Mark Carney is a protest candidate. He was not elected for his policies, necessarily. He was elected for likeability as a contrast to Trudeau (who he advised informally). He was also elected for demeanor as a contrast to Pierre Poilievre, the 'Canadian Trump', who has, for the good of Canada, lost his seat. Good riddance!
Poilievre talked of change but he's been holding the same parliamentary seat since 2004. The people of Ottawa-Carleton and Bruce Fanjoy said, 'yes, change indeed!' And change they engendered!
Carney, for better or for worse, symbolizes calm, order and the status quo Trudeau had apparently compromised. Trudeau had made Canada 'unfamiliar.' On principle, status quo scares the hell out of me. But given Trump's menace, I'll give Carney the benefit of the doubt! After all, he talks like that smooth-talking uncle whose words make issues less painful!
But I'm not celebrating...yet. I'm not dismissing him either.
For those of us living at the margin and studying those who live at the margin, Carney's victory is something to approach cautiously. He is a man who has never done groceries. He has no clue how the average Canadian lives. He is now elected to learn what it means to be Canadian. The man had three passports. A true globalist.
He was recently called out about lying about his first call with Trump. He had said Trump 'respects Canada's sovereignty'. That was a lie. He failed to tell Canadians that Trump repeated the call for Canada to become the 51st state in their first phone call. Why lie to Canadians about such a fundamental issues?
Recently, he first stood by liberal candidate, Paul Chiang, who had called for a conservative candidate to be abducted and taken to the Chinese consulate for a bounty. Really? Chang would later resign as a candidate even after Carney stood by him!
I'm glad Carney won. No doubt. But I'm not enthused by his taking over in Ottawa...yet. He is too close to the centre that he risks becoming centre right. Poilievre even complained that Carney has copied his platform. Carney wants to be different from Trudeau so bad that he will risk pandering to the conservative, old guards within the liberal party. Yet, he was Trudeau's informal advisor. There are conservatives who find it 'respectable' to be called 'liberal.' Carney was once asked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a conservative that molded Poilievre, to be finance minister.
Celebrate. But celebrate with caution. Carney is a neoliberal, a neocon of Obama variety! I'll wait to be impressed! I work with children and youth and my daughter plans to attend university in Canada. I'm yet to see a policy on Carney's platform that would give them something about which to smile.
First Vice President Riek Machar and President Salva Kiir Mayardit
____
I know President Kiir, most of the time,
says the RIGHT thing but does the WRONG thing. While he can incite tribalism
sometimes, he tends to sound like a leader once in a while. Check his Independence Day speech. At times he says the right thing to the people of South Sudan.
His actions, however, are most of the time
contrary to what could be called leadership.
But credit where due. His call for calm is
the right thing at the moment. I have been saying this over the last two
decades: that President Kiir should always come out and address the country
anytime there is a national tragedy and speak to the people of South Sudan.
There is something calming about words from
the head of state. Leadership is a psycho-social reality.
Honorable Michael Makuei, the Minister of Information and the government spokesperson, calms no one down. Well, maybe
a few South Sudanese find his condescending press statements calming. South Sudan is a country bereft of leadership.
He talks with a princely
I-will-say-what-I-want-so-what-the-hell-will-you-do-about-it attitude.
On the other hand, folks from Sudan People Liberation Movement In Opposition (SPLM-IO), that is,
their spokespeople, talk like there is a gun to their heads. But they have this
impotent, annoying, self-righteous attitude like they own THE truth. Like
Truth=IO! They make me want to...forget it!
What South Sudanese do not have are leaders who speak on their behalf, leaders who care about South Sudan and her peoples.
But note that Uncle Makuei is neither
Jieeng (Dinka) nor is he South Sudanese. He is from a tribe called the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). This tribe has
different clans. The largest two clans are "In-Government" and
"In-Opposition." Bɛny (1) Kiir are
Kuär (2) Riek are their tribal chiefs, respectively.
SPLA is a tribe that lives in the past. The
future scares it. It is a tribe that does not apologize. It considers humility
a defeat. It does not entertain criticism. Criticism is disrespectful to this
tribe. It considers itself infallible. These people do not take responsibility
for their actions.
