I am an individual, an indivisible duality. I am a part permanent, and a part person with a myriad of invariable characteristics, ever changeable and mutable.
So who am I?
I am, first and foremost, a human being, a spirit dwelling within a physical frame. That is part of a personal philosophy of being.
As South Sudanese, what do our philosophies and cosmologies say we are?
What is life and what is death? What is the value of life? What is the purpose of life? What is our philosophical framework of identification? What are our values of relating to one another, within and without a familiar context? What is the place of material things within our cosmology? What is success? What is wealth and what is dearth? What is prideful and what is shameful? What is justice? What is individual interest and what is community interest? What is culture? What is South Sudanese, and what is not?
As a people ruptured by war, our social fabric is disintegrated, shattered. The rhyme and rhythm guiding our actions and infusing meaning into our existence, its objectives and accomplishments, is in discord.
As a people, we are at a crossroads.
Our consciousness, conditioned by aggression and defense, by violence, is a natural consequence of decades of war. Violence’s objective is destruction, but ours should be an objective of construction. Consequently, we must acquire a fitting consciousness and a different culture.
The culture of violence is a culture of death, destruction, and impoverishment, and therefore opposed to the culture of peace.
Moreover, we have a difference of cultures in urban and rural areas. Emerging classes with differing cultures, interests, objectives, and means of accumulating wealth or ensuring survival exist.
The lowest common denominator, the basis for policy decisions, should be the majority: the rural people. Their interests and objectives should be paramount, and their existing cultures and means should be essential to any developmental dispensation, trajectory, and strategy.
The immediate focus of governance should simultaneously be institutional development based on ethics and objectives emerging from our context and its dictates; the direct provision of essential social services to our population, especially in the rural areas; and the extension of a professional rule-of-law apparatus to the peripheries of the Nation-State.
We must consolidate sovereignty internally first, while securing our borders and building the capacity to repel and defeat any outside aggression.
Equally, we must chew on the idea of democracy as predetermined by the West, while juxtaposing it with the egalitarian models of traditional governance of pastoralist and agro-pastoralist societies.
We must pick gold nuggets from the wealth of experience in governance of the Kingdoms of the Chollo, Anuak, and Azande, and our neighbors, the Fung.
Then, and only then, will we understand our current philosophies of political organization and dispensation, which have organically developed atop our value systems and cultures. Consequently, we will appreciate our tendencies vis-à-vis the emerging State and its machinery.
After which, we can attempt to develop a coherent philosophy of political organization and dispensation befitting our context.
In doing so, we must consider:
What are our basic standards?
What are human rights within our context?
What is a clan organization?
What is the role of youth and age sets?
What are gender roles?
What is the division of labor? Is it hierarchical or cooperative?
What is authority?
Is consultation with a council of elders necessary?
What is constitutionalism?
What is the government?
What is the relationship of the average rural person with the government?
What type of governance is needed?
The Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) affords us an opportunity for charting a new social contract between the people and their governance system.
I would hope that the above-enumerated questions would be sufficiently considered in the permanent constitutional-making process.
© Apuk Ayuel Mayen 2018. All rights reserved.
Apuk Ayuel Mayen 