The national dialogue in South Sudan: The inability to acknowledge your wrong side of the story is your disability
By Kur Wël Kur in Adelaide, Australia
July 2, 2017 (SSB) — “Maintain his eye contact, and through his words, I will look at his heart,” said the blind man to his young son who was as well his guide. This is Dinka proverb; it’s an epitome of an intelligent man acknowledging his disability. Life, whether king’s or beggar’s life depends on this simple logic of truth.
It’s a submission and dependency of intelligent and intellectual leaders on their subordinates or guardians that make them exceptional leaders. And when a leader submerges in this logic, it’s called “a leadership of creative reasoning.”
To ask for directions isn’t your weakness. Any traveller who hits a dead end and persists on going forward without looking out for the detour, lacks an ability of connecting the dots backward. In this instance, most travellers or tourists need guides. So, tourists would mention sites they would love to visit, but the guides would be the ones to take them to these sites.
What of if tourists who’re totally new to the city or sites, decide to advise the guides on routes they should take; and these tourists insist regardless of numerous advice from the guides that the routes they’re talking about are the wrong routes to the sites? As a reader and a thinker, what do you think the guides would do?
Remember, tourists have absolute powers to either listen and keep the guide, or dismiss the right directions and fire the guide. To navigate towards arguments I want to make in this article, I would like you to think of ministers in our government.
Ministers in any government are guides to the president or leader of that government. Their advice or constructive criticisms shouldn’t infuriate the president. For example, when the minister for information uttered the following statements, the citizens in droves protested, accusing the minister as anti-government and its leader. However, what exactly did the minister say? As Radio Tamazuj penned, the minister said:
“The trust, the confidence is lost. It is not accountable and as such there is need for us to rejuvenate it. We lost it simply because some of us did not care about all these principles. And as a result, the people lost trust in that government simply because of the conduct of the few.”
This’s an embodiment of a constructive criticism because the minister explored the solutions to the citizens’ lack of trust in their government by saying these:
“We must address the shortcomings that brought about this lack of trust. We must start to build confidence in our people so that they trust their government, so that they respect their government.”
But if you have been following the politics of South Sudan, then your sincere political analysis predicts another reshuffling of the cabinet. And ministers of the likes of Honourable Michael Makwei Lueth will sift or edge out of the cabinet. And if this happens, then it’s a bad governance expresses itself.
I believe you know the number of reshuffles our president has made since our country’s constitution came into existence with absolute powers to the president. Reshuffles are the causes of our atrocities and tragedies; they’re disagreements between a tourist and his (excuse me for the gender’s bias in this article) guides. Any government or leader who exhibits a reactive solution to criticisms instead of being proactive to them, represents a bad governance.
And if I have to go further in discussing the corrosive elements, spalling off coatings of a good governance, then I have to mention bad advisors to the president. These bunches of visionless advisors come in many forms: they can be security agents, friends or relatives to the president in the government, who’re sucking the system dry with their corruption.
They collect partial information for the president and advise the president to pass decrees; then step back and watch the president prune the tentacles of his government. These advisors are the cancers of Salva Kiir’s presidency.
To expand on this, cancer is a disease in which one corrupted (cancerous) cell corrupts the other healthy cells and force them to divide uncontrollably and eventually damage the body tissues. There’s no difference between a biological cancer and the political cancer, all arrives to one destination: death to their victims.
If there were patriots working with the president to maintain the energy of good governance, why do citizens wallow in conflicts of all sorts? How come poverty and illiteracy rank high in the country? The lack of good governance nurtures illiteracy and poverty. Citizens in ministerial positions are to blame for the bad governance in our country. It’s not the lack of policies, but lack of delivery. For example, the DIALOGUE is an important policy.
The DIALOGUE must work on the government shortcomings as Honourable Michael Makwei Lueth has mentioned. The DIALOGUE must be directed to heal the lacerations of war, lacerations such as extreme poverty, displacements of citizens, mass exodus of the citizens and the crippling fear of the government that the dodgy and abysmal security agents have instilled in the hearts of citizens. These problems need our president to address them directly.
For example, in the case of displaced citizens in the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) compounds, our president must give them hope by providing enough basic needs beddings, food, milk for their children, and shelters, even clean water isn’t enough for them in those compounds. These people have rights not to trust the government because of the experiences they have gone through and the government must earn their trust.
Another example, for the DIALOGUE to work, our president must move freely among the citizens. If he shows up at the dark corners of poverty, where young children, the seeds or future working force our country are scavenging for food, then this DIALOGUE will be the best political move in an entire tenure of his presidency.
In this DIALOGUE, we must work hard; we must give ourselves a job, a job of souls searching. Our response in this DIALOGUE is our responsibility. As a nation, we must move forward; if there’s one thing we have to be proud of as citizens of South Sudan, then it should be our diversity. Our diversity shouldn’t be our enemy.
However, if this DIALOGUE is aimed at the politicians with different political views and rebels in all forms (active and passive rebels), then it will go down in the political history as another failed policy.
Bless and Peace Will Come to Us.
Kur Wël Kur has a Bachelor Degree in Genetics and Zoology from Australian National University (ANU). He was the former General Secretary of Greater Bor Community in Adelaide, Australia. He can be reached via his email contact: kurwelkur@ yahoo.com
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