They only like to point their crooked
fingers.
But it is a tribe that is internally
divided. SPLA as tribal people have used division to recruit two clueless
colonies: Jieeng and Nuer. SPLA has so mentally colonized these two nations
that they believe that members of SPLA are their fellow tribesfolk.
But President Kiir, once in a while, acts
like a true South Sudanese, not a colonialist. He abandons the egregious,
insidious values of his SPLA tribefolk every now and then.
Today, he acted like members of his colony:
South Sudanese. But you can see in the same speech that his SPLA tribal
attitude jumps out of him once in a while: He points fingers at "enemy of
peace", who are, strangely, his SPLA folks and the folks SPLA has mentally
colonized.
____
Kuir ë Garang (PhD) is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee.
Since
I posted the video
commentary about the Rwandan incident, several things have become clear. Both the
Rwandan police and the South Sudanese Student leadership in Rwanda have noted
that the violent incident that was wrongly attributed to South Sudanese
students has, if anything, to do with South Sudanese.
As
the president of South Sudanese Students Association in Rwanda, Saleh
Mohammed Adam, has said in his
interview with Juba-based Eye Radio, “the incident happened on the 27th
of December, so we actually have seen the footage, and I told them clearly when
we tried to view the footage …and in the actual truth we found out these people
who fought Rwandans…are not South Sudanese.”
He
added, “I have called one of the police who was in the investigation process of
the incident [and] he told me I was right. They said the issue has been already
solved so it was just misinformation and misidentification.”
This
is why it is crucial that we wait to hear all the facts surrounding the incident
before we respond as to who is at fault. Both Rwandans and South Sudanese
automatically assumed that South Sudanese are to blame. They attributed
violence, a natural fact of every society, to be a natural propensity of South
Sudanese as people.
While
the South Sudanese leadership did
not respond to the incident, the Rwandan
authorities did.The Rwandan police and
the ministry of foreign affairs did not buy into the narrative that South
Sudanese are naturally violent. Rwandan authorities have shown a sense of
leadership South Sudan’s foreign ministry has not.
Boniface
Rutikanga, the spokesperson for the Rwandan
national police, cautioned the public against using social media as the source
of facts and truth.
“People should not be worried about what is
going on over the social media but should learn to understand that the fact not
always comes from the social media” [sic].
Advising
against targeting South Sudanese, Mr. Rutikanga said that the incident is a normal
event that can happen between any communities living in Rwanda or among Rwandan
themselves.
“What
happened”
he added, “was just a case that could
happened to any another community. It is normal. It could happen between
Rwandans among themselves or could have happened between one community and
another” [sic].
Mr.
Rutikanga assured the public that neither South Sudanese nor other foreign
nationals living in Rwanda have violently targeted Rwandans.
“…there is nothing special that would be
called that South Sudanese were targeting Rwandans or certain foreign group
targeting Rwandans. There were no premeditation of doing that, so let me just
assure people that there is nothing problematic.”
Responding
to the hateful vitriol directed at South Sudanese by Rwandans on the social
media, The
New Times warned on January 1,
2025, against current and historical dangers of othering. that “Young [Rwandan]
people should be taught about the dangers of otherness, especially prejudicial
and stereotypical. It starts off as just that, but the cost is too high. Crimes
committed should be reported to the right institutions and dealt with legally.”
The
New Times added that “Inciting hate against a
specific people has no place in Rwanda today or tomorrow. Our hospitality
should reflect the remarkably diverse society we have built over the years.”
The
New Times was echoing what the Rwandan Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Olivier Nduhungihere, posted
on X on December 30, 2024, about Rwandan
values of unity, rule of law and respect for diversity of the people living in
Rwanda.
These
remarks underscore what I said in the video; that, at the time, we did not know
what happened. I said that we should wait for the police to do the
investigation to find out what really happened.
I
also, as a cautionary reminder, showed a video of South Sudanese being maligned
in the Australian media. Some of the videos shown in Australia as South
Sudanese youth engaging in acts of violence turned out to be non-South
Sudanese.
