One Year Anniversary: In Memory of Comrade Kerbino Wol Agok

# In memory of Kerbino Wol Agok: His journey from child soldier to entrepreneur and philanthropist and a Marty.

By Diing Mou Aguer, South Sudan

Kerbino Wol stands as a living example of the success and dignity that South Sudan, and especially its younger generations, can hope to achieve.

Kerbino joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) at the age of twelve, becoming a member of the “Red Army,” a contingent of child soldiers. Following the independence of South Sudan in 2011, Kerbino began his business career as the CEO of Kerbino Agok Security Services (KASS), a private security company headquartered in Juba. 

As a businessman and entrepreneur, Kerbino created thousands of jobs for his fellow citizens and took pride in offering high-quality services from a company owned and operated in South Sudan. As a philanthropist, Kerbino started the Nile Foundation to educate and empower young people across the country.

The Nile Foundation organized business training workshops for students and multicultural football matches for IDPs. Kerbino’s vision was to invigorate the youth of South Sudan through these events, guided by the conviction that South Sudan can reach its full potential only by providing the youth with the necessary skills and knowledge to thrive in the 21st-century global economy.

Kerbino believe that citizenship is both the responsibility and a right, he said it is the responsibility of good citizens both to act in accordance with the law and to call attention to unjust and unlawful conditions.  

Kerbino Wol stands as a shining example of the success and dignity that all South Sudanese youth can hope to achieve.  His gruesome killing represents a deep injustice for every citizen of South Sudan.

Kerbino’s extraordinary character was made up of virtues that are rarely found together. He stood out as an unsurpassed person of action, visionary intelligence, broad culture and a profound thinker.

But it is not only that Kerbino possessed the double characteristic of the man of ideas — of profound ideas — and the man of action, but he was a person of total integrity, a person of supreme sense of honor, of absolute sincerity, a person of stoic and Spartan living habits, He constituted, through his virtues, what can be called a truly model leader.

The corrupt regime boast of their triumph at having killed this great man of action. They boast of a triumphant stroke of luck that led to the elimination of such a formidable man. But perhaps they do not know or pretend not to know that Kerbino was only one of the many facets of the personality of combatants south  Sudan should have to keep. And if we speak of sorrow, we are saddened not only at having lost a person of action. We are saddened at having lost a person of virtue. We are saddened at having lost a person of unsurpassed human sensitivity. We are saddened at having lost such a mind. We are saddened to think that he was only 38 years old at the time of his death. We are saddened at missing the additional fruits that we would have received from that intelligence and that ever richer experience.

But those who boast of victory are mistaken. They are mistaken when they think that his death is the end of his idea. For the person who fell, as a mortal person, as a leader and again, as a soldier, was a thousand times more able than he who killed him by a stroke of luck.

We have an idea of the dimension of the loss for the 7Oct movement. However, here is the weak side of the enemy: they enemy think that by eliminating a person physically they have eliminated his thinking — that by eliminating him physically they have eliminated his ideas, eliminated his virtues, eliminated his example.

So shameless are they in this belief that they have no hesitation in publishing, as the most natural thing in the world, the by now almost universally accepted circumstances in which they murdered him after he had been captured. They do not even seem aware of the repugnance of the procedure, of the shamelessness of the acknowledgement. They have published it without hesitation and fear of shame as if they were not a signatory to the international law of armed conflict (IHL). aka the humanitarian law.

Even worse, Akol tried to deny it by collecting the armed civilians and bribed them to faked the video that was circulated on the social media as if the armed civilians had the right to shoot a captured revolutionary combatants, a cowardice act that was very contradictory to the announcement made by the SSPDF spokesperson Maj.Gen. Lul Ruai Kong.

And not only that, they have not hesitated not to hand over his remains to the family for burial. Be it true or false, they didn’t certainly announced what they had done with his body, thus beginning to show their fear, beginning to show that they are not so sure that by physically eliminating the combatant, they can eliminate his ideas, eliminate his example.

Kerbino died defending no other interest, no other cause than the cause of the exploited and the oppressed people of this country. He died defending the cause of the poor and the humble. And the exemplary manner and the selflessness with which he defended that cause cannot be disputed even by his most bitter enemies.

Before history, people who act as he did, people who do and give everything for the cause of the poor, grow in stature with each passing day and find a deeper place in the heart of the peoples with each passing day. 

The genocidal regime in Juba is beginning to see this, and it will not be long before it will be proved that his death will, in the long run, be like a seed that will give rise to many people determined to imitate him, many people determined to follow his example.

We are absolutely convinced that the revolutionary cause on this country will recover from the blow, that the 7Oct movement will not be crushed by this blow.

From the revolutionary point of view, from the point of view of our people, how should we view his example? Do we feel we have lost him? It is true that we will not see him and will never again hear his voice. But He has left a heritage to us, a great heritage, and we who knew him so well can become in large measure his beneficiaries.

He left us his revolutionary thinking, his revolutionary virtues. He left us his character, his will, his tenacity, his spirit of work. In a word, he left us his example! And Kerbino’s example will be the ideal model for our people.

If we wish to express what we expect our revolutionary combatants, our militants, our people to be, we must say, without hesitation: let them be like Kerbino! If we wish to express what we want the people of future generations to be, we must say: let them be like Kerbino! If we wish to say how we want our children to be educated, we must say without hesitation: we want them to be educated in Kerbino’sspirit! If we want the model of a person, the model of a human being who does not belong to our time but to the future, I say from the depths of my heart that such a model, without a single stain on his conduct, without a single stain on his action, without a single stain on his behavior, is Kerbino! If we wish to express what we want our children to be, we must say from our very hearts as ardent revolutionaries: we want them to be like Kerbino.

Kerbino’s blood was shed for the liberation of the exploited and the oppressed, of the humble and the poor. That blood was shed for the sake of all the exploited and all the oppressed. That blood was shed for all the peoples of south Sudan, fighting against the kleptocratic and genocidal regime, he knew that he was offering his countrypeople the highest possible expression of his solidarity!

It is for this reason, comrades of the revolution, that we must face the future with firmness, determination, and optimism. And in Kerbino’s example, we will always look for inspiration — inspiration in struggle, inspiration in tenacity, inspiration in intransigence toward the enemy, inspiration in nationalist feeling!

we are also urging our country men and women to demonstrates their solidarity with the revolutionary struggle and raise aloft and maintain ever higher aloft revolutionary banners and revolutionary principles. 

In these moments of remembrance, let us lift our spirits and, with optimism in the future, with absolute optimism in the final victory of the peoples, and say to Kerbino and to the heroes who died with him that we are ever onward to victory.

The author, Diing Mou Aguer, is the Interim Chairman & C in C of 7October Movement.

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