NCA, a Legally Registered Girls’ Association Needs No Permission from TEYA, a Boys’ Club
By PaanLuel Wël, Brisbane, Australia
Tuesday, 21 July 2026 (PW) — The amended Twic East Youth Association (TEYA) Constitution is out, and with it the long-rumoured attempt to subjugate the Twic East Girls Association (TEGA/NCA) has finally stepped into the daylight. A male-led and male-dominated youth association appears determined to bring an independent women-led association under its constitutional control.
There is something almost touching about the sudden concern of TEYA for the organisational welfare of women. For years, women have endured forced marriage, educational exclusion, economic dependency, domestic violence and the familiar instruction to wait quietly while men finish discussing matters of importance. Yet TEYA, a male-led and male-dominated association, has apparently discovered the great emergency facing the women of Twic East – publicly organising themselves without sufficient male supervision.
The Twic East Girls Association (TEGA), popularly known as Nyan Cit Arialbek (NCA), have committed the dangerous act of becoming women-led organisations in a society where women’s empowerment is warmly praised at public events, provided it remains ceremonial, decorative and safely controlled by men. They have elected leaders, developed programmes, represented women’s interests and demonstrated an alarming capacity to function independently. Naturally, something must be done.
The divined solution, we are told, is “unity”, one of those beautiful political words whose meaning depends largely upon who is using it. When powerful institutions speak of unity, they often mean that smaller organisations should dissolve themselves, surrender their independence and accept leadership from above. In this case, unity appears to mean that women may continue organising, so long as their organisation is annexed to, supervised by or subordinated under a structure led principally by men.
One must admire the elegance of the arrangement. Women would remain empowered, but not excessively so. They could speak, though preferably through authorised channels. They could lead, though under an institutional roof whose keys remain in male hands. They could enjoy autonomy in much the same way a tenant enjoys ownership while the landlord reserves the right to enter, rearrange the furniture and decide whether the house should continue to exist.
Nonetheless, freedom of association is not a special inheritance belonging to TEYA. It is not a family cow entrusted to male custodians, who may decide which women are permitted to milk it. If TEYA derives legitimacy from the right of people to organise voluntarily, then the same right legitimises Nyan Cit Arialbek, and every lawfully established women’s association. TEYA cannot climb the ladder of freedom of association and then pull it up before women reach it.
The legal position is conceptually straightforward. Where an organisation has been validly established and complies with the applicable requirements of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, its future should be determined by its members. Nostalgic boys who do not belong to a the girls’ association possess no natural authority to decide whether it should remain independent, merge with another body or surrender its leadership structures to the patriarchy masquerading as “unity”. There is no mysterious customary principle under which every organisation founded by women eventually matures into a department of an organisation founded by men.
Around the world, women’s organisations have emerged because the supposedly universal institutions of society have often treated male experience as the norm and women’s concerns as a specialised inconvenience. Women organise separately because when everyone is invited into the same room, men often occupy the microphone, the chairmanship, the agenda and, occasionally, the seats reserved for women.
South Sudan provides no shortage of reasons for independent women’s advocacy. Women and girls continue to confront child marriage, forced marriage, gender-based violence, interrupted education, economic marginalisation and exclusion from political decision-making. In such circumstances, weakening women-led organisations is the brazen disarmament of those who have only recently begun to acquire a collective voice.
The patriarchal campaign against Nyan Cit Arialbek’s organisational independence also exposes a familiar anxiety. Male-controlled associations may coexist comfortably with one another, even when their mandates overlap, their leaderships quarrel and their constitutions contradict each other. But when women establish an independent organisation, men suddenly discover the dangers of duplication.
There may be several men’s associations, youth associations, intellectual forums, political camps, clan committees, leadership councils, and drinking clubs, each populated by remarkably similar gentlemen. This is called diversity. One independent women’s organisation, however, risks dividing the community. The real issue, then, is not structural coherence, but organizational control.
Nyan Cit Arialbek has become threatening precisely because it has become effective and popular without male management. It demonstrates that women can define their own interests, collect their own resources, elect their own officers and produce their own leaders. The fear is that women may succeed and, in succeeding, expose the unnecessary nature of the supervision men had intended to provide.
Those defending the autonomy of Nyan Cit Arialbek have also confronted the tired accusation of belonging to a rival political faction religiously opposed to the current TEYA leadership. Under this theory, one must secretly belong to a rival faction. The possibility that another person has reached a principled conclusion independently is apparently too radical to contemplate.
This habit impoverishes public debate. Twic East cannot become an intellectually mature community if every disagreement is treated as evidence of political infiltration. A person may oppose TEYA’s position without joining a rival political faction, just as a woman may belong to Twic East without submitting her organisation to TEYA.
The test of enlightened male leadership is not whether men applaud women who operate within boundaries designed by men. It is whether they can accept women exercising power beyond male control. TEYA may collaborate with Nyan Cit Arialbek, support their programmes, attend their events and advocate for their funding. What it may not legitimately do is convert partnership into guardianship and then insist that women should be grateful for the protection.
Indeed, Twic East community does not need a gentlemen’s committee for the liberation of women because women are already organising themselves. What they require from TEYA is not absorption, supervision or constitutional manhood. They require recognition as equal partners, respect for their organisational independence and sufficient political space to decide their own future.
The gentlemen at TEYA may find this arrangement emotionally difficult and frustrating. They may experience the unfamiliar sensation of watching women exercise authority without seeking male permission. That entitled discomfort is not a constitutional crisis, but rather what Khartoum was experiencing when Juba declared independence.
TEYA’s spirited attempt to forcibly integrate NCA into its structure recalls the equally determined and ultimately doomed campaign of the now-defunct Greater Bor Association to subsume the Twic Dinka, Hol Dinka and Nyarweng Dinka communities as mere subsets of the Bor Dinka community.
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