As it turns out, the Australian case is
similar to the Rwandan incident as facts start to come out. It is pent-up
hatred meant to tarnish South Sudanese.
It
is therefore vital that we wait for facts before we share our opinions in spaces
that do not have editorial oversights. X, formerly known as Twitter, is a
sociopolitical wild west.
While
it is prudent that we respond to reports when they arise, it is also crucial
that we show restraint and avoid self-denigrations.
I
am not, of course, saying that South Sudanese do not engage in acts of violence
in Australia or in East Africa. I only suggest that we blame South Sudanese
when they make mistakes. As South Sudanese, we should not join self-blame and
denigration before we get all the facts.
We
have started to see ourselves through the prisms of those who have no respect
for us.
___
Kuir
ë Garang (PhD), is the editor of the Philosophical Refugee (TPR)
'Garang also reiterated the importance of education to the red army as future leaders in his speech to Sudanese refugees in Itang Refugee Camp (also in Western Ethiopia) in 1988. Garang told civilians that Southern and Western Sudanese were excluded from power in Khartoum because they are said to be uneducated. “Why are they not educated?” he asked. He added that “this is why we have built schools for the red army because they are the future generation. No one will say in the future that they are not educated.”'
As we yet again commemorate another May 16th, I think about the future of South Sudan through these three generational groups: The SPLA generation, the red army generation, and the youth (as conventionally defined by the United Nations and the African Union).
When
I read in Frantz Fanon’s TheWretched of the Earth that “Each
generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfil it, or
betray it”, I wonder about the youth in South Sudan and my generation (the red
army generation). With the current political and economic situation in South
Sudan, the red army generation seems to have betrayed its generational
mission.
But
is this generation to blame? First, what is this generation and why it is
important?
The
red army generation, called the lost boys of Sudan
in the United States where some of them resettled as refugees in early 2000s,
were born in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. To the Southern rebels
(1983-2005)—the Sudan’s People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Sudan
People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)—the red army generation was to furnish Sudan
with disciplined, educated post-liberation leaders.
Of
course, SPLA recruited
some of these boys as combat infantry in the 1990s. These older boys, called
Jesh el-assuot (black army) informally because they were of fighting age
according to the SPLA, were hardly adults as conventionally
defined. It is however important to note
that the SPLA leadership believed in the education of this generation. With all
their short-comings, which
are very well documented, SPLA leaders did not blindly use them all as child
soldiers. The future was a haunting presence.
While
the use of child soldiers must be condemned, and rightly so, it is important to
understand the cultural and the survivalist context in which SPLA recruited and
inducted them as child soldiers. This cultural dimension, while not necessarily
acceptable per se, must be factored into any analysis of South Sudanese
liberation history and all its complex dimensions. It cannot be ignored, or oversimplified,
if the present status of the youth and the red army generation in South Sudan
is to be properly contextualized.
The SPLA
senior leadership also understood that a revolutionary agenda without any
strategic plan for the young generation is foolhardy. Speaking in 1988 to Jesh el-amer
(the red army) in Pinyudo Refugee Camp
in Western Ethiopia, John Garang de Mabior, the co-founder of SPLM/SPLA and its
ideological
architect, said that the duty of the red army generation is “to
re-build the country.”Garang added that
“my responsibility and the responsibility of my generation will be to dismantle
Old Sudan…we will raze it to the ground.”
Garang
also reiterated the importance of education to the red army as future leaders
in his speech to Sudanese refugees in Itang Refugee Camp
(also in Western Ethiopia) in 1988. Garang told the civilians that Southern and
Western Sudanese were excluded from power in Khartoum because they are said to
be uneducated. “Why are they not educated?” he asked. He added that “this is
why we have built schools for the red army because they are the future
generation. No one will say in the future that they are not educated.”
The
importance of education for the red army is also underscored by the decision by
the SPLA to send about 600 young men and women to Cuba
in the mid-1980s for education. Another important educational program
encouraged by the SPLA leadership to educate the red army generation produced
scholars of Face
Foundation of Polotaka, Eastern Equatoria.
