By Atok Dan Baguoot
It was earlier this month when the president of the republic Gen Salva Kiir Mayardit together with the minister of Interior Hon Gen Alison Manani Magaya officially inaugurated processes of registration of persons in which citizens are issued varieties of national documents ranging from age assessment certificates, national Identity card to passport. It is ongoing very neatly. What remains questionable is how the workforce assigned is handling this work.
Having scanned through the forms and the nature of information needed from respondents, they are well detailed in a simple and clear language. The design and format are also professional in standard. Now the awkward part that I saw when I glanced through the forms after being filled especially part handwritten is that quite a good number of personnel assigned to fill these forms don’t write legibly and interpreting questions to respondents is also questionable.
Inasmuch as the majority of them come from an Arabic education background, understanding the questions to interpret the application is a bug. When I glanced through several forms already filled, my eyes met with a lot of mistakes. Among these mistakes are the usage of surname, state of origin, ethnicity, place of residence, and many others.
The handwriting on paper is as illegible as that of a child in primary two class.
It is this very misinterpreted information that the experts seated on computers will definitely key into the system as data leading to distorted facts. A cousin of mine sharing the same name with me had his first name written as a surname and each of his dependents had a different surname. Imagine all these dependents are his kids and the wife and each had a delink parentage association judged by their names. I thought my kids can have the same surname as me except for the wife who might have retained her parental names in our South Sudanese Africa way.
In such a case, there is no way a graduate from an English education background can fail to differentiate between surname, place of birth, place of parents’ origin as well as current residence. These people making all these simple mistakes are Arabic graduates because I don’t think whether the migration staff who recruited them had also recruited primary school kids.
In fact, the majority of people who graduated in the North do pretend to be literate in both Arabic and English languages but in reality, they are not. Indeed there are those who had gone to good schools in the north to warrant such qualifications. This number is meager compared to the huge chunk who had only mastered English alphabets neatly.
Mr. Maduot Parek, the gentleman in charge is a person who likes to go for professional work. Nobody has notified his office of all these messes that are taking place. Let our Arabic language learned brothers and sisters first polish their English language before they take up crucial positions which need occupants to be linguistically literate enough so as to minimize errors. Of course, forms were designed in the English language to conform with the constitutional requirement, and there is no way you can be denied that inalienable right to work in this republic but you have to do some dos before you apply in such a public scrutinized position.
Our passports and national ID cards have to spell our names correctly. Time has gone expired for when Arabs use to tell us that African names are difficult to pronounce and write. Besides that, there should be a reduction in those northern practices of standing with a witness before one qualifies for issuance of any of the national documents. Am sick of being asked to present a birth certificate or its equivalent before I can apply for any other documents. First of all did our lawmakers really pass such foreign procedures of doing things? It is absolutely not and where did we find it, it was acquired from the North.
If up to now there is still only one health clinic in my county of over a hundred thousand inhabitants, no single hospital, where do you logically think I was born in or if I had passed the whole of my childhood age without a single sign of immunization or vaccination, do you reasonably really expect my mother to produce a birth certificate for herself and me.
In addition to that, I might be the only person from my family residing in Juba, probably the other person is in Wau or serving in the army in Torit, can the lack of a relative to witness the procession of my documents be a barrier? Yes, there could be a few of us who really need cross-examination to establish their true identities or foreign persons of origins wanted to capitalize on a legal lapse to get registered, such are rare cases and they can be handled by the experts assigned in the process.
Issuance of national documents is the birthright that needs nobody to represent me in any case. Am truly objection to all the rigorous processes that do not have legal bases or even culturally in the context of South Sudan as a nation. We need to do a simple thing in South Sudan and that is to desist from the northern way of doing things unless it is legally anchored in our law. Representing me to acquire my nationality right is not a legal affidavit at all. Laws of every country or land are derived from their customs, cultures, and practices.
Atok Dan is a media expert residing in Juba. He can be reached at atokbaguoot@gmail.com
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