Opinion: Open letter to FVP Dr. Riek Machar Teny

June 16, 2020 Opinions

By Noah Issa Philip

Dr. Riek Machar Teny, First Vice President and the Chairman of the SPLM/A-IO during an IGAD summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Photo Credit: Nyamilepedia.)

June 16, 2020 (SSNN) – Your Excellency, with due regard and rectitude to you and your colleagues, I hope this letter will find you although you and your wife and other colleagues are battling with COVID-19 pandemic, it’s my hope and prayers to see you and other colleagues of yours to be healthy again as the world continue battling with COVID-19. And it is my wish that those who their results came COVID-19 positive shall all recover and those who finished their race to COVID-19 shall continue to Rest in Eternal Peace.

As a South Sudanese citizen, I am speaking my scholarly opinion and the minds of those who might not have access to social media, state TV, radios to see and hear what is going on in the beloved country whom we fought for, for the last 21 years, and still fighting, after we got our independence from Sudan on 7th July 2011. We did not fight for the reason of messing the country after but we fought for the independence of our beloved country and to be free from marginalization and oppression.

Your Excellency, we comprehend that any ministerial placements in the Republic of South Sudan are political posts and needs someone who has been in the politics for long and has gigantic understandings of what party intended to facilitate to its citizen not just someone who recently joined the politics as you did for us in the ministry of health. And other ministers whom I am still waiting to hear their public press address and judge after knowing their reliability to their various positions.

Your Excellency, it is not too late to figure out the inaccuracies of your subordinates and correct them before it gets to uncontrollable mistakes. To be brief, the reason of writing this letter to your esteem office is that my [South Sudan] health minister usually addresses the president and public with huge Parapraxis and does not represent the speech of a higher profile person. As a learned and experienced politician, your subordinates must have eloquence in public addresses although they have different educational backgrounds but must consider the grammatical rules.

I could remember after your [FVP] return into office in 2016, my [our] capable president H.E Salva Kiir Mayardit expelled the then minister of water, Dam and irrigation H.E Mabior Garang from attending the ministerial meetings because of a simple error of putting on a France bow tie and he was ousted out of the meeting and nothing happened. Do the same to your ministers, if briefing you and the public become problematic, and then let the spokesman Dr. Thuou Loi of the ministry of Health take over the responsibility of briefing the public about the ministry of health’s accomplishment.

Your Excellency, the minister of health does not only know how to address the public due to her poor English language but she also doesn’t know how to run the ministry effectively. Mismanagement of COVID-19 funds in the ministry of health all comes due to lack of management skills she has, and to address these challenges from happening day and night in the ministry, call her at your house/ office and coach her on modalities of how to run the ministry of health effectively. The blame goes to you because you gave us wrong person in right position and this could only be corrected by you.

Your Excellence, I have seen/read a lot of funny comedies/clips and comments about Hon. Minister of health, and instead I resort to write this piece of paper to let you know the criticisms of the public and that of individuals, and hopefully you will increase your efforts to make sure that the ministry of Health is running smoothly and effectively to the expectations of the public.

I look forward to seeing you hear my humble call!

The author is a concerned citizen of South Sudan and can be reached via: Noahissaphillip@icloud.com

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