One may ask for the connection of salary arrears with gender-based violence cases. Here the answer is as direct as the question. Salaries are monthly incomes for family upkeeps and other home needs. Having roughly defined it that way, then lack of salaries for quite a long time almost sets apart today’s families because within salaries, stand little budgets which women use for their everlasting needs.
With South Sudan’s 8- or 9-months’ salary arrears, almost all government- dependent families are in the centre of boiling water, with women creating this and that to make sure their husbands sacrifice for survival or else something happens, in case of any failure. Men who are tolerable are at the safer side whereas those who are not, continue committing GBV cases each time they are asked for upkeeps; this comes as a result of unreachability of the government to talk to.
The nothingness of these salaries is another thing to put into accounts, take for instance, a soldier who gets 1,300 SSP as a salary cannot buy a sack of flour though this salary is given monthly, and so do other government employees. This leaves men with no other choice other than suppressing women and children for time passage. Remember women and children do not have much difference in terms of how they perceive being told what they asked for is unavailable, they think they are mistreated when their needs are not fulfilled.
Dismayingly, more cases are committed in December, the month for Christmas, and I am more than happy to have this particular month coincided with 16 days of activism to end gender-based violence in South Sudan so that every woman and man becomes aware of all forms of GBV. Not every government employee buys Christmas and new year’s clothes for their wives and children, there are those who do not even think of what to put on other than what to put in the mouth while there are those who do not ask for last prices in the markets.
So, frankly speaking there are government employees who receive their salaries or whatever the case may be while in arrears like that. So, I do not exactly know how long are their hands to reach salaries that have not yet come to concerned authorities? Or are there some personalities (VIPs) favoured by allowing them to borrow from residual bank money?
Such questions should be asked, because two colleagues working in the same ministry, or any other government department expected to get salaried at once must not differ in shopping for their family needs. This difference of workmates creates doubts among women and children that salaries do come but this husband of mine must be spending it somewhere, maybe on prostitutes, alcohol, private businesses, if not then, why is so and so who are his colleagues service their families in abundance as usual?
Now, a woman, like a child who thinks that he/she must get what he/she wants by crying, makes noise and series of quarrels every now and then so as to really dig out what could be the problem with this salary. While a woman does this at home, a husband may not understand that she is discovering something, he may think that she has crossed the red line between a husband and wife, and the disagreement automatically emerges.
The emergence of disagreement at home is the emergence of cases of GBV and so emerge other divorce-bringing misunderstandings. So, in the course of fighting GBV in South Sudan, the government should be pressurized to give salaries to soldiers and other government servants who have been persevering, using a dog’s begging style of turning one eye after another to the government to bring salaries on time.
These salaries, when brought all, are expected to refund debts borrowed in the course of waiting for them and allow people to shop preserved food items in expectation of another delay since it is not a surprise for such a thing to happen, but the dismay comes in when one- or two-months’ salaries are given later. When the civil servants ask, they are rudely answered that “choose any month you like”. Salaries should be paid on monthly basis.
The author is a medical student, University of Juba.