What went wrong that should have gone right? Holes the TGONU should seal
7 min readBy Kon Joseph Leek, Juba, South Sudan
May 3, 2016 (SSB) —- ‘They shouldn’t have been sworn-in with bibles!’ a young man jokingly said while watching the swearing-in of the cabinet on SS TV last Friday, ‘how do you expect God not to run away from those who consult witch Doctors to help them remain in the cabinet?’ he asked. He believed that for corruption to subsidize from those old faces is to make them traditionally sworn-in for instance, by making them jump over an axe or something because for traditional things are always conditional and for this, they would fear. There is no way you can mix up too powers [Devil for lobbying for a position on one side] and [God for swearing-in on the other side] and expect performance!
But to me, I have no problem at all, whether to be sworn-in with the Bibles or axe doesn’t make any different to me. All we wanted in the first place is this; their unity was all we yearned for. Getting reunited and get back to their feet with their cunning and corn us once again because this is what fate has subjected us to, a new form of punishment; your own mother whipping you with barbed wire, scorpion and fire! It is not news to me and to some of us, for I expected it, seeing the same faces in the system getting back to their usual business of looting the Country with their pistols in their right hands and looting with their left hands!
But we are happy with the fact that their reunion will silence the guns [I hope forever]. We don’t want to loss anybody again, not even an old man to poverty or young man to criminals. What we, the governed [ruled] needs especially from the top leadership made up of the three [president, first vice president and the vice president] is to stop living spiritually in this country; I am simply telling them to start living physically here. I agree with Achebe’s statement that many presidents especially third world presidents do not live in their countries, one of the penalties is loneliness. Harnessed to the tramping of protocols and blockaded by a buffer of grinning courtiers and psychopants
Even a good and intelligent leader will gradually begin to forget what the real world looks like. When our president set to see things for himself, say in Gudelle, what does he see? Highways temporarily cleared of lunatics and beggars, Juba Town Council doing its best of watering the roads for time-being in order to keep the dust down, the president sped o his destination in order not to have enough time to see the happenings of the area with his own naked eyes.
And if he is attending a party, the party is strictly controlled about 1000 meters away attended by the deserving type! In short, the president is only made to see such scenes of contented citizenry but history tells us of wise rulers at different times and places who achieved rare leadership by their blunt and simply refusal to be fooled by guided tours of their own Country, Chinua advised, in antiquity we read, for example, Haroun al Rashid, an eighth-century caliph of Baghdad who frequently disguised himself and went an accompanied in to the streets of his city by day or night and see the life of his subjects in its ungarnished and uncensored reality
What many fears and dreaded here is simply corruption, corruption in our state has reached its fatal stage. It is corruption that leads to poverty and other violent crises like robbery, demonstrations etcetera. I sometimes in the past said that if you could corrupt and open up factories and companies then you can create employment opportunities for the unemployed but where you still the money and keep them under your beds or you run to another country and buy houses or marry more wives then you are just a dare devil! Corruption is already chronic in our blood, it is the blood that moves in our veins – but can’t we really reduce it like ARVs to AIDs? South Sudanese have been and still are corrupt because the system under which they live today makes corruption easy and profitable; they will cease to be corrupt when corruption is made difficult and inconvenient.
To eat is when you are hungry, and to corrupt is when you make other(s) hungry, isn’t it? For some of our leaders, they believe that liberating this country was to eat it, but they don’t even know that they are malnourishing their best country. They are sucking it so bad!
Who can blame someone who swallows little saliva that comes out of the sweet he was told to keep in his mouth? Children make big people do that. Corruption is when you swallow that very sweet. Doesn’t a goat eat where it is grazed? Who can blame or stop someone from taking the milk of the cows he keeps? Isn’t corruption killing those cows and eat it all alone? It is service delivery that we need this time, security, roads, electricity, hospitals name them
You all need to bend to work this time, we shall not endure more anarchic system based on egotistic competition among the leaders instead of competition for service delivery to the destitute populace of your beloved country. Anarchic nature of the system is the cause of most conflict around the globe, and for this, we should all cooperate for common interest in order to achieve mutual benefits of lifting this state up from the ashes of 2013 destructions. Your join task now is to work with the assumption that other countries will not help you unless it is their own interest
What increases tribalism and corruption now is the assumption of some of our leaders of putting their interest above the country and its citizens. The state is a possession of its citizen rather than the leaders. We the citizens cannot be too nationalistic when we are not guaranteed a right to be. Nationalism starts with the belief of statehood. In order to insert nationalism in to the citizen, it is to insert the idea that the state is the property of its citizen. This is the key element of nationalism. If the state is the agent of the people, then the people should decide what policies the state should pursue.
Some of my friends criticizes the current cabinet citing the claim on what they will do that they did not do in their previous tenure, and what level of trust can be put on the same people who messed up this country in 2013 that they will not do it again. How do we trust the people whose hands are tainted with bloods? To me, it is all politics; Max Webber (1864-1920) said that the decisive mean for politics is violence. Anyone who fails to see this is a political infant, he added. Whether one considers war as a tale of tragedy or a saga of heroism, the fact is that, force and the threat of force is ever present.
What I have just said above is attributed to “when control eases, chaos occurs. “Control” is all about not making the law of the land too compromising to make the devils loose to hunt and cause havoc, it is not about making the laws of the land too ceremonial to act, and it is not also about taking the laws of the land for granted. “Control” is about putting the rope of the laws on the neck of every native and tethers its notch to a very strong stick that whoever wants to loosen it stubbornly gets hanged
The writer can be reached on j.konleek@gmail.com
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