Welcome Back Dr. Machar: Shoulder the burdens of Nationality as Leaders than to rustle over them
5 min readBy Gabriel Gong Baak Madut, Juba, South Sudan
April 28, 2016 (SSB) — It was such a long awaited public appearance with positive anticipation of socio-economic changes in what many people refer to as young nation by exception of its historical existence as a viable landscape by political geography.
Though you have finally reached Juba and conducting now your several meetings with your current and previous colleagues in hotel halls; it is of no doubt that much more effort is required to cement the damaging political reputation of this country and that of those of you who have been rivaling against each other accompanied by your heavy weight camps behind.
However, it is too pathetic that most of you the highly profile political figures do not have time to read newspapers just like you do not listen to the public plights or grievances. The fact that our cabinets since 2005 have never respected public consultation and search for public demand was the very reason the nation returned from its economic race with other nations in the world and becomes a country that kills its own citizens based on the method it took during the last three years of war resulting to the badly creeping of our economic standard.
However, we as common citizens can continue to volunteer our efforts to speak out what we see is best to be done in this country that we equally claim as our own regardless of whom we are and where we are coming from. The words we had spoken are many but they fell in deaf ears at the time. We urge our leaders of the current era to deservingly lend us their listening ears and work mutually for the interest of the nation rather than of their own.
Three years of our political or power struggle is over when we finally saw you Dr Riek Machar at Juba International Airport (JIA) and more specially when we also witnessed you taking oath to take up the leadership of FVP under your previous boss, President Kiir Mayardit with whom you worked together cooperatively from 2005 until 2013 when you were axed out of the then cabinet by the presidential decree.
We know it was due to the rapid growth of power struggle that produced a great in the post Independence Period; a decision that had brought South Sudan to zero percent of its enlargement in totality. We really urged all of you to respect your signatures and work for peace in order to return the most needed economic and security stability in the country.
Domestic products alone can upgrade our life situation. The international view about the political and economic image of the new born nation from the bondage of parasitic colonialism cannot in reality relieve South Sudan from our present economic catastrophe. I am not panic to freely express what I feel as a citizen of this nation despites intimidation on fundamental freedoms and freedom of expression.
You all need to shoulder the burdens of nationality as leaders than to rustle over them. The citizens of South Sudan can no longer afford to put at least a one day meal onto the table for their families just like they cannot send their children to school and/or access health facilities, yet you remain rulers for the generation that deserves no future of becoming leaders for tomorrow. For the last eleven years of South Sudan’s self-rule, majority have sustained economic situation of depending on what is from hand-to-mouth economic status without hope for any improvement.
Mr. Machar we as common citizens welcome you to Juba and South Sudan’s top administration once again with a task to reshape your political history and that of the nation hoping that citizens will live in total peace and harmony. South Sudanese are loyal and patriotic citizens who appreciate to live on empty stomachs and sacrifice anything they can for the progressive accepted viable and sustainable development. Such hopes and expectations have kept us alive for so many years during the struggle and today.
Welcome back home with a view for achieving one democratic South Sudan full of hopes opportunities and inductive of all. Home is always the best, from East to West, North to South we shall always come back home and cherish together. However, your coming back to Juba cannot be a reason of next fear and worry. This is the time for you to put in implementation the democracies you have been speaking for years.
Finally but not least, do not build your individual children, families, relatives and friends in anticipation that they may inherit your leaderships and continue to rule South Sudanese. No!! South Sudan belongs to its inhabitants and South Sudan is a promised land that a leader may emerged from an unexpected source to which some of you may believably give their testimonies in the near future on some evidenced grounds.
Anyway, welcome, Mr. First Vice President for you will be forgiven although not forgetting 2013 December 15 and its dismay on the citizens and the nation at large. We are dearly waiting to see how friendly the two of you (Riek and Kiir) will work collectively and simultaneously in order to make South Sudan the Promised Land that we all deserve.
We are waiting to see how the two of you will one day stand against the spirit of tribalism and stand for the love of all without distinction. But who among you our leaders needs to be blamed again for any destruction ahead of us? There is a great reason to reshape your personal political history and that of our nation. When two elephants fight; it is the grass that suffers.
The writer is a senior common citizen and can be reached via email: awaar3@yahoo.com and on cell: 0955525275. He is a lecturer of international relations @ masters’ level – The then Cavendish University of South Sudan’s Studies Centre.
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