Statecraft in the Hands of Clowns: The Politics of Pretension and the Death of Development in South Sudan
By Emmanuel Ariech Deng, Juba, South Sudan
Monday, 22 December 2025 (PW) — The notion of worth in our society has become a false narrative, a dangerous assumption that responsibilities can be faked without the requisite qualifications. A flock of thieves, masqueraders, and fools presume they can govern perfectly; yet the moment they fail, they rush to blame others for tasks they never undertook. In doing so, they conveniently forget their own barbaric pretensions and profound ignorance of how systems function and how national objectives can be achieved in a country desperately in need of development.
These masqueraders are perpetually running around, pointing fingers at the very people they deliberately marginalized, all in an effort to deflect attention from their own dysfunction, mismanagement, and the glaring collapse of two decades of institutional establishment. Their conduct is not only ruinous to public welfare but also corrosive to the very craft of statehood.
This malaise is rapidly spreading within our fascist state and among us. While these actors remain deeply engrossed in corruption and large-scale collateral destruction of the nation, socially, politically, and economically, they boast of services allegedly rendered to citizens. Yet the record is plain: industrial production and infrastructural development have been miserably neglected, if not entirely abandoned.
Reliance on such leaders, who are rigid in thought, resistant to change, and steeped in pretension, poses grave dangers. It risks imperiling generations to come, sowing social disintegration, breeding mistrust in institutions, and fueling insecurity in movement and business across a country otherwise rich in natural resources and cultural diversity.
These are the perils persistently tied to two decades of failed experimentation: daylight robbery of public resources, absence of accountability, killings with impunity, contempt for the rule of law, and conspiracy theories peddled by security agencies to prop up individual clowns. Taxes, gold, and crude oil have been mismanaged and privatized, serving narrow interests rather than the common good.
These strategies are deliberately applied to drain national wealth and weaken the economy, tactics that are designed to entrench power and ensure unfettered access to state resources. Meanwhile, the people live in anguishing poverty and insecurity, paying heavy and painful prices so that ruthless leaders may thrive in obscene comfort. Big vehicles, oversized emblems, grand motorcades, vast sums of money, and mounted artillery dominate cities of potholed tarmac and rutted roads, with garbage heaped along pavements both central and peripheral.
Today, the order of the day is the recruitment of uneducated, underage boys into the military, youths insufficiently enlightened to comprehend the country’s political configurations or the community conflicts rooted in power struggles among incumbents, aspirants, and their power-based associates. Many of these boys died in the wars of 2013, 2016, and 2025. Those who survived are scattered in poverty, nursing deep frustrations and numbing their pain with new brands of dry gin, popularly known as Kasongo and Makwei Lueth.
No salaries. No welfare. No vocational training. Nothing except fresh recruitment into National Security and the SSPDF. That, it seems, is the national development strategy we have witnessed over twenty years of grip and reign. The devil, indeed, is a pathological liar. The cognoscente, bewildered.
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