From one meal per day to zero meal per day! From you will get your salaries next month to salaries suspension! From hopefulness to hopelessness! Having seen that South Sudanese are vulnerable beyond vulnerability, hunger has sharpened its teeth and started scavenging the starving people of South Sudan. As hunger beats South Sudanese where they go for a living, it equally beats them at homes.
When they go to offices, even what they call operational funds are nowhere to be found. The offices are as dry as summer grass. It was these operational funds that propelled the children of the civil servants to this very moment. Though a bigger portion used to be cut by Bosses, the subordinate civil servants used to lap up what could fall down from the Bosses’ mouths, hence allowing them buy sandwiches for their children. Such a thing is hard at the moment and so, people are starving to death.
If the civil servants and soldiers remain at homes, the people they are responsible for may become too hopeless to succumb to the consequences of hunger before their actual times for succumbing to the effects of hunger. They have to go out to instill hope in their children that they are struggling to put food on their tables, though they know getting food is easier hoped than achieved.
What dismays much is that the hunger is selective in beating people. It only beats the soldiers and civil servants whose hands are too short to reach money in the Central Bank. When people hope for something better tomorrow, they hibernate quite well. Hope keeps people satisfied.
South Sudanese, especially those working in the government, have been hoping to get their salaries as time goes by. But the recent order of suspending the salaries has caused South Sudanese to lose hope. It means that all the money of the 8 months is going to get lost in-between the fiscal budgets. As people begin the new fiscal budget, the chronic salary delay is expected to come in.
The situation is ill-boding, therefore requiring an urgent response, but who is there to respond to it? Those who are there are what they call aggravating factors. Instead of controlling hunger, they aggravate it because they benefit from hunger. When people tasked with humanitarian assistance and disaster management call for a press release, it is not that they are serious about the situation.
But it is that what they have squandered is getting finished and that, they call for a press release to attract donors, be they national or international donors. Once donors pour in donations in different forms, they get diverted by the very people expected to deliver them. One evidence is that, when a donor shows up, officials strongly demand monetary donations. This is because monetary donations are easy to run away with, compared to material donations which give them hard time to mould into something easily stealable.
The worst thing is that, donors do not care whether what they have donated reaches the target people or gets lost on the way. To me, they are thieves too. They should monitor the donations and inspect them whether they have reached the target people or not. If they have been diverted, they should report it and refuse to donate next time. This way, the individualization of donations can be controlled. Hunger has intensified as UN agencies reports say a quarter of South Sudan’s population is facing shortage of food. This situation needs food assistance.
Thank you for reading “Sowing The Seed Of Truth”.