By Ngor Khot Garang
I want to begin this ride with a word of prayer. God, forgive or don’t forgive those who set this house ablaze and those who are fanning it. Whoever may take this prayer personal, please don’t worry. I don’t subscribe to religion, group or any ism but there is a man, who is more than a man whose story from a no-man to a man who can decide who lives and who dies is still unknown. Don’t think of this man as a president of an African country because he is not the one. I am sorry. There are so many Ngongs with wonderful stories of zero success and millions of failures.
To shake this guy’s hand means many things including a better life if you are that lucky enough to meet him but we will come back to that later. Let me time-travel back to his early years. They were not so good and I am so sorry for that. Having started life, there were days he could pray to have just a single meal. He was so thin that you would mistake him for a masquerade.
But deep down, he was a determined young man. To most people, he was actually older than his age because of his thick forest of beards. The kids, if they see the bearded man, would cry and he was used most times to scare the kids in the society.
To avoid all these humiliations, all he had to do was to borrow money from his friends to shave his beards and the biggest problem was that it would not take three days before the beard was back. He would go back again and borrow some money from his friends and up today, he is still being demanded by some of his friends that have long been forgotten.
If he can meet those childhood friends, he will not only reward them with cash, he will surprise them with car keys and some of them can die instantly as a result of happiness. Of course, this guy, his other name was Machok, which literally means hunger, was a good guy when he was young. Before he enlisted in the army to liberate his people, he was a committed church goer and more into that, a failed church choir.
He almost became a gospel singer but his voice led him down. After all the things he put his hands on in his younger life, all of them yielded good results but he failed in school. Though he was a smart student, the life of those days did not give him enough time to focus much on his academics. We cannot blame him a lot because we have many things to blame him later.
As a young soldier, he had one pair of military uniform and one pair of worn out shoes. Understand your current struggle now before you judge him(anyone, from any walk of life, can come from nothing and have a seat at the table) He was not fighting for himself, he wanted to change the lives of his people and be a part of the people who have contributed to the liberation of the their country. Imagine him in the 1980s and you will understand the man I mean. He was not a good for nothing young man. He was so sure that he would die and they would win or he would live and they still win. I wish he had seen himself swimming in petrodollars.
But one thing he did not see in his vision was himself in a presidential seat. He would have died of happiness by that time but since nobody knows tomorrow, it has happened that the man is a president and he is still not aware of his position and the purpose of his leadership. Now I want to look at his current life in 2022. No doubt, a lot of things have changed in decades.
The man is no longer the same, his life has completely changed for the better. His small forest of beards which left him in debt some years ago is a blessing to him now. Few years ago, people with thick beards were asked to shave or face the consequences. Some of them had to flee the country for the fear of their lives.
This guy is no longer Ngong, he is now “Kueth” which means “Wealth”. He is money. He prints money and when he is happy, he gives out bags of petrodollars. Everything is working well with him, if Ngong of 1980 meets Ngong who is now Kueth-2022, they will fight to death. Ngong- 2022 has forgotten the man he was expected to be by the people. Ngong-2022 has improved the lives of some of his friends. They are now better off. They have built better homes, not in their home country but abroad with fat bank accounts.
And own several offshores businesses. Not to forget those who will become the next leaders, their kids, they are so obese when millions of the poor citizens can’t afford a decent meal a day. Ngong-2022 has blood in his hands but he is not aware of it. He has been told, by his good-for-eating-men, who can’t imagine their survival, without Ngong at the helm, that he is a good man. The moment he hears this, he will surprise them with bags of petrodollars and positions.
But Ngong sometimes surprises them with presidential decrees. He appoints and disappoints. What I am afraid of is that Ngong will one day decree himself out of his office by mistake because this is the best job he can do. He might have got a first degree in that. Hunger sounds foreign to Ngong. He can eat anything he wants and if he wants, he can sell the country with the people and eat all the money.
Ngong is so rich that he can bribe the heavens to give him a second chance but am not sure if that will be possible. He has a lot of cars and he owns plots of land. These things may sound unreal but there is a real country that exists beyond Ngong’s neighborhood.
In this country, life is terribly hard. Even from a region where Ngong came from, there are people who cannot afford a single meal a day. The economy is down, poverty is a badge you wear all your life and blood is the only price you can pay for being a citizen of this country. As a leader, Ngong was appointed to be a servant of these people. To better their lives, it seems like Ngong is a punishment sent by God to punish these people for the crimes they did not commit.
Ngong doesn’t know his people. He doesn’t move and he doesn’t care about their well-being. He doesn’t want his people to be strong because strong people will question the system if the system is not working for their interests. This is the strategy he uses to hold his grip on power.
If Ngong was not evil, he would appreciate the fact that he is leading, people so strong and resilient, people who still forge smiles in the midst of so many difficulties. We ask Ngong to forgive himself and maybe come back to his normal senses. It is never too late. To be continued.