Additionally,
in refugee camps (Itang,
Pinyudo,
Dima,
Kakuma,
etc) where the red army settled, SPLA appointed leaders to supervise them. They
emphasized the importance of education to aid agencies providing relief
services in these camps. On a personal note, I completed elementary and high
school in Kakuma Refugee Camp due to SPLM’s emphasis on education. It is with
this emphasis on education that a prominent SPLA commander, after talking to my
mother in 1995 in Mangalatore
Displace Camp, accepted to take me to
Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Schools in Mangalatore were poor. Because of the itinerant
nature of internally displaced persons, I found it difficult to benefit from
constantly interrupted schooling.
DR. JOHN GARANG DE MABIOR ON LEADERSHIP, SERVICE PROVISION, AND ACCOUNTABILITY
With
this emphasis on education and the red army as future leaders, why then are the
youth and the red army generation marginalized in South Sudan?
The
obvious answer is what SPLM leaders have become. Instead of building an
inclusive economy and democracy, or allowing the red army generation to play
that role, SPLM has built a self-enrichment kleptocracy
where a coterie of powerful political and military elites siphon state
resources to foreign banks. Within this system, the youth is seduced
into it or marginalized.
This predatory “gun
class”, as South Sudanese scholar an
former minister Majak D’Agoot calls them, has become callously parasitic on
state resources.So the conditions in
which the youth and the red army generation could fulfil their generational
mission, in
state-building for instance, are
non-existent.
As
D’Agoot has noted, “SPLA has morphed into a degenerative gun-toting aristocracy
that straddles the sociocultural, political, and economic spheres like a
colossus.” This has enabled a predatory elitism, an elite-centred economic
system of reciprocity. They have made it the political
and economic culture in the country. The youth and the red army generation joins
them because it pays. Others join this predatory elite on ethno-centric basis. The
generational mission has become an inconvenience or a threat
to personal safety.
To
stop the gun class from money-laundering, the United States sent Sigal
Mandelker, the Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial
Intelligence, to Kenya and Uganda, which have become money-laundering hubs for South
Sudanese gun class. After Mandelker’s visit, money laundering continues. State-building
and service provision have been abandoned.
Instead
of being allowed to fulfil their generational mission, the youth and the red
army generation face
arbitrary arrests, tortures at national security secret locations, and the unexplained
disappearances. Frustrations has also
caused self-destructive decisions for this generation. The rebellion and
subsequent assassination by the South Sudanese army of businessman and
philanthropist, Kerubino Wol, and the arrest by the FBI of Dr. Peter Biar Ajak,
resulted from these generational frustrations. It is the attempt by the youth
and the red army generation to fulfil their generational missions that puts
them in trouble with the South Sudanese national security.
Those
in positions of power are appointed through nepotistic arrangements or through
political cronyisms. They are mere tokens without real power. For instance, the
deputy governor of Jonglei State, Atong Kuol Manyang, is the daughter of a
powerful former SPLA commander, Kuol Manyang Juuk. Kuol is also a senior
advisor to President Kiir. The deputy Mayor of the city of Juba, Thiik Thiik
Mayardit, is the nephew of President Salva Kiir.
The
governor of Jonglei State, Mr. Denay Jock Chagor, the national minister of
health, Ms. Yolanda Awel Deng Juach, and the national minister of petroleum,
Mr. Kang Chol, are among the red army generation who were appointed through the
revitalized agreement for the resolution of the conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCISS)
signed by SPLM-In-Government and SPLM-In-Opposition in 2018. SPLM leaders find
it nearly impossible to appoint the youth and the red army generation into positions
of power on merit.
Co-opted
South Sudanese youth and the red army generation must therefore reject SPLM’s predatory
elitism however solvent. Otherwise, corrupt, and self-centred leaders in their
60s, 70s, and 80s will continue to be the past, the present, and the future of
the country.
The
social media is, as the English would say, a double-edge sword. For South
Sudanese living abroad, Facebook Live and Tik Tok—the two most important
avenues of our social media discourse—have become an-everyday reality. Intrusive
but necessary, they have become an uncomfortable feature of our cultural and
social landscape.
I’m
intentionally ignoring Twitter. It’s the abode of pretenders, who think they
are better, elites, intellectuals…! They think they are better than
Facebookers. They say proudly, ‘I’m not on Facebook!’ That’s a topic for
another day.
Facebook
and Tik Tok make us laugh, sad, angry, confused, or indifferent. We use them to
promote cultural events or fundraisers. We also use them to vent with uncharacteristic
bitterness, expose people’s secrets (the post-relationship and post-friendship exposés),
or declare enmity.
They
are confusing. We complain about them, but we can’t stop watching them, or
using them.
But
we must admit some things. They are a moral problem and a good.
Meaning, we can’t wish them away. Since the good doesn’t need to be fixed,
it is the bad that we must address. That is true. In Logical Investigations,
Edmund Husserl tells us that Truth is ‘eternal’. It’s not bound by time
or a place. (You’re free to dispute this!)
If
you use this social media duo [Tik Tok and Facebook] to spread positive social,
cultural, and political messages, then kudos. Continue! We need you. That’s
true. That’s eternal.
But
here is the problem we must address. Insults.
We
must address them not for what they mean to the community. That is easy. Any
idiot in our community knows that Facebook Live and Tik Tok insults are moral
harms and social wrongs. No reasonable person, even the foul-mouthed
Facebooker, would say public insults on Facebook are a moral good.
What
we must address as a community is the underlying problem, the unspoken. We tend
to focus on the fact that so and so insults so and so. The question we must ask
ourselves is: Why would a reasonable personal go live, his/her children in the
house, and open a verbal artillery of the unspeakable? It’s not the visible
that is the problem; it’s the invisible.
What
happened to rɔ̈ɔ̈c ë
guɔu (shame) andriëëu de rɔ (self-respect)?Why are people
saying anything and everything that comes to mind publicly? There must be
something deeper, something Freudian about the public insults. Why do the young
men and women who vent publicly in the most grotesque of ways on social media
believe this is the panacea? Of course, insults make us feel good.
Remember when we were kids and a certain son and daughter of a certain
man beat you up. You’re weak and cannot compete so you use your mouth. After thirty
seconds of hurling the most filth you can imagine on that son of a gun, you
feel amazing! Sigh. But then you run! Run!
Of course, folks who unleash their smutty tirade know public insults are
not the panacea for their problems. No matter the amount of vitriol they
unleash on their targets, the problems will remain.
But then they feel good! Well, before their friends and relatives call
to ask them to refrain.
But their insults play two roles. It gives them a chance to say: ‘I’m
not the problem.’ For women, it also gives them the chance to speak. To
use Spivak’s expression, women in our traditional communities are the
subalterns who don’t speak.
A good wife (tik| tiŋ pieth/tiŋ nɔŋ piɔ̈u) or a good girl (nyaan pieth/nyaan nɔŋ piɔ̈u) doesn’t speak about her marital
problems. A young South Sudanese female doctor recently said that women have
been freed from the constraints of our tradition. They can no longer afford to
be the non-speaking good girls or good wives, she argued. They’ve found a
voice.
That sounds good. Worrying but understandable.
I must add something though. Since I’m not a medical professional, I’ll ask our health professionals some questions.
Is there a mental health, trauma element to this?
There is normal venting or speaking out your truth. But then there is scotch-earth,
full-blown, leaving-nothing-to-the-imagination paroxysm. Is there something we
can do as a community to help people vent respectfully? How can we validate
venters, especially women, without normalizing harmful Facebook videos?
What our people don’t realize is this. Venting on the social media,
however deceptively privately or reasonable it appears, is like going to the
shopping mall full of people and screaming one’s frustration standing on top of
a table on the food court. Imagine that. Imagine it for a moment. You may say
it is not the same; but it is.
Like it or not, the social media is here to stay. All we must do is to minimize
its harm and maximize its usefulness. But if we don’t go to the roots of the
problem that make people vent publicly without any ounce of retrain, then we
shouldn’t complain about any filth on Tik Tok and Facebook.
The great danger to public venting is this: They are social harms that make
some people heard, and self-validating. ‘I will not be ignored!’ is the
message.
South Sudanese community ‘leaders’ and health professionals, this is your
challenge. The likes of Kuirthiy can only write!
