My community, like many other communities across South Sudan, is plagued by civil war, inter-communal feuds, and, worst of all, climate change. This community has been badly hit by climate-induced floods, which are wrenching livelihoods away and leaving them far less to adapt. And like a drowning man clinging to a straw, they remain faithful to their traditional ways of survival: rearing cattle, fishing, and growing maize and sorghum through their long-practised monoculture farming methods.
There was a time when the Gawaar community had abundant natural resources like fertile inland areas that supported crops, livestock, and terrestrial wildlife. A number of islands scattered across the Sudd wetlands, surrounded by waters rich in freshwater wildlife. These wetlands offered productive fishing grounds. Fishing till now has been a long-standing source of livelihood for this community, as it has been across much of South Sudan, where the Nile and its tributaries, the Sudd wetland, swamps and seasonal streams cut through community habitats.
Sadly, South Sudan has been brought low by many maladies and tragedies, including conflict, climate change, and disease outbreaks. The people who face it all are South Sudanese communities relying on threadbare support to withstand climate disasters, while the situation is only getting worse. The response system is frail; worst of all are the people entrusted with running it.
Earlier this year, the Senior Presidential Advisor, Hon. Kuol Manyang, made a deeply outrageous remark that not only seemed to excuse the government’s failure in climate response and peacebuilding but also exposed a disturbing lack of care for the civilian population. Hon. Kuol described South Sudanese as lazy people who should no longer discriminate against certain foods such as frogs, lizards, and dogs. His statement created a nationwide uproar, but the one good thing it did was it united the suffering poor of South Sudan and those who stand with them.
Hon. Manyang was part of the liberation war, and it is too soon to forget that the civilian population supported the liberation struggle by feeding soldiers through the sweat of their brow from Anyanya 1, to Anyaya 2, to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). Before his statement, SPLM Secretary General Dr. Akol Paul Kordit cynically bragged about how resilient the South Sudanese are, saying that no matter how broken the national health system is, the South Sudanese could survive on herbs and traditional medicine.
Since flooding began persistently sweeping through South Sudan in 2015, a large part of my community retreated into the wetlands. The floodwater initially submerged areas serving as dry-season refuge for this pastoralist community, but it did not stop there. It moved further, swallowing permanent villages, fertile clay soils, ancestral sites, traditional landmarks, and the dense forests that once defined Gawaar land.
Much of the remaining dry land could have gone underwater, as it did in Unity State, were it not for the Jonglei Canal. This controversial and monumental canal was first imagined during the Anglo-Egyptian period, later studied by Egypt, and finally constructed by the Sudanese government from 1978 with Egyptian support. Its work was halted in 1984 after the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) attacked the construction site during the civil war. The canal was designed to pull water away from the Sudd wetlands for the benefit of downstream countries, yet nearly half a century later, its raised banks would stand between my community and the floodwater. A project once feared for threatening our environment became, in a cruel turn of history, the thing that kept parts of our land from disappearing under water.
At the peak of the flooding in 2020, different displaced communities across Jonglei State moved and resettled along the canal banks. To the east, the water stopped; to the west, dry land began. Communities settled with what remained of their livelihoods on both sides of the canal. But for my community, the land is sandy and unsuitable for crop farming, making it more suitable for cattle keeping. As a result, crop farming, the primary source of livelihood, hardly brings food on the table. Even cattle keeping to complement it is under threat, owing to the emergence of new livestock diseases afflicting their animals.
Where my uncle lives today, cattle keeping has become one of the most deadly forms of livelihood. Unlike our abandoned dense forest villages, my community lives in a sparse woody savanna, which allows easy movement for cattle-raiding criminals from neighboring communities. These bandits not only target cattle; they kidnap children and kill anyone who stands between them and their targets, especially the young men looking after their cows in the bush. In the worst cases, they attack cattle camps and kill civilians. The young men burdened with protecting their community and their cattle usually meet these bandits with resistance. Often, lives are lost on both sides.
For several years, heavy rains have been destroying crops during the rainy season. Insecurity has forced farmers to cultivate very little from the land, pushing people to depend on humanitarian aid. This was a community that once sustained itself from its natural resources, but because of climate change, compounded by insecurity, it can no longer feed itself.
Juk’s words exploited the level of vulnerability borne by the civilian population. They shocked the nation for a very good reason: food is not just food. What to eat and what not to eat is embedded in our culture. The Nuer, and by extension many South Sudanese communities, do not eat frogs or lizards. They do not eat dogs either. With the many famines that have befallen our land (many linked to climate change and crop failure), people sometimes resort to eating tree leaves and taking herbs for sickness. But their situation speaks more of a government failure to ensure a country’s stability than being lazy or resilient.
Later this year, Kuol Manyang Juuk travelled to Bor, Jonglei State’s capital. He brought an entourage of heavily armed soldiers to visit his farm ahead of the rainy season. He did not go there to demonstrate how frogs and lizards are to be farmed, or how to fatten dogs for meat. No. He went to inspect the preparation of his farm for the cultivation of maize and vegetables.
In Greater Pibor, formerly a county within Jonglei State, the Chief Administrator Gola Boyoi Gola recently joined his community at a demonstration farm, holding a hoe and clearing the land excitingly as a way of urging people to cultivate their own food rather than depending on humanitarian aid. Yet, like Kuol Manyang, Gola was flanked by armed soldiers, even in his own community. So who is fooling who? A simple civilian, armed with only a hoe, knows what it means to be in a remote field, knee-down farming, while hostile armed civilians can appear at any time. He knows what it means to work hard, only for destructive rains and outdated poor farming methods to turn that labour into nothing. The issue is not laziness. The issue is a country asking hungry people to farm while leaving them exposed to violence, floods, and crops no longer suited to the changing climate.
My conversation with my uncle, despite all seemingly insurmountable challenges, was a genuine engagement centered on survival. I see a new community with a new economic point, that is the Jonglei Canal.
The canal has become a flowing body of water, providing fishing as an alternative income too. With the right support, it could provide another way of farming supported by irrigation, freeing people from depending on the rainy season that keeps failing them. If maize and sorghum do poorly, beans and other crops can be tried. Communities like mