John Garang: “Our tribes and regions will not unite us; only South Sudanism will unite us”

Our Tribes, religions and regions will never unite us; only South Sudanism will unite us as Dr. John Garang would have said

By Ngoi Thuech, Dodoma, Tanzania

John Garang’s prophecy

Monday, November 26, 2018 (PW) —- We are all caught up in the most stupendous midst of peace. It is not that we are only tired of war, in essence, no one gets to enjoy the good things a life can offer in a time of war. Martin Luther King, Jr once said that “those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” Our people are still sensitive to the psychological traumas of the recent war and we ought to perpetually avoid weaponizing words as tools for further ethnic divisions and hatred.

Instead of being too sensitive to fight each other over ethnicity, we should rather be quick to defend each other when such ethnic hatred ensues. Peace is hard to maintain, but people can easily be provoked to fight themselves and in a matter of a few months, they could easily destroy relationships that took decades to create, not to mention the billions of dollars that were spent on building the infrastructure.

So, instead of returning a fire for fire, peace would only elude us and we could end up with one war after another. We are better off finding shared commonalities that will act as binding knots to keep us together in times of uncertainties instead of focusing on the different aspects that we don’t know about each other yet. Our liberation hero Dr. John Garang de Mabior used to say that our tribes, religions, and regions would never unite us; it is only Sudanism (now South Sudanism) that will unite us.

South Sudanese are being Ridiculed on World Stage: the Case of Nyalong Ngong

By Deng Agok Ageer, Australia

Monday, 26 November 2018 (PW) —- Few months ago, we saw this unprecedented wedding that was held in Nakuru-Kenya. At the time, I didn’t put a lot of thoughts into it until, the other day when I came across it again, couple with this stories trending about Nyalong wedding, which is also called auction on CNN. Underneath all our social interactions, I have realised, that, we have become accessories of our bad publicity. I know we have enigma of sorts which has become slowly bad PR.

A lot is going wrong to put it that way and So, I though it’s imperative now to shed some lights on certain issues. I will base my thoughts mostly on the context of Nakuru’s wedding that, I just alluded above. What am I talking about? Well, some of us who saw the video, or the picture below, will remember exactly how un-comforting that video was and still is.

I am afraid, that, videos is still circulating around the world. If you saw that, video at that time, then, imagine the how embarrassing it was for the individual, the organisers involved and most importantly for the country the videos came from! With that said, how do you think the world would react to it? In your own imagination, what do you think is being said generally about us?

Virginity is to village as HIV/AIDS is to urban areas: Does the assumption still hold?

By Ayuen J. Awan, Juba, South Sudan

Thank to PrEP and PEP, you can protect yourself and love ones from HIV/AIDS

Monday, November 26, 2018 (PW) — I was in one of clinics in Juba couple of months ago for routine HIV test, something I do after every end of three months to establish my status on this incurable epidemic posing threat to human lives in the world today. It is advisable by medics to test after every three months because new HIV infections become detectable by lab tests after that period. In 2017, there were 36.9 million people living with HIV in the world, of which 180,000 were from South Sudan.

Although there is no data clearly comparing prevalence of HIV in villages and towns, it can be basically assumed that the disease is evenly distributed among populations. Regional data show greater disparity depending on geographical location and the nature of neighborhood. South Sudan population movement is very dynamic – producing a uniform mix of urban and rural people – living side-by-side, socializing, sexualizing and trading together throughout the year, in towns and villages.

Even without such data, it is still extensively held in South Sudan that town people are more exposed to HIV than the rural inhabitants who live in villages and informal settlements like cattle camps and fishing grounds. This is a notion more ingrained particularly in villagers which the urbanites also uphold leading to the rise in the demand for village girls over their civilized and educated counterparts in urban areas. Villagers strongly believe that AIDS is endemic to Urban settings just like urbanites believe that virgin girls are in the village.