Working in the Office Isn’t the Only Way to Make it Big in Life

By Apioth Mayom Apioth, USA

Sabina Dario Lokolong, deputy minister for humanitarian affairs and disaster management, Nov 2011

September 1, 2015 (SSB) —- In our contemporary South Sudanese society, office work is always associated with progress. As a result, people tend to look down on jobs that require manual labor, and many more professions that are seen, having nothing to do with sitting behind an office desk, such as doing entrepreneurial enterprise. In Juba, for instant, an Ethiopian water tanker’s owner, whose business charges 15 SS Pounds per home, could walk away with 3,000 SS Pounds by the end of the day after having visited 200 homes.

Meanwhile, a South Sudanese accountant, who obviously sits behind a desk from Monday through Friday, filing business transactions, makes about 900 SS Pounds a month. Furthermore, a whole lot of Bangladeshis are doing road construction, obviously brought over by the NGOs; whereas some of our very own people are going hungry, refusing to make something happen for themselves.

There had been no country in the history of our planet earth, where everyone did office work, and they had actually achieved economic prosperity. In the very office, where we supposedly to do work, running water and the light need to be turn on; and sources of these power outages are operated by a variety of workers ranging from technicians to engineers to environmental scientists: they are also mandated to travel from place to place, surveying their assigned areas, looking for obstacles that may get in the way of their work.

Ripples of a civil war – Young South Sudanese are migrating en masse (3)

By Joseph Lino Wuor Abyei, Cairo – Egypt

The current state of RSS

September 1, 2015 (SSB) —- Joe, this young Egyptian physiotherapist, told this writer “there are a good number of young men from South Sudan squeezed in a room in Aduqqi, they want to migrate to Australia. You people, what is wrong in your country. Does it mean that if you are given another chance you would vote for unity?” Joe seemed unhappy, and Joe the writer of this article seemed embarrassed.

On the plane to Cairo there were more than a hundred young men and young women coming to Egypt. Some of them were students studying at various Egyptian universities and some others were seeking for a way to migrate as just revealed by Joe. Put in mind that there are four Egypt Air flights a week.

What has happened in “al dawla al waleeda, why are young men migrating? Joe, the Egyptian, revealed to this writer that South Sudanese youth are quietly deserting the country in large numbers. This writer is truly concerned about the turnabout of the situation in “al dawla al waleeda.”

Reading the Report of the African Union Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan (AUCISS)

solomondersso

Introduction

Finally, 10 months after AUCISS completed its investigations and seven months after it initially tabled one of its reports, the time has arrived to make the AUCISS report public. At a summit level meeting held in New York on 26 September 2015, on the sidelines of the 70^th meeting of the UN General Assembly, the Peace and Security Council (PSC) answered the call from civil society organizations and AU partners for the release of the AUCISS report.

There are actually two reports. The ‘main’ report, which was prepared under the leadership of the Chairperson of the AUCISS, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, is 304-pages long (excluding annexes). Professor Mahmood Mamdani, one of the members of the AUCISS, singlehandedly authored the other report, also described as the dissenting report. The AU Commission submitted to the PSC and the PSC considered and decided to release ‘for public information purposes only’…

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South Sudan accession to EAC: The safer paths out of our wartime economy–Part 2

By Mayen D.M.A Ayarbior, Juba, South Sudan

President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya; Prime Minister HailMariam of Ethiopia; President Kiir of South Sudan President of Somalia/Djibouti, and President Museveni of Uganda

September 1, 2015 (SSB)  —  In the previous article we have argued that the IMF, World Bank, and Troika’s “order” to South Sudan for the country to devalue its already valueless pound could be the final stroke that will destroy our economy.  Once currency devaluation is undertaken in compliance, then the chain that is dragging inflation from running away shall inevitably be broken and the country will leave Zimbabwe way behind it in terms of inflationary gaps. That seems to be the final recipe (grand conspiracy?) for luring the starving and angry populace of S. Sudan to the streets shouting “Kiir must go!” and state collapse becomes a reality as chaos (greater chaos) reigns, other forces intervene, and militias become independent actors preying on the vulnerable.

History, in its political economy recounting, teaches us that rarely have developing countries closed their gaping budget deficit by applying currency devaluation, especially when they were entangled in war time crises. In our circumstance, it is practically the state selling its dollars in the black market to get more pounds as a means of paying for its internal responsibilities. Given the fact that this is the case, printing more pounds (America calls it quantitative easing) could be the only temporary, logical, and safer solution until an essentially structural one is soon found.