This fact is clear: our country is now devouring one of its own daughters, and this act must stop immediately.
I have observed from the stand, in a sustained fashion, that Hon. Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit, Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programs, has been cast by a chorus of young critics as an intruder, imagined as a name that appeared from nowhere to steal a chair that was never meant to be hers.
To me, this narrative is unfair, dishonest, and dangerous. We must acknowledge that she is a citizen of the Republic of South Sudan by birth. She carries the same rights as every child this country has produced, and no one, including a mob on social media or a self-appointed tribunal of the aggrieved, has the authority to strip her of those inherent rights.
Let us consider this short biography, one her accusers refuse to read and understand. In the early 1980s, while her father was swallowed by the bush and the war, where he was a master of the canopy, she made the same journey thousands of South Sudanese children made to Ethiopia. She did not travel by car or plane but on foot, or at times, carried on the shoulders of exhausted elders, across the same punishing distance that claimed so many of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan before her.
She grew up in the same manner in which thousands of South Sudanese children grew up: largely under harsh circumstances in refugee or displaced camps, hungry for certainty, and raised by a mother, like most of our mothers, who did not know from one season to the next whether her husband would come home alive.
She later moved on to Australia, following the same path walked by many of the Red Army generation this country now praises without hesitation. If we strip away her father’s name, this story would fit perfectly; it becomes the story South Sudan celebrates, and if we attach her father’s name to it, suddenly it becomes a scandal. A contradiction of this kind is not her failure. It is our failure.
Of late, her critics have graduated to calling her “ambitious” as though it were an indictment. AMBITION is not a crime at all. South Sudanese generations, over time, dating back to the Torit mutiny, have claimed ambition as the only inheritance not attached to shame.
It was ambition that built academics out of Dr. John Garang de Mabior, Dr. Telar Dhol Jok, Dr. Lual Achuek Deng, and Dr. Majak D’Agoot, among many others. It was ambition that forged generals out of Salva Kiir Mayardit, James Wani Igga, Paul Malong Awan, James Hoth Mai, Akol Koor Kuc, Malek Reuben Riak, JJ Okot, Jok Riak Makol, and Mangar Buong Aluenge alongside plenty of their colleagues, and it was ambition that turned an oppressed people of South Sudan into a sovereign state.
South Sudanese of all walks of life have never put ambition on trial; however, it is now apparent that it can only be on trial when a woman named Adut Salva carries it.
Of late, a more corrosive idea is spreading beneath the noise. This belief is held by a segment of functionally illiterate individuals, as well as some gifted intellectuals, who refuse to embrace discernment; they think that the children of leaders are inherently guilty, condemned by their lineage to bear the consequences of governments they did not govern. I urge all the intellectuals and the sensible citizens to vehemently reject this thinking outright because a daughter or a son is not a proxy for her father’s or mother’s record.
If we now consider bloodline to be a charge sheet, then every child of every veteran, soldier, minister, and chief in our country would stand convicted before they could even speak a word. To me, that would not be regarded as accountability. Perhaps it is a new and uglier tribalism, one I assumed to have been built not necessarily on ethnicity but on proximity to power.
I also understand that the criticism of the office Adut Salva holds is misguided; therefore, let us examine it with the honesty it deserves. The Office of the Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programs is not sacred or new. Hon. Nhial Deng held it between 2016 and 2018 and served in a similar capacity during the Addis Ababa talks after the 2013 conflict eruption. Dr. Barnaba Marial Benjamin held it in 2019. Benjamin Bol Mel held it from December 2022 to early 2025. None of these men were accused of theft or having become drunk with absolute power. So why is Adut’s appointment treated as trespass?
We must honestly accept that an envoy is not a minister with executive power. An envoy is a messenger. The only honest question left to ask is this: which message, within her mandate, has she failed to deliver? None has been named, because none exists.
For these reasons, I must assert that South Sudan must not continue eating its children on the strength of rumor and resentment. We ought to understand in a timely manner that accountability has a proper season, and that season is not now. Let her come to power, as she should, if she is ever elevated to an executive position, such as a ministry, a cluster, or a seat with a budget and a decree behind it, and then fail to deliver.
That is precisely the standard this country applied to her predecessor in this very office, Benjamin Bol Mel, who was later made vice president for the economic cluster and was removed from that post within the year amid unanswered questions about his performance.
Nobody demanded his head while he was merely an envoy. The scrutiny began when he assumed power. Adut deserves nothing less, and nothing more than that same order of things.
She is owed the same chance to serve, to rise, and yes, to fail if that is what her accusers want to see. She is not a stranger in her own country. She is our daughter. It is time for this country to acknowledge this fact clearly and without hesitation. We can only hold people accountable if we put them in charge of something.
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.
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