Is the South Sudanese state turning South Sudan into a slave labor camp?

 

Photo Courtesy: Office of the President of South Sudan

January 3, 2025

It is good to be optimistic. It helps you focused to confront adversities in life. There is nothing wrong with that attitude when you are self-motivating. 

But when a president tells citizens to be optimistic without giving them reasonable political or economic plans to be hopeful, he risks trivializing their pain and desperation. 

This is what President Kiir of South Sudan has done in his recent New Year's message. 

South Sudanese have gone for months without salaries. Instead of apologizing to the people of South Sudan, or tell them how the nonpayment of salaries will be addressed in the new year, the president thanked South Sudanese for their patience, resilience, patriotism, and submission. 

Asking South Sudanese to be optimistic when the president presented no tangible agenda for the resolution of what has become a chronic problem in the country is to insult the people of South Sudan. 

Asking South Sudanese to work for free for more than a year, and expecting them to continue on waiting patiently, is risky. It borders on creating a slave labor nation, as someone has noticed.

Admitting economic problems as the president did in his new year's message on December 31, 2024 is reasonable. 

But it is not followed by a plan. President Kiir only asks South Sudanese to embrace uncertainty in perpetuity. A diseased, hungry, flooded, unsafe, and despondent populace cannot build a country. And it can by no means turn into a state-building human resource. 

South Sudanese are exhausted. They have been taken advantage of by South Sudanese leaders under President Kiir and the SPLM. 

The people of South Sudan need more than pastoral inspirations. The youth of South Sudan need programs that would allow them to see and embrace a brighter future the president invokes without a plan. 

The president only invokes a brighter future like a traditional seer or a  false Christian prophet. 

Reminding South Sudanese of the challenges they already live through is to be oblivious of the living conditions of the people. It is self-absolution. 

President Kiir is a political leader. He is not a priest taking confessionals from his congregation. 

He should deal in facts, figures and strategic plans. 

Statements such as "the government will prioritize" or "I am...directing that the Ministry of Agriculture double its effort" are vacuous personal directives. 

The president should speak forcefully in terms of government's plans not personal directives. He should own failures not deflect them or speak in terms of collective mistakes. He is the president. 

When one reads the tone and the messaging in the president's speeches and addresses, he speaks like a middle-management executive who takes orders from the CEO. 

 

That "We in government of today must do our best" or "We must ensure..." are not reassuring. They are abdications of responsibility to the people of South Sudan.

If there are economic challenges, and indeed there are, then what is the government's strategy to resolve the problem? Not mere personal directives. Tangible, documented strategies. This is missing. 

Asking South Sudanese to continue to work for free is a risky affair. It borders on slave labor. 

This must stop!

_________________

Kuir ë Garang (PhD), is the editor of the Philosophical Refugee (TPR)

Three socio-political monstrosities destroying South Sudan

There are three main socio-political monstrosities impeding progress in South Sudan. But they are not difficult to fix. They don't cost money. They only need a leadership that is not afraid to offend colleagues and relatives. A leadership that has principles on which it compromises only if doing so advances the interests of the citizens of South Sudan. 

The first monstrosity is our identitarianism marked by acute, self-righteous, ethnocentric sentimentalism. It is now clear, to all of us (however much some of us may pretend) in (and from) South Sudan that most of us will support politicians from our home areas or those with whom we have consanguineous relations regardless of the enormity of their immoral acts. We celebrate them even if they are murderous, unprincipled graft entrepreneurs. 

Corruptocrats, as I call them!

The second monstrosity is the desire to join the elite and climb the socioeconomic ladder in South Sudan. It is an invidious motivation that turns one away from care of citizens to naked bourgeois interests. Rigid, pure, materialist quest for money and power. In this context, corruption and cronyism have become instrumental tools in our fetishization of Kiir's monarchial, Medievalist decrees. This is what South Sudan has become. 

The third monstrosity is political relevance. This is at the heart of  the political anomie in South Sudan. Many politicians (and young wannabe-politicians) will go to extreme lengths to remain politically relevant. Young folks in South Sudan join political parties not for ideological reasons or on principle, but for relevance, simpliciter. In the process, South Sudanese civilians either become pawns in this quest for political relevance, or they become virtually irrelevant, nonexistent.

As long as these three monstrosities are not addressed, South Sudanese will continue to suffer under the self-serving interest of the political class that has turned South Sudan into an extractive colony. 

Tumaini Initiation

_______________

Kuir ë Garang (PhD) is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee.