I was there when you visited Juba and I attended the event at the hotel. There is one generation in South Sudan without education, from 1983 to 2005, and prior to that, from 1955 to 1973. When I say education, I mean that people know how to read and write properly.
The education system is broken.
First, there are conflicting issues. For education in South Sudan, English was the medium of communication in my time. In 1983, with the Islamization and the implementation of the Islamic law in Sudan, the curriculum was changed from English to Arabic. Arabic became the medium of communication. The whole syllabus changed from English to Arabic. Islam became the religion of the state. In 1990 it became even worse. It became the Islamic brotherhood, even worse. Now we have a full generation without education.
Those who are inside Sudan have a little bit of education, but in Arabic. Those who are in the bush have zero. We have ministers...for example, the chief of defence of South Sudan could not read or write, neither Arabic nor English. This is the chief of staff of the military, let alone the soldiers you are talking about.
Second, there is the salary issue. The salary of a soldier is 300 South Sudanese pounds. This is less than.... You divide that by 7.1, so it's less than $50. They cannot do anything. As a result of that, the soldiers use their guns at night to terrorize people to get more money, and this has become part of the corruption. Especially if you are a police traffic officer, it's even better. Then you can just give a ticket to any driver, and if the driver is a foreigner, that's even better because he cannot speak Arabic.
Now, after the independence of South Sudan, Arabic was removed from the constitution, so the medium of communication, the lingua franca, is English, yet 85% of the SPLA-SPLM, who came from the bush, cannot read or write English. Those who lived in Khartoum only speak Arabic, so you see all this confusion.
Now, what do we do? I think we should invest in education, because if we invest in education, then we have a better future. It will take a long time and the politicians will want to see a quicker result, but in development it is better to invest in the education of these children, because these homeless children, these soldiers that you are talking about, they will be the future for South Sudan, if we invest in them.