TGoNU Could Solve, Mismanaged Currency Float
By Mayen D.M.A Ayarbior
February 18, 2016 (SSB) — Citing discrimination on a pay adjustment regime which had seen Kenyans and Uganda getting 500% salary increment, last week the national staff of KCB underwent a strike. Because they are employees of the same institution they felt, and rightly so, that the policy was unjustifiable, disrespectful, discriminating to the extent that they could just express their dissatisfaction with a mere petition (request) for justice. To their dismay, in a strange case of abdication of parental (let alone national) sense of duty to protect our employed youth, some senior citizens appealed to the national staff’s “patriotism,” and urged them to ‘go back to work!’
Since before the Panthaw (Heglij) war, which was a just war, the population of South Sudan have been living under official and unofficial economic austerity. Most families have tightened their belts with the hope that everything will be okay. Indeed, everything will be okay one day so long as we just close our eyes and believe in Jesus, but when? Most on the streets argue that the current mismanaged float may not answer that question until it is rightly managed. They hang their hopes on that the formation of TGoNU, which is on the corner, will answer that question of when things will be okay, economically that is. The entire nation is keeping its metaphorical fingers crossed.
When the current devaluation policy was proposed, the signing was on the wall that undertaking it at this juncture might be ill-advised. But since a more radical step of floating the SSP was undertaken, not just devaluation as it were, a little hope was there that it would the awaited magic bullet. However, as authorities mistook ‘payment adjustments’ for ‘payment increments’ some true economists began to question whether we in South Sudan really understood what we had just done with our economy. In East Africa, nominal devaluation (managed float) was an element of an eclectic concurrent financial restructuring which involved printing of bigger currency denominations (one thousand, five and two hundred paper notes) and income adjustments all across the board. Markets too automatically adjusted.
Many analysts have warned on how the current mismanaged float is grinding (punishing) the entire population, and referred to the KCB strike as being a tip of an iceberg which is gathering all over the country, only to be possibly dispersed by TGoNU. The hope that people had when the country’s leaders talked of salary increments has long dissipated when news trickled down to state levels that only unclassified staff will get it on their basic rather than gross salaries. And considering that government is the largest employer in South Sudan, one could empathize with those single mothers who dropped tears at the prospects of cutting meals and not taking their kids to school this year, in spite of working fulltime and overtime.
Considering their (our) revolutionary and historic contribution to the independence of South Sudan, no one in his right mind has questioned the patriotism of the current generation of leaders of South Sudan. That notwithstanding, citizens worldwide have the tendency of judging leadership by today’s management capabilities, rather than yesterday’s prowess. And if that is the gage of leadership, the current generation had better pull its sleeves up, drop the shining pens on their pockets, swap V8s with hardtops for midlevel staff like Undersecretaries, build a single railway and interstate road, and be revolutionary again.
Mayen Ayarbior, BA Econ Poli. Science (Kampala Int’l Univ.), MA Int’l Security (JKSIS- Univ. of Denver), LLB (Univ. of London). Author of: House of War (Civil War and State Failure in Africa) 2013. mayen.ayarbior@gmail.com
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