By Bida Elly David
The commissioner of Juba County has warned Bari intellectuals against using youth and community elders to meet their political goals saying that the practice would create division and result in total insecurity in the state.
He made the statement during the handing over ceremony of the Bari Community Center to the chiefs of the Bari community in the six counties.
Speaking during the event, Joseph Charles Wani, the commissioner of Juba County said that the BC Center is meant for traditional activities but not political events.
“We have closed the Bari Community Association because they have encroached as a community-based organization that is supposed to work on cultural promotion, unity of the people of Bari and developmental projects but we began to realize that the Center has begun working on political things,” he said.
“They even invited foreign dignitaries here and talked political things. Secondly, we have noticed that the Center has become a source of division within the Bari community and we the authority especially me (commissioner) decided to close the BC centre,” he said.
Charles said that “Today we are here to give the responsibilities to the chiefs because they are the owners of the people, territory and land since the centre is supposed to be managed by traditional authority and customary laws without putting political influence,”
He stated that the local chiefs will continue running the Center until an investigation concerning the suspended Association is accomplished.
Charles said that he took this initiative for dissolving the Bari Community as a mechanism to avoid accusations against the Bari people for being rebellious and working against the government.
“The chiefs will continue until the investigation committee is formed to investigate the reasons behind the problems and the motives behind it and all that. Me as Bari does not want my community to be looked at as a rebellion community,” he lamented.
Charles further accused individual intellectuals who played roles to engineer political agendas within the community to battle the current State regime.
“These are individual intellectuals who wanted to manipulate everything around the community to make it to be the staking point for them to come to a political position. Bari community is not a political party and if you have any political thing, go to your party, talk and come for your position,” he said.
He called on the intellectuals to avoid creating division among the Bari community to get a ticket to a political position in the state saying that the act will plant total insecurity in the state.
On his part, Juba city mayor H.W Michael Lado, cautioned the community against using the centre for division and political agenda saying that the centre serves commercial purposes since there’re companies, halls, and toilets that are used to generate income for the community.
He commended the commissioner for having done the job of tasking the chiefs to claim responsibilities until the case is resolved.
Meanwhile, Angelo Lodu Lino, one of the chiefs tasked appreciated the initiatives and vowed to take the traditional leadership of managing the centre using traditional laws and norms with no political agenda attached.