The future is not always as bright as you think. Sometimes you may be living in the future without you knowing. For students, it is passing with good grades and having a good job. Maybe starting a family, that is the future. Sometimes the future is living in the place you have always dreamed of.
And this future is different; it was bleeding profusely after being stabbed in the back by some members of the community. It was no more, I saw it and I’m here to tell you the sad news, that either you reverse the ship with which you are sailing, or we sink forever. It is true nobody knows what is coming but there are men who know what to do to prevent what is coming. The future is almost dead, and we have ourselves to blame for the murder.
Don’t tell me that you don’t know what I’m talking about. It is about you and your children. Why must you sell 100,000 years of a good life for two months of comfort in one of the five-star hotels? You can take your calculator and think, what do we have that we want to lose because of individual interest?
Think of the years, of sleepless nights of pain and struggles to build a better future. Now it has been zero work or even worse, it has been building castles in thin air. The people don’t want the past, they have seen enough of it and this time, they want to see the inside of the future they have always envisioned. I am sorry that the future is going to be the rebirth of the painful past.
This is not going to be a ludo game; the dice will not work in our favor. It is a matter of life and death. Have you ever gone to the cemetery? I went there once and there is something so humbling in that place. On every gravestone, there is a birthday and death day. This means that this life starts from B and ends at D.
It is short and that sucks. But in between B and D, there is C, which stands for choice. Why do we choose to slaughter the future? Can we autocorrect human beings who are too blind and blinded by the material wealth that they can’t see the snake that is coming to eat their wealth?
I am talking about the future; don’t always believe in prosperity gospel preachers who will tell you that they have seen your future. That you have to sow some seeds in the house of God for you to get there. With these gospel preachers, anyone who fails to sow seed in the form of money in the house of God is robbing God and must pay for it.
That is not true, you create your own future, and you can destroy it too. For most people, the future is winning the jackpot, for some politicians, the future is a lot of money and appointments. But what about the future of a country? Excuse me for a minute; I personally went there for a visit. It was in the evening and everything was dark. The following morning, nothing changed. It was still dark and this time, everyone was crying. I was told that it is ever dark and one day, it is going to be even red.
What about the bright future I was told? I could not even understand. Everything was a hoax. This time, I was beginning to sense that somebody had made a coup d’état and took over the future and everything. In this place, there was total suffering. The oil wells already dried up, the agriculture sector was sick and struggling to survive.
You cannot differentiate between a common man and the big man, oh, I want to forget. Those days when things were still intact, it was an accomplishment to be called a big person or zol Kebir. It was success itself. Sometimes back, if your day was bad, all you had to do was to call someone who is financially okay and shower him or her with some praise and don’t fail to call them big people, you will have lunch that day.
In town, before I traveled to the future, I was told that for you to survive here, all you have to do is to single out one big person and make them know that they are really big. If you have one, you can even get a very good job and win court cases even if you were guilty. With big people, anything is possible. Sometimes when they are happy with you, they can surprise you with car keys. Things were completely different here in the future. Talk of oil, it was gone and our animals too.
There was this place, let us call it Sudd, some decades ago. Someone wants to take it but the people of the land said they will have to fight to their graves for the sake of that place.
This time I could see some of those people wanting it gone. What a change of mind! The future is not always real. It is sometimes real. Let me just imagine that the oil wells will never be refilled by nature. Take it this way that our water too is gone. In the next 30 years, we are going to pay to get water. It means that water is going to be the oil of the 21st century but our future will be different.
You cannot imagine a future without oil and water that is going to be our future if we don’t change the story. Sometimes, God can give you the winning cards and leave you to play for yourself. I remember a man who scored an own goal in a match that would crown him as a world champion just three minutes before the match was done. That goal changed the trajectory of his life forever. After years of working hard to make his dream a reality, he ended up dialing the wrong button, he was now a loser.
Another man, because of his laziness to read, mistakenly signed his dismissal letter. The other day, he was evicted by the landlord because he could no longer pay the rent. He wished he was wise enough. We are talking about the Sudd region here. The sudd region is more than what money can buy. Before you press the button, think about the future generation and the hefty price they will be forced to pay.
There is so much debt to be paid and the future could tell. You cannot cheat history; it always repeats itself. There is no doubt, we will not be here forever, but it is better to leave things in order than in a mess. At least the ancestors will be happy. Think about the future.
Thanks for reading Finding Hope. The writer is a student of law, University of Juba.