South Sudan: Let’s stop entertaining negative ideas about our dear country
6 min readA Setback on What South Sudan refused to do at the time it could possibly have done!
By Ariik Atekdit Mawien, Juba, South Sudan
October 15, 2016 (SSB) — On date 3 September 2011, I sat down in Malakal and wrote this piece of the below article as a nationalist to challenge and warn the leadership of my country about the challenges ahead of them. Time went and I thought that anybody could have looked at the newspapers to read and analyze the little piece I had posted.
The young and old writers of this country have for so long voluntarily tried to direct and advise our leaders and the community members to only try to do what is correct and good for the nation but it went into their deaf ears. More negative opinions driving the country into an ocean were entertained while the very ideas that could have helped the nation became the first victims thrown out into the sea ahead of the nation.
It only became too ugly when the first selected ministers and the elected MPs of the new nation sat reluctantly in their luxurious offices and hotels without diagnosing the internal problems in their motherland. The Leaders have to be blamed for working hard to make South Sudan a failed the country. Now welcome to 5 years old analysis speaking on the current situation of South Sudan!
“In South Sudan we injure ourselves by the negative ideas we entertain. How often have you wounded yourself by getting angry, fearful, jealous, or vengeful? These are the POISONS that enter your subconscious mind; none of us were born with these Negative Attitudes,” I wrote in an article published on Khartoum Monitor and the then Citizen newspapers.
The environmental aspects of our country have made us look on others with our own negative eyes and suspicions, therefore the promotion and the encouragement of tribalism and social-phobia against other communities went on rampant.
People have failed many times to think over situations and perform true and accurate evaluations. Due to these, South Sudan is occupied by hatred and jealousy with every person blaming it on others. Nobody wants to accept that they are the reasons of any disorder in the societies we live in. Instead individuals want to be praised and credited positively for what they had not helped to occur. Every person tries on his/her everyday life to point fingers on others holding them responsibility for all failures and glorify one self with what is good. However, that won’t help us out. We as a people must accept our weaknesses, failures and evil deeds that we have allowed to occur to make South Sudan to slide into such an unbearable situation.
My new country South Sudan, a nation which is emerging out of war to maybe the most hoped and expected permanent peace has so many problems to be told about it. The country which is coming out of the marginalization needs to lose the culture of peace but trying to cling on the shocking development of war which is a true inheritance of the protracted two civil wars battled by my country-men/women and the Arab Muslims of Sudan.
Indeed one is right to say South Sudanese had never been united even before the arrivals of Arabs or colonizers to Sudan because they had existed in their closed tribal borders for so many years. They came to be united recently during their struggle for freedom against the successive Khartoum Islamic regimes.
Frankly speaking, dates beyond Anyanya wars can never retained information of any togetherness among various ethnic groups in South Sudan. Though most of the ethnic communities have many similarities among their cultures, distinct tribes had lived for ages without coming beneath solitary rules. So when we campaigned for separation we should have known that we had a task ahead of us to do and at least to win doing it successfully. So to whom can this be blame on, the leadership or the people being led?
It was a lack of communications among the communities maybe that had stopped them from getting united. The fact that every member of one community speak their own mother tongues and could not easily understand each other created a lot of rivalries and they so ended up in wars and victories. But this must stop with the coming up of the modern South Sudan which is independent with its sovereign Government. Wars of cattle rustling and tribal land grabbing must be brought down by South Sudan leadership before we could announce any failure.
We would actually like the Government of the youngest Republic to work jointly to fight for unity and peace for our local communities. Igniting of tribal or clan conflicts because of political or personal interests may not help since that appears to be an attitude of north Sudan with its Islamic regimes which we had all witnessed in the past.
There is no any other way of making South Sudan a prosperous country when it contains a number of tribal wars whose end is not known at all. The best and the only better way is to find a peaceful solution to the nation’s tribal problems. It is supposed to be the extraordinarily work that the appointed cabinet looks into to bring our communities to peace.
I am sure it will be ugly for the selected ministers and the elected MPs to sit in their luxurious offices of the world’s newest state without diagnosing the internal problems in their motherland country. There will be no anymore possible excuses to blame chaos in South Sudan on Khartoum as an enemy or the opposition political parties as the strikers of tribal clashes.
As we know that every MP comes from a constituency in South Sudan it is also the same that our national ministers represent vast geographical regions in the country. It won’t take them long if they work together to combat tribalism as that would very well easy a way out for corruption in the country.
It is sometimes hopeless to find that the hardest headlines of our day to day news in South Sudan is all about violence which results into death of hundreds of lives every now and then. We were expecting our hardest headlines to carry developmental news.
It is good for any leadership to continue leading and find a way out to solve the situation. The problem of Lou Nuer and Murle communities needs to be solved before darkness. We can’t talk of peace and rule of law when the necessary security is not provided to the citizens.
Our government should work hard to bring education and development to our rural villages in order to engage the civil population. Otherwise it has been a long holiday for development to work since 2005.
The former Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) was termed to a very small child for so many until it got outdated. I hope the Government of the Republic is born an adult to avoid us wasting a lot of time without development. We need not to entertain leaders who have self-interests in public offices.
The December 2013 crisis and the 2016 Juba’s renewed war occurred because no man in South Sudan wants to work out things rightly. This is a Setback on What South Sudan refused to do at the time it could possibly do!
The author is a long experienced journalist and holds a bachelor of education in bio/chemistry. He can be reached @ Atekdit Mawien: ariqdudic@gmail.com
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