny, open government that was less prone to big dramas, and its public servants were paid top-tier wages.
Out of the rising stars of Africa, Rwanda is currently dubbed as the “Singapore of Africa” in that it took up the “Singapore Model”, added some few innovations to it, and now it is called the “Rwanda Model.” The Rwandans are innovators to the Singapore Model, because where the Singaporeans said “No” to foreign aid, they are now saying “Yes” to well-intentioned philanthropists. Sixty percent of Rwanda’s annual budget comes from foreign aid. Rwanda is slated to turn its economic fortunes around in the next thirty years. All this will come about after a few group of Rwandan citizens came together and thought about what they would do to improve the welfare of their citizens. Paul Kagame put it nicely: “If you believe you are worth more, you will achieve more.” On the flip side of the same coin, South Sudan is bound to follow in the footsteps of other typical African states like Zambia or Ivory Coast; why is this so? The administrations of Kiir and Amum are not going to be much different to either of Laurent Gbagbo’s, or Frederick Chiluba’s.
Another odd worry to all of us, including Rwanda, is that we constantly live in a dangerous neighborhood known for its infamous notoriety in wars and public disorder. That is probably the reason why Paul Kagame is seen more often around Museveni and Kenyatta; he is playing politics to these guys so to avoid high cross-border tariffs and high costs of shipment from the coast to Kigali. When the neighborhood is this dangerous, it is the ordinary citizens that pay the grunt of a disrupted economy; in other words, their economies could come to a standstill at times. So, Kigali is playing good politics to try to let them see sense about how economic development comes about.
The two important messages to take out of this critique is that our leaders are the major causes of: (a) Poverty, and of why Africans continue to linger in the bottom pit of the global pecking order; and by this we continue to die of diseases, and war-induced famines (b) Indignity – our leaders have developed a culture of begging for their people, and then turn around to pocket those same donations they were crying about a little while earlier.
Our leaders must know that this game of begging people in the Western countries, is out of touch with our moral realities of our contemporary world. Do they even ask themselves sometimes about where the donors acquire the charities they happily hand to us? Those monies come from painstaking labors and sweats of ordinary people who come to realization that our humanity is no less than theirs. To live a lavish lifestyle is not worth playing with the precious savings of another person who wished to send his or her offspring to school, or buy a house. A mere following in the footsteps of the likes of Zambia and Kenya, to achieve economic prosperity some two hundred years later is a bitter pill to swallow. Within that time, our people are going to continue to languish in inhumanely deplorable conditions. People are going to get tired to see the face of another suffering African from one century in and one century out. Time is up for our policymakers to chart new paths to put an end to this interminable cycle of indignity of losing face.
Why can’t some few patriotic South Sudanese patriots rise up and change this sickening order of things? The poverty that our people are going to continue to experience, if things stay in stalemate as they are, is worse than the indignity of becoming the laughing stock of the whole word. To take things at a face value, it is easy to sense that we don’t really have much of a choice during the times of Salva Kiir and Riek Machar. As the above proverbs have demonstrated, change doesn’t occur in a power vacuum, there must be a visionary at the top of the heap who can administer strategies for anything substantial to take place. Someone who can administer sound policies, and send some people after those policies to make sure they are followed through to the end.
We don’t have much hope for either Kiir or Machar to be our new Lee Kuan Yew, Paul Kagame, or Thomas Sankara for that matter. They are infected with incurable diseases of politics; basically, they are just in politics to make a name for themselves; the welfare of the common people is none of their concern. They say we are going to do this and that, but in the end, nothing really happens.
About Post Author
