THE FADED DREAM OF OUR GENERATION: DOES SOUTH SUDAN HAVE A PATH TO ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION?.- By Makneth Aciek

Discussions about South Sudan economic crisis have become so common, so pervasive, it like smog in air, and none of us can avoid breathing it. The rate of United States of America dollars against South Sudanese Pound, and prices of commodities in the markets have become part of the “small talk” conducted at the corridors of tea vendors by the wearied youths to break boredom.

The so-called “dollar situation” has contributed to a complex but dark national mood. Every South Sudanese is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed and helpless. Blames are being peddled, irrelevant questions are being asked and unworkable solutions are being suggested; even the task of managing the national currency has been removed from the realm of bankers’ responsibility into the dustbin of “political problems” and recast belatedly from an economic issue into a question of political will. Others have considered it wise to blame everything on young people’s laziness or pride in indolence!

But how can we begin to wrestle with the precarious and insecure material environment we live in if we don’t understand the genesis of the problem we face? Looking critically at the structure of our young nation, there is a contradiction between tribal identities and citizenship. Everything had been tossed by the forces of this contradiction, and the severe economic pain we are experiencing today is deeply rooted in this contradiction.

Our country has been sliced into estate properties of “vernacular nationalities” that see the nation as food chain, and what matters to them is how to get on top; this has left tribes eying each with suspicion. The bonds of solidarity among citizens are stretched to the breaking point in the race for booking a place on top of the food chain.

A lot of things have changed since we got our independence, our collective journey as people who are/were bound together by the common destiny is no longer a voyage to equality; but a chase to leave others behind. Our constituencies have been pulverized into an aggregate of tribal fundamentalists - a group of self-centered people who are competing for ethnic superiorities, with little if any awareness of the commonality of fate. This has atomized our communities and the consequences of that atomization are expressing themselves in form of economic crisis.

The nature of social relationship among citizens determines the fate of their economy; how people interact or relate to each other is an important aspect of an economy. There can never be material prosperity when there is disharmony among citizens; financial institutions don’t function in absence of solidary action among peoples that constitute the body politic. High levels of internal conflicts and contradictions are insecurity to businesses; there is much anxiety and blame game when our currency loses its purchasing power, but our chronic culture of internal conflict over many years prior to and after independence often go unmarked.

We wail in anguish when South Sudanese Pound suddenly collapses against world major currencies, but this is one of the consequences of our past mistakes; because they have just spilled out into our market or “systems of distribution” and became visible to all, people take them as news. Yet the real news was running earlier in small daily occurrences of inter-communal conflicts, perceived tribal slights and growing resentments among the so-called peoples’ representatives. Long years of disharmony among our peoples correlated with today economic predicaments. 

we failed to stay relevant to our initial aspirations of self-determination. It is our collective guilt as a nation and at some point, we only have ourselves to blame, and only ourselves on whom to unload bitterness and wrath. The weird part of our economic hardships is that it denies the commonality of fate; such hardships don’t add up: they divide and separate the sufferers, and this renders calls to solidarity sound ludicrous. We think tribal and blamed others for our woes, but we all share the same fate. This is contradiction!

The nature of South Sudan contradiction is what Antonio Gramsci called “morbid symptoms”, which appear in the interregnum when old is not yet dead and new is not yet born. For many years our people lived in isolation whether in mountain villages or hiding in the swamps along the Nile River. They lived in small groups where they knew themselves, and each other by what they did or produced. In essence, our people were physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world.

The exercise of the right of self-determination introduced us to the rest of the world, and after our independence there appeared to be a transition from small groups that essentially reproduce themselves through agricultural productions to a bigger and sovereign society based around and on consumption. The citizens of the new nation began to know themselves, and each other by what they buy, unfortunately. Others went to the extreme of deluding themselves that happiness and blessedness consist solely in the pride of enjoying what is good to the exclusion of others. This was how we introduced envious and malicious attitudes into our financial institutions.

Bad habits, however developed, have consequences on the future of peoples, even long after the circumstances under which those habits were developed have changed. The practices and cultural attitudes developed among and by the isolated communities (which were really important for survival at that time) have diffused into the key institutions of our nascent Republic, and this has challenged the government to develop the human capital of her own peoples.

Our people are gradually moving from isolationism to the point where they would have better contact with the rest of the world, this comes with fear and anxiety. A society beginning to move from one epoch to another requires the development of flexible and critical spirit; lacking such spirit, we can’t perceive the marked contradiction which seems to be occurring in our country today as emerging values in such of affirmation and fulfillment clash with early values seeking self-preservation.

We can’t adequately address our economic problems until we fully understand the nature of this contradiction! The shock between yesterday which is losing relevance but still seeking to survive and tomorrow which is gaining substance, characterizes the period under which we live as time of announcement and transition.

