Opinion | Hon. Puot Kang Chol’s expensive wedding

By Maj. Gen. Dickson Gatluak Joak Nyuot

OPINION – Cde. Puot Kang Chol, first and foremost, accept my congratulations and please thank you for becoming a man in your own way. As colleague and friend in the struggle to establish a vibrant nation, today I want to let you that I have had much respect and regards for you while thinking because of your age, you will be a bit unique and different from our older generations in terms of choices, behaviors and actions as you work to correct constraint messed and contemplates to serve your country with empathetic love and unraveling leadership as the future seems bright with huge demands for corruption free leadership.

Comrade, the whole country is in deep crisis and everyone is hungry food and means to find daily survival notwithstanding the natural disasters which has befallen our beloved region in the past couple of months now.  By you making such an expensive marriage, it appears like your celebrating the suffering of your own citizens in broad day light, or your trying to tell the general public that being a minister of Petroleum is where corruption happens and as young as you are, your the riches man among the older men in whose VISION SOUTH SUDAN suffers economic collapse and serious skyrocketing commodity prices and land grabbing. Could it be because you’re the Minister of the most important Ministry in the whole land??

Let me be a bit harsh with you here; how much did you spend in that show off marriage of yours?  200,000 USD or more?? And where did you get such money from? Hon. minister Pout if you are honest enough, please tell the public how much you earn as a minister and your current worth as a minister. Analyzing your actions together with those your fellow minister in the current government, speaks to the magnitude of the current corruption within your Ministry and that of the entire nation.

Asking you hypothetically, what do you think such an amount of money would have done to the lives and livelihoods of those affected citizens supposing you donated it to support them rather than spending it in that single day marriage or how many soldiers would you have paid assuming you decided to cancel such an expensive marriage and pay monthly salaries of school teachers in Upper Nile who have been without salaries for the last 8 months now? Or better yet, with that same money you spent, wouldn’t you have maintained Malakal Teaching Hospital such that it is restored to its condition or better before the war???

It is sad to say, but there are currently ongoing wars or conflicts in around three dozen counties of Greater Upper Nile, most of them in the Unity region, Fangak and Lou Nuer Land with 300 to 500 deaths in the current or past months.

Cde Puot, there was no need for you to brag off like that while we know the very source of the money you are showing us. You have not brought them from your own family’s fortune; did you?

If I were you, I would have kept that lavish marriage of mine behind closed doors just to avoid wrong messages it may sent in a country like ours stricken by war and poverty.

The author is a member of South Sudan United Front and a concerned citizen.

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