Again, this fact is clear. They needed my voice when they sought political impact and factual oratory. They needed it when they were desperately looking for local and international attention. Now that I have spoken my truth regarding the issues facing my country, they desire my silence. This reveals everything you need to know about their true nature and confirms any suspicions you may have had about what this so-called opposition is genuinely based on.
Truth be told, I did not reach my current political standing from a comfortable apartment in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Toronto, Ottawa, Berlin, Oslo, Rome, or London. I have paid dearly for it, and I continue to do so, enduring a painful exile just a short distance from our beloved motherland. As a founding member of the South Sudan United Front/Army (SSUF/A) and later the leader of my splinter faction, the South Sudan United Front-Progressive (SSUF-P), I openly disagreed with figures like Gen. Paul Malong Awan and Pagan Amum Okiech at a time when such dissent came with significant consequences. They do not have a national agenda other than their own political rebranding. I told them without remorse.
For this reason, these individuals and their associates actively sought to prevent my participation in the establishment of the National Consensus Forum. During the peace talks, they worked tirelessly to eliminate me, Laraka Machar Turoal, Peter Gatkuoth, Joseph Madak, and other young leaders without any regard for our contributions. They demanded that we either align ourselves with their factions and serve their interests or be excluded from the peace negotiations altogether. The TUMAINI Initiative finally collapsed, in part, due to their exclusionary arrogance and ambition.
The pattern was always unmistakably the same: they would use the young and then discard them, doing so repeatedly. I was deemed useful when they required a thinker, an effective communicator, a digital warrior, and a principled voice to challenge the government. However, the moment power-sharing became part of the discussion, I was considered an inconvenience. That reflects their mindset.
What they must know is this: my opinion counts. I am part of nation-building even outside government, perhaps more so precisely because I have never been inside it. I have never stolen from this country. I have never held an office, received a government salary, or approved a budget that disappeared into private accounts. My hands are clean in a political environment where integrity is a rare and remarkable quality. This independence is not a liability for me; I believe it is the only currency in South Sudanese politics that cannot be fabricated or bought.
Let me correctly name for you what is happening. Many of those who are currently insulting me do so out of pure hatred or are hired by economic fugitives, those individuals who looted South Sudan’s public wealth, fled before facing accountability, and now live comfortably in foreign capitals while lecturing the rest of us about patriotism. Others, tainted by the blood of innocent citizens, are seeking political rehabilitation through opposition movements that serve as vehicles for their own recycling, with the hope of returning to the same table and feast. They recruit young people for their digital energy and sacrifice, then push those young people aside the moment negotiations begin, showing that they are more interested in their own power and influence than in the well-being of the nation. South Sudan is not their cause. It is their hunting ground.
Likewise, there is a particular arrogance that grows in diaspora. Some people who left the country and acquired citizenship elsewhere now believe that distance has given them clarity. It has not. It has given them safety. Safety to make noise, including defamation without consequences, to diagnose leaders from videos, and to demand regime change from their comfort in neighborhoods where their own children are warm, and their own futures are secured. Nobody is against the diaspora. But holding a foreign passport is not a license to destroy the home you left behind, and calling yourself more patriotic than those who remained in hardship, fighting for liberty, is an insult that should not go unanswered.
As honest citizens, we can all affirm that President Salva Kiir Mayardit, if he has failed, did not fail on his own. The very men whose agents are now diagnosing him from abroad have failed him. They built a culture of impunity, which allowed corruption and violence to flourish without accountability. They looted the resources. They ignited the war and fled its consequences, leaving ordinary citizens to bleed while they rebranded themselves as liberators.
The underdevelopment of South Sudan is their crime as much as anyone’s, and they have never once stood in a courtroom to answer for it. I will not join their chorus. President Salva Kiir Mayardit and Dr. John Garang de Mabior are the backbone of our history, and I will stand with that history, openly and without shame.
Ask me whether I was bought. I will tell you plainly: President Salva Kiir Mayardit bought me with his sweat through a liberation that gave me, my family, and every South Sudanese the country we call home today. He has never paid me a single pound. I owe him nothing except the truth, and the truth is that you, his loudest critics, are not a viable alternative. You serve as a cautionary tale of what South Sudan must never become again.
Till then, yours truly, Mr. Teetotaler!
The writer, Dr. Sunday de John, holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB) from the University of Nairobi, Faculty of Business and Management Sciences and Faculty of Medicine, respectively. He is the current Chairman of the South Sudan United Front-Progressive and can be reached via drsundayalong4@gmail.com
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.