September is gone! It is eleven months now without the salary. Since when the salary delay started, it has never exceeded six months.
It usually used to hang between four and five months. Something must be wrong. Maybe the salary has reached a menopausal age, forcing me to coin a word for it as “salaropause”.
Medical professionals often define menopause as having occurred when a woman has not had any menstrual bleeding for a year. Relating the definition of menopause to the salary delay, while keeping in mind the newly coined word “salaropause”, salaropause can be defined as having occurred when the salary has not been received for at least six months. Menopause is a natural change, but it can be caused by surgery that removes both ovaries and some types of chemotherapy.
When it is natural, menopause typically occurs between 49 and 52 years of age. But what could cause a salaropause? It could be caused by war, corruption, bad governance, and economic crisis. The war to which an end is being put through the peace agreement has drained a lot of money for its implementation. But the truth is that there are some officials who are using the implementation of the peace agreement as a tool for stealing the public money. An evidential example to cite is that which a Cabinet Minister has admitted when he was summoned by the parliament.
Bad governance also plays a key role in the salary delay as the revenues generated are misused. But corruption almost solely accounts, not only for the salary delay, but also for the country’s dwarfism. Suppose the salary delay was planned as a political tactic to weaken the civil servants and soldiers to remain muted in the affairs of the government. In that case, the planners should know that the civil servants and soldiers have developed resistance to salary delay. It is nine months now but the civil servants and soldiers have neither died nor gone on strike. It has become part of them.
When someone responsible for you is too vulnerable to make informed decisions, you just protrude your tongue as a gesture of incapacitation. Tongues are to be protruded to the government of South Sudan as a gesture for its incapacitation to put an end to the chronic salary delay. Which country in the world goes for nine months without salary payment? People thought that the odd history of South Sudan would end with the formation of an accommodative government with five vice presidents. It was not expected that another odd history of a nine-month salary delay would be recorded so far.
The government should look into the issue of the salary delay, even if it means diverting the peace implementation funds to pay the civil servants and soldiers, so be it. It would sound better if the peace implementation funds are diverted to pay the civil servants and soldiers than diverting them for the special programs that benefit the few.
The salaropause is a life-threatening condition that multiplies the number of crimes, GBV cases, rebellions and boosts hunger, asylum-seeking, underdevelopment and brain drain. As urgent as possible, the salary adjourns, now the salaropause, should be attended to by paying the civil servants and soldiers their salary arrears.
Thank you for reading “Sowing The Seed Of Truth”.