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.
Dr. Jok Madut (left), Dr. Bol Mel (middle) and Dr. Aldo Ajou Deng (right)
The social media statements by Dr. Jok
Madut and Dr. Uncle Aldo Ajou are confusing. I think they will have to explain
the following to South Sudanese.
Dr. Jok said that what is being discussed about Bol Mel is based on assumptions
and hatred of the man. He also said that Bol Mel has not expressed any desire
to replace Kiir. And that Kiir has not said he's preparing Bol Mel to replace
him. I will give Dr. Jok the benefit of the doubt because he shared these views
on social media where most of us are not always serious and measured when
sharing our views.
I have come to know Dr. Jok as far more
sophisticated and self-aware than the status being referenced reveals.
Here is my dilemma. I’m not sure if Jok is saying that for us to accept the
argument that Bol Mel regards himself as the heir apparent to President Kiir
then he must say explicitly, "I want to replace President Kiir!"?
I will wait for Dr. Jok to explain
himself. Bol Mel will have to be a complete dodo to say publicly he will
replace President Kiir!
No!
Bol Mel has shown a meticulous ruthlessness,
a systematicity of a miskiin sekin! The English calls such a person a
silent killer.
Also, there is never a case where politicians are clear about their intentions.
Facts and politicians are like Trump and Truth, water and oil!
Since Bol Mel was decreed in, he's been like Kiir's right-hand man. He stood
beside President Kiir when the man from Kampala came to South Sudan. He was the
one sent to Ethiopia to smooth things over with the New Flower [Addis Ababa]
after J1 prioritized the man from Kampala over Dr. Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia.
When he was appointed VP, Bol verbally, explicitly targeted Riek Machar, a
member of the presidency. He also asked Madam Nyandeeng not to abandon Kiir!
I'm not sure what he meant by that! He also mentioned that he would get
involved in security issues. We must ask ourselves why?
Now, Riek is in detention and Upper Nile and Jonglei are conflagrations. That
Bol Mel may be Kiir's successor is more of a presumption than an assumption.
Enter Bol Mel as VP and boom! there is money for salary! This is what late
Steve Jobs called connecting "the dots moving backwards."
How about Uncle Dr. Aldo?
He said Kiir cannot just make Bol Mel his successor, arguing that SPLM has
succession structures. He's kidding, right?
Is it not the same Kiir who embarrassed Kuol Manyang, imposed Peter Lam Both
and then tossed him, demoted Wani Igga to Secretary General and then made Bol
Mel one of the deputy chairs of the SPLM? Did anyone in the SPLM make a
whimpering sound?
Note this. If the president goes abroad for
state visits, article 1.6 section 1.6.4 of the Revitalized Peace Agreement says
that the first vice president becomes the acting president on a temporary
basis. When both the president and the first vice president are absent, the
president appoint one of the four vice presidents as acting president.
Since Riek is now in detention, let’s see
who President Kiir would appoint as acting president. Vice President Nyandeeng?
Vice President Josephine Lagu? Vice president Taban Deng Gai?
We will see…
Note that section 1.6.5
says that if the president is mentally or physically incapacitated then the
next president will be selected by the party of the president. Dr. Riek cannot
become president through the revitalized agreement of 2018. Perhaps Uncle
Doctor has a point here. If SPLM leaders are no longer afraid of Kiir then they
may ignore his wishes and pretend SPLM has structures to respect.
But Kiir is, we are told, not physically and mentally incapacitated now. When
it comes to succession, please don’t try Kiir! Try Kiir...just try...!
So Uncle Aldo is saying Kiir will, somehow, respect rules, laws and
regulations when it comes to who is to succeed him? Come on Uncle Doctor! Has
anyone ever defied Kiir? Pagan, Nyandeeng and Riek did! Where are they now?
Madam Nyandeeng is protected by the ghost and the liberation aura of John
Garang. She became VP through G [X] not through Kiir’s SPLM.
Uncle Doctor also said that we cannot blame Bol Mel for the corruption inherent
in awarding contracts. Bol Mel is just a businessman, he said. Is this an
implicit endorsement of corruption?
So Bol Mel is our VP but we should not hold him legally and morally
accountable? Is that what we are now supposed to expect from our public
officials? "Blame the government! I knew there was corruption but what did
you expect me to do?"
Folks, Bol Mel is a public figure, for better or for worse. Allow us to unpack
his public life! He comes with violence and money…and the slick, efficient smoothness
of a high-end gigolo!
____________
Kuir ë Garang (PhD) is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee (TPR).
Except for those benefiting from
South Sudan as a rent state, the country is, unequivocally, a failed state. But
I'm not "a bad-wicher!" [as Mr. Ateny Wek would accuse folks like
me]. I'm just tired. Really tired!
I've been doing this for more than two decades. My fellow citizens who used to
call me names for criticizing you are now calling you vile names I dare not
repeat here.
I was only then a concerned, albeit a young, citizen who knew your
revolutionary record as a led-leader. You are good, even efficient, at
following orders, at being guided, being told what to do.
I didn't see you as a leader of your people! I thought you were a stabilizing
force from behind a leader.
In 2005, my fellow citizens thought I was a mindless, peace-disturbing kid who
didn't know what he was saying. Why was I seeing in you what they didn't see?
They see you now, Mr. President! Clearly! But too late I guess!
Yes, the humblest of men, the most successful president in the history of the
world, is only focused obsessively on his mindless decrees and those with whom
he shares the spoils from oil monies.
Bravo, Bilpam Akech, for an accurate commentary! "Kiir Must Stay!"
you say! He must stay on to make South Sudan a-slave-labor state!
South Sudanese, Mr. President is so kind that you remain quiet when you go for
more than a year without salaries. You love him so much that you sing praises
to him as you die of hunger, diseases, floods, ethnic violence, state
oppression, and mere stupidity of his ethnic and yäc-centered cheer-leading
minions. Their ceaseless panegyric has become nauseating.
Thank you, Mr. President, for turning a beautiful country into a place where
citizens tell their fellow citizens to "go back to their ancestral
lands." Thank you for making South Sudan a place where South Sudanese are
so secure that they move from their ancestral lands to go and inconvenience,
through no fault of their own, the lives of their fellow citizens in other
parts of the country. Kudos!
Thank you, Mr. President, for making me understand what you meant by "no
reverse gear" in 2005. I thought it meant a full-speed sprint to social
development and economic success.
A true Land of Milk and Honey!
I didn't know what you meant was an-SPLM-bullet-train to mediocrity, disorder,
anarchy, death, violence and slavery.
Thank you for making South Sudan the only country in the world were citizens
work for free. Scholars of slavery and historians tell us that slavery is about
ownership of the people, especially their labor.
We know what would happen if South Sudanese protest, even peacefully!
Bullets...as your nephew (Thiik) and your government spokesperson (Makuei) have
warned! And Bilpam Akech has spoken for you: South Sudanese should COMMIT
SUICIDE (hang themselves) if they don't like the amazing country the humblest
man in the world has built!
Thank you for making more than a century of a peoples' struggle mean your
transformation into an absolute king, a colonialist ruling over subject people
from Juba, a neocolonial metropole.
These are subject people about whom you don’t care! Or do you?
The youth in Africa, which is by far the continent with the youngest population, 70% being under 30 years, are like exploitable things used by political leaders to decorate themselves. This is not always a palatable adornment. They are either their political muscles, conduits for their ethnicized polemics, or cheerleaders of their stayist agenda.
I see this on many South Sudanese fora and social media platforms.
But African youth are listening, watching...peacefully. Demoralized and devalued as they are, they are still the future. And they know it.
As such, African leaders should not be too complacent. Pre-empting any hints of protests with massive military deployments is also not the way to go. Shutting down youth meetings for fear of these meetings morphing into anti-government movements is not also the way to go.
The youth may not liberate themselves by picking up guns and flee to the bush. But they know the power of the social media and its importance in galvanized THE STREETS.
In South Sudan, the youth is unemployed and their parents go for months, even years, without being paid. Protesting, the most democratic means for the expression of grievance, is dangerous, even fatal. The youth of South Sudan and their parents suffering in a silent indignity.
But the youth in Africa, even in South Sudan, are a sleeping giant. Kenya has shown African leaders that they are no longer willing to be tools for the exploitation of the people and the mouths for the spread of divisive ideas.
They want improvements in their political culture, their economies and political leadership. It is that simple.
African leaders take the youth for granted. Kenya and Nigeria have now seen the consequence of ageist arrogance. They must appreciate what the youth are doing to change their countries for better. Not all Gen Zs have been zombified and stupefied by Instagram and Tik Tok as some politicians like to believe.
Listen to them. The appropriate responses is change in policies not guns and tanks.
Here is the importance of the protests. Instead of fleeing their countries out of frustration to die in the Mediterranean see like thousands of African youth who continue to defy the deathly Sahara and what some commenters have called the new middle passage, protesting African youth have decided to challenge the historical amnesia of their political class.
Africans leaders cannot have it both ways. They cannot ignore the ones dying on their way to Europe and expect the ones who have remained at home to be quiet about what made those youth brave death.
The youth do no like to protest. They like a better living standard.
It would be foolhardy for African leaders to mock them. Museveni, stuck in the past, as as entitled and blinded by power as former US president, Donald Trump, seems to assume he is going to live forever.
He uses the police and the army to intimidate the youth and opposition figures. But how long will that last? The army and the police will one day realize that they work for the people. And the emperor will be seen for what he is: Naked!
In South Sudan, the political class is reading from Museveni's authoritarian book. Any time there is a mustering about protests, the army floods the streets with tanks and armored cars. Yes, armored tanks. The South Sudanese army is not used to protect civilians. It is used to intimidate.
But how long will the youth of South Sudan suffer in dehumanizing silence? How long will South Sudanese leaders rely on divisive politics to prevent youth from reminding the political class that the future is the youth not men and women in their 60s, 70s and 80s acting like they still have the next fifty years to rule?
Since 2005, the political class in South Sudan transitioned from liberation-mindedness to power politics. In power politics, priorities are about parties and individuals. The future of the country becomes secondary if it is at all part of political conversation.
Between 2005 and 2011, the ruling party, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), failed to transition into a conventional political party. Leaders could not agree on succession.
They kept on postponing conventions, normalizing postponement. The consequence was the war in 2013. The culture of postponement has now becomes part of the peace agreement. The elections also seem to be heading that way.
Meanwhile, the country is falling apart. Salaries have not been paid for months. A recent report by the Associated Press shows that civil servants are leaving their jobs for menial work. Some have resorted to waitressing while others have become charcoal salesmen.
But the president either does not care or he has no idea what he is doing. Between 2020 and 2024, South Sudan has had six finance ministers.
Until recently, the president kept the public guessing about the reason for which he fires finance ministers, some of whom lasting for less than a year. Apparently, he is looking for the right person. The South Sudanese finance ministry has become a matter of trial and error.
The president may have not realized that the reason why institutions vet candidates is to avoid aimless and error. Vetting and interviews are meant to find the most qualified or the most appropriate Candidate for the job.
A recent selection of a running mate by the presumptive Democratic President Candidate, Kamala Harris, is an example. Harris vetted qualified candidates and settled for Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz. Harris believed Walz is the best Candidate for the kind of the presidency she hope to run should she win in November.
President Kiir needs to learn this. Vetting candidates based on experience, past achievements, education, and fit removes the needs to hire candidates blindly. The president can even outsource the vetting process to ensure a company with experience hiring qualified candidate does the vetting.
But we know that doing so may lead to the hiring of someone who is good for the job but bad for those who have captured the state governing apparatuses. So for the president to say he is looking for the person to fix the economic when he is not exercising the judgement required to find one is dishonest.
Today, the president and the ruling class are comfortable. But they should note that the youth are watching what is happening in Kenya and Nigeria. The African Spring is afoot.
South Sudanese leaders should not be complacent. The youth are peaceful. But they are not mentally dead.
INSPIRING SOUTH SUDANESE
__
Kuir ë Garang (PhD) is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee. Follow on X: @kuirthiy.
'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.
Top: Dr. Peter Biar Ajak (left) and President Salva Kiir (right)
Below: Minister of Petroleum, Mr. Puot K. Chol (left) and late Mr. Kerubino Wol (right)
In
South Sudan, the youth is marginalized and
confused. These are obvious realities to
South Sudanese at home and abroad. The reason for this confusion and
marginality is, however, not so apparent. We may fault culturally inspired political
ageism. But that is easy.
So,
making sense of how political ageism marginalizes the youth needs more than the
proposition that ageism is to blame. The youth themselves enable the system
that keeps them at the margin of power and decision-making in the country.
Of
course, the structural dynamics of youth economic and political marginality,
which is outside youth control, is not something I downplay. The youth are,
however, not helpless bystanders in the ageism power matrix. They are complicit
as pawns of the elite and ethnic chauvinists.
The
youth, who are ethnic chauvinists or wannabe-elite make political ageism
effective and marginalizing. These youth do not mind septuagenarians or
octogenarians monopolizing politics and economics if these youth join, or are
favored by, the political and economic elite. South Sudanese scholar, Majak D’Agoot, has
referred to this youth-marginalizing South Sudanese elite as the “gun
class.”
An Analysis of the land issue in the Equatorias
In
this case the youth support the gun class, however incompetent and corrupt,
because these leaders come from their tribe. They complain that the older generation is not
giving the youth a share of power. However, these marginalized youth support
leaders who tell 40-year-olds that they are “leaders of tomorrow.” For instance, some local youth associations in
South Sudan are headed by “youth” in their mid-40s. This is why, on
April 17, 2023, Daniel Mwaka, a South Sudanese youth leader, suggested that the
youth age bracket in South Sudan be delimited at 35.
