One More Struggle for the Liberation of South Sudanese (Part 2)
By Thiik Mou Giir, Melbourne, Australia
February 20, 2016 (SSB) — Now let me turn to what I think is needed; namely, one more struggle for the liberation of South Sudanese. It is a project that will let us overcome our innate weaknesses and also a project that will let us overcome the evil schemes of our foreign enemies, some of who pose as our friends. We now have multiple foreign enemies, not just one; bear that in your mind.
If these enemies want our people to fight each other, if they want to keep our people divided for the next one hundred years in order for them to exploit our natural resources, they might have already, skillfully and successfully, built within our people the internal control mechanism that threatens their very coexistence.
There is nothing more for them to do but to sit back, enjoy and watch our people demand more weapons and they provide and our people then kill themselves with those weapons.
When fighting stops, if it is ever going to stop, our people and their children and their children’s children will be in debt for a very long time. The unborn South Sudanese will be born with all life-long loans to pay! Three quarters of the revenues will be handed over to pay off the debts; one eighth will be used to enable the current and future governments run the country while the other one eighth will go into the pockets of the current and future corrupt government officials. Such is and will continue to be the situation until we wake up.
If your enemy convinces you that he is your friend, then he remotely maneuver you into fighting each other while he steals your wealth and feeds you with porridge, what is he? A genius. If, on the other hand, you allow your enemy to easily handle you and control you in that way, what are you? An enslaved, crippled fool. If, in the twinkling of an eye, all South Sudanese natural resources evaporate and all the deadly imported weapons that the government and the opposition forces have acquired over the years vanish, South Sudanese will immediately realize that they have no friends, except our non-Arab Africans.
What happens next? In this scenario the 18 – 60 year olds Dinka and Nuer men will have their 45-minute spear fighting today, reconcile tomorrow, and inter-marry after tomorrow, as they used to do in the past. Have you got the point I am trying to make? Good. So, the people who are posing as your friends these days do not care whatsoever whether thousands of people die, millions of people are traumatized and millions of people forced to refugee camps.
All they care about is to secure the natural resources of South Sudan. As it stands, this war is vicious and whoever will appear, in the end, as the victor is, in fact, the vanquished. The real winners will be the greedy foreigners.
The only way for our people to escape this vicious situation is that our people should earnestly embrace the vision that I am proposing. We must construct our new identity. We should take part in the struggle to liberate our hearts and our minds from our outdated and outplaced cultural practices. It is also a struggle to liberate our minds and our hearts from our tribal mentality. This vision embodies a concept called Renaissance.
Renaissance is defined as a bridge between the old and the new. This is exactly what our people need to work on. We need to construct this bridge. Our children will continue with what we would have already started and who knows, they will be able to initiate what could then be considered new or, modern. We have a long way to go.
By constructing our new identity, we will be able to safeguard our democratic processes and our freedom of thought. This will be possible because a new identity, a new South Sudanese character, will emerge. Once this has been achieved, we can then expect democracy to work, we can expect to join hands as one people to subdue tribalism and we can expect the number of conflicts to be radically reduced.
Renaissance brings about a change in the society. The change our people need most is twofold: Social change as well as cultural change. There are certain things in our society that we should let go and there are certain things that exist in our society that we should retain and bring them up to date. The vision that should inform and guide whatever our people do in order to bring about this change is to “Construct Our New Identity”.
Whatever our lives’ fields are, we must make sure that they are contributing to the building of our common identity. We must work hard and feel we are purpose driven; we are laying a brick upon a brick; we are viewing what we have built and we are foreseeing what remains to be built. Love, trust, loyalty and the knowledge of our shared history are the factors that will be sufficient enough to motivate us to do more. As this happens, we will be able to resist being manipulated by politicians and by foreigners.
To conclude, let us say to Uncle Daniel Koat Mathews and to all those who took part in the struggle for the liberation of South Sudan:
“For the love of our people and the love of our land, you struggled and did not struggle in vain. We find it necessary now to struggle on, not with guns, but with pens and hard work, in order to construct and protect our common identity as South Sudanese people. In this way, we are honouring, protecting and preserving what you had struggled for. Thank you!”
Let me say this again, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”. Let us get up, shake off the dirt, and walk with our heads up like any other proud people.
The author of this piece can be reached at: thiik_giir@hotmail.com
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