What needs to be announced is not regime change agenda, but how to use our shared cultural values as vehicles of economic integration, and as method of introducing our people to the global policies of monetary economic. By the way, the solution to our problems is not kept in an envelope somewhere in the presidential palace, it is not hidden in the government safes that can be acquired by overthrowing the political leadership. No! Our problems are result of social collapse in our societies.

There is an explosion of solidarity among all south Sudanese communities, the bonds of relationships have fractured among our people; the conflict is not only among tribes but also between each person and his clan or family. So, the perpetual ambition of advancing regime change agenda is solution so unrelated to our problems. The only coherent thing we can demand from government is to address disharmony in our body politic, and evaluate how the nation has managed the seventeen years of transition.

In case we forgot, South Sudanese fought and acquired sovereignty by being soldiers and crusaders, not by being traders and industrial scientists. However, in the course of our struggle, there were stories which kept our people cohesive, and promised the model of economy for free nation. The vision of our struggle was a story of ordinary people; it depicted young people of our generation as heroes/sheroes of the future who would shoulder the responsibility of nation building.     

The elders of our revolution trained us (their children) to aim higher and reach further than they themselves managed to dare and achieve; they expected us to have wide range of choices, be better educated to the wonders of the world, be richer and more secure, and climb higher in hierarchy of learning and professional excellence. They expected us to preside over the building of nation and be the guardians of our freedom; their point of arrival will be our starting point- and a point with yet more roads stretching ahead, all leading upwards to prosperity.

There is no quick fix to economic woes, and there is nothing automatic about prosperity either; to overcome our difficulties, the parents of struggle should rekindle their parental ambition and equip their young ones to respond to the current realities, develop skills and discipline to cope with contemporary challenges. This is the sure path to reconstruction.

We may be required to revisit the equations and modalities that were developed during our liberation struggle. From life experiences, we had developed set of rules and procedures for meeting our needs, for overcoming our challenges, and for guiding our behaviors. All south Sudanese whether rich or poor have memories of famine, and a time of hunger in their family’s history, but their procedures and ethics for guiding behavior at bad times helped them survived; they knew what can be spoken and what must remain unspeakable to avoid panic among the people.

They knew the land on which they stood, the very land they buried their dead ones is natural resource they could use to generate food through farming. The fertility of the soil on which the riches of our people use to grow is not exhausted, only that we have been consumed by the seductive power of promises (the wealth of mineral resources) made during the liberation struggle. Now, the throngs of the seduced people have turned wholesale, and almost overnight, into a crowd of the frustrated, placing hopes on waves of unfounded optimism.

As much as we seek solutions to our financial crisis, we must admit first of all, time changes and circumstances change. Our current circumstances require us to do some readjustment and evaluate the contradiction between inherited/learned expectations and unanticipated realities of our independence. This too is a path to reconstruction.

We must overcome the delusion that we are privileged with petroleum resources. “Where is our oil money?” This is the most misguided question ever asked; it is not fully our oil and its resources are not yet ours until we learned to refine it, process it and market it by ourselves through our facilities and institutions. We must not forget; human knowledge is an integral part of what is or not a natural resource. The mere presence of mineral resources in our soil is of little or no value if we don’t cultivate cultural perquisites for developing them into wealth.

Without knowledge, skills and basic civic education, clever people will come and con us out of our oil resources. This has happened already! What should have been our wealth is being shifted out of our land to other countries in the name of “operation costs”, leaving our country with meagre percentage which could not build our roads or pay salaries for civil servants after local stakeholders have “done justice” to it.

The core of our economy is not based on market, the economy entirely depends on the percentage which the country gets from crude oil, which is distributed as salaries to those that work for the government. This means there is no business in our country, what looks like business is basically a system of distribution; and this has been one of the sources of conflict in our country. Most of the people who had taken up arms against the government were pushed and are still being pushed by desire to be in control and to direct the flows of dollars coming from the sale oil resources; and to them, politics is nothing else, but a competition to get an opportunity to divert these flows.

We shall be on our path to economic recovery if we put less emphasis on oil resources, and focus more on agriculture. With only oil resources, we can’t build stable economy and workable financial institutions through which we can navigate our lives with pretty well ease and certainty. Oil businesses and systems all over the world have corruption as their foundation; and looking at the predicaments of our country, such systems are not particularly fit for a foundation on which long-term economic policies could be built, they will only lengthen the lines of jobless and redundant youths at the tea vendors

The message of hope in regard to economic recovery is agriculture; it is an old story of our people’s struggle and a dream of our generation, let’s do everything to allow its words turning flesh and save ourselves from perpetual humiliation of material inadequacy.

Makneth Aciek can be reached via [email protected]