Assessing our New Year's predictions: A Response to Manyang David Mayar
7 min readDear Manyang David Mayar,
By Zack Mayul, Nairobi, Kenya
Monday, June 04, 2018 (PW) — This is June 2018, so let’s glance back at our New Year’s predictions, and see how much has come to pass. Let’s start, shall we?
Thank you! I read your thrilling article that you wrote on 7th of January 2018 as a response to my article “WHO REALLY CARES FOR THE NEW YEAR, 2018”, in which I foresaw what the New Year would look like.
Indeed, I must say, you had a very strong argument and I enjoyed reading it. Kudos!
Some people who read your article in response to mine — especially the part where you branded me as a “reactive individual” — had tried to attack you in their responses. On their behalf, I must apologize and tell you that you should not take anything to heart.
This is an intellectual one on one stage of thoughts; and, we are in a class, teaching society that we hope would be better someday. Amen?
“Please, be advised that I am not here to dictate your happiness about the New Year….” In my article, I knew there was a group of people like you who would be touched and try to crucify me by all means for melting down my heart or why I turned pessimist.
However, just like the well-written Distributive Theory of Justice by John Rawl that limits us to solutions of how the natural resources like lakes, rivers, mountains among many, are to be distributed equally, you focused on one side and did not offer solutions to why you think the New Year would be celebrated by a young man like me, who hails from a country that is torn into pieces, where tribes, clans and regions are turned to plowshares.
How do you think I should celebrate when the cholera that killed people in some part of the country last year is still taking another fraction in my village or some parts of Africa?
David Mayaar, how do you expect me to feign and embrace what is happening in the world right now? Noura, my half-sister from Sudan was recently sentenced to death just because she defended herself from a man who was allegedly raping her.
She was meant to offer herself to defilement just because that is what the stupid law says against women. Is that something to be proud of in 2018? I doubt.
The case of Libya slavery hasn’t ended, even though the media is just on a commercial break. This is one of the stories that really daunted my days when I first read it. I can’t believe it can still happen now if not some decades ago.
I have been reading your article over and over again for the last five months, and whenever I come to conclusions, it seem you were literally telling me that I should not worry about what is happening in Libya, Burundi, Syria, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Lebanon because they are none of my business, and they’re just external forces that I have no solutions over them.
You might be right, if this is what you were trying to communicate, but do you remember this famous story in the Old Testament? The story of Nehemiah who was working in the Persian government as a governor, enjoying all the privileges that no any other Israelite under the leadership of
King Artaxerxes was enjoying more than him, but he was still having the guts to get concerned about the welfare of his people.
Why his people were fending against their own God and why they were never following their cultures. This is what made him build the wall of Jerusalem I fifty-two (52) days.
“Your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God…” words of Ruth to her mother in-law, Naomi. Somalians who dies every day in the hand of Al Shabaab, Libyans who are still being smuggled into Europe, the Oromos who died during that massacre, and the Palestinians who die every day in Gaza are my people.
This is one reason why I cannot celebrate in 2018 when death toll keeps rising.
You seem so religious, I guess; so you know how humanity means to all of us, isn’t it? Which was why Jesus, according to St. Luke Gospel, came to earth to deliver us from the bondage of evil and die for our own sins. Am I right?
Can’t you see the evil practices that Prophet Amos and Jeremiah condemned in the Bible being practiced in 2018?
The selling of fellow human beings to slavery, which is now being depicted in the case of Libya as mentioned before, dishonest businesses happening around the globe, worshipping of idols, and immoralities, which you must have heard or read about it.
Before you read and reply back to my article, come to think of this:
– how many girls in Masaai land would survive the FGM knife this year?
– how many girls like Malala are being denied access to education in 2018?
– how many death news do you expect to hear this year just because so and so was attacked and killed in a cold blood in his own house by a man who not know how to make good use of a gun?
– how many religious leaders around the globe would jive their congregations and do what Brazilian Pastor did in 2015?
– how many times do you expect to hear that a gun was pointed on a black kid walking on a lone streets in U.S.?
– how many times do you expect to hear citizens storming the streets protesting because the prices of necessity goods are above sea level?
– how many times do you expect to see bloggers discussing nudity of innocent women just to earn a living?
– do you think that the case of a Monica and the lecturer at Makerere could be the last event around at the university?
– how may times do you think leaders of a country like South Sudan would go to Addis Ababa and negotiate their positions forgetting the welfare of their subjects?
– did you think the case of employees transacting sex for promotions would remain in 2017?
Come back home:
– there are some villages where people don’t attend to their farms because they fear their dear lives.
– I know of a village where supper is never prepared past six o’clock in the evening because it might never be supper.
– there is a region in the country where water borne diseases are busy killing people even now.
-there is a town in South Sudan where people don’t sleep because it might be attacked any time.
– there is a pupil who cannot access classes in 2018 because no one is able to teach him or her how to read and write.
– there is a parent or child that doesn’t know what to eat the next day.
– there is a soldier who goes to bed with an empty stomach.
– there is a teacher that goes to class minus a cup of tea.
– there is a student who has dropped out because his/her parents could not afford to sponsor him/her, and
– also, there is a student that has been lying to the parents or a relatives that he/she is studying in one of the universities in East Africa but has never attended any class. Instead, he is busy drinking in the bar whilst the only little wealth is invested in his education.
As an individual, who didn’t want to witness these things in 2018, I find it, and I repeat, not necessary to celebrate the New Year even now; because I didn’t want to see AU and IGAD mediating East African leaders and reminds them that it is their citizens who will die of hunger, being denied access to education, and have less developed countries that could not compete with the rest of the world.
I didn’t want to see UN donating relief food, health services to the refugees in 2018; instead, I wanted to see them go back home and settle down as they take part in nation building.
I am not wishing for bad luck, but this is June 2018, and you must bear with me that, only 10% of what I have mentioned above shall be done before June 2019.
Thank you.
Zack Mayul studied Bachelor of Science in Marketing. He can be reached on both Facebook and Twitter as Zack Mayul and via his email: zack mayul <zackmayul54@gmail.com>
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