By the time I became fit to join the liberation struggle, it was already 2005. I was initiated into adulthood a year before and while preparing for the bush, the CPA was signed.
It was biologically impossible for me to join the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) before reaching adulthood.
When I see soldiers enjoying their privileges, and I don’t think they have privileges, it does not dismay me because it was not my mistake to be still too young for the Civil War. On the other hand, I would be deemed a madman if I blamed my parents for not giving birth to me early before the liberation struggle so as to join the Anya Nya Movement.
If my father had joined the army during the liberation struggle, he could have been an army General by now. But I have no gut to blame him for not joining the Anya Nya Movement or SPLA. Who knows he might have been killed by Arabs and I would remain unborn. But in one way or another, my father participated in the liberation struggle by providing food, shelter, and moral support to the soldiers.
I myself had contributed to the liberation struggle by carrying a box containing 248 bullets in 2002. On top, my father contributed his elder son to the SPLA in 1999. Had my father or I, or both, joined the SPLA, there are a few privileges we would be enjoying now, just like the liberators and their children are enjoying. But what I know is that there are people who liberate a country and after the liberation, the country is not specifically for them alone. It is always for all.
In every residential area in Juba, there is always a large piece of land reserved for army Generals. Such a piece of land is always well-located and topographically nice. The government constructs concrete buildings on this land and distributes them to some army Generals. Maybe such army Generals sustained more than 5 injuries during the civil war or whatever the case, I do not know. It looks like they are being compensated for the injuries they had sustained, but the truth is that all South Sudanese need compensation.
When you look at the residential area opposite Military Intelligence School along Newsite-Bilpam road, you would find that some people are more South Sudanese than others in South Sudan. Starting from the Petrol Station opposite SSPDF Engineering Division, on the right side up to about 10 kilometres away from Eagle House, Bilpam Headquarters, the fences are of the same design as well as the houses. One could just conclude that such houses belong to elites, not just elites, but those who are so close to the big man. Of course, those elites who beat their chests that they are the ones who own South Sudan.
If you have at least 3 plots of land in every residential area, but some people, including unassigned army Generals, have not even half a plot of land, how do you feel as a liberator? If you really have a sense of nationalism in you, you should feel ashamed. You grab poor people’s plots of land. You remove poor people’s children who passed scholarship interviews and replace them with your children.
You cause war and recruit children of the poor to fight the war, and you send your children abroad. You eat oil and non-oil revenues and pay no salary to the civil servants and soldiers. You tease the economy to go wild by not regulating the dollar rate and you still sit in public offices that you are leaders, you are not leaders. You are anything that occupies space and has weight. All the citizens are equal. No citizen should be more South Sudanese than the other.
Thanks for reading “Sowing The Seed Of Truth”.