By Luk Kuth Dak
September 13, 2013 (SSNA) — If there’s one word to describe the newly-imposed speaker of the South Sudan’s Parliament Manasseh Magok Rundial is crook.
I have known him for many years dating back to when he was an establishment officer in then ministry of public service under the stand- up guy Stephen Abraham Yar (Rock).
Besides, I was his press secretary during his briefed tenure as governor of then Upper Nile Region (UNR).
Over these years, I watched him turn his office as governor of (UNR) into a corruption machine… and he was basking about it. He never shied away from being publicly seen in the company of crooks and sugar- smugglers, who showered him with bribes that he was able to purchase a giant real estate in one of Khartoum’s most luxurious suburban, Arkawit. All within the first couple of months since he took over the helm of the governorship in UNR.
There’s something else I had learned about the speaker. He did not know right from wrong. Honorable from dishonorable. He believed that what belonged to the public was simply his.
How sad!
And while I cannot claim to know everything that’s going on in my country, there’s an irrefutable evidence that the President of the Republic of South Sudan, H.E. Salva Kiir Mayardit has lost his resolve. As a head of the government, he’s directly responsible for what might transpire as a result of his spontaneous decisions to ouster the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement’s ( SPLM) loyalists only to replace them with the " Jallaba golden boys" whose primary job during the course of the civil war was sleuthing on our people, such as Manasseh Magok Rundial, Riek Gai Kok and Abdullah Nhial Deng, to mention a few.
Therefore, the imposition of Magok Rundial into the speakership of the parliament did not come as a big surprise, now that President Kiir’s clutching arms with the murderers in Khartoum.
As if the party (SPLM) is a family business, President Kiir- literally- ordered every member of the party to move on, if they do not like his policies. "Go ahead and form your own parties, he was quoted as saying."
Yet for those of us who care deeply about this presidency, we worry so much about the legacy that he will leave behind when all’s been said and done.
As former US President, Abraham Lincoln once said: " A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The author’s former press secretary to then governor Manasseh Magok Rundial. He can be reached at [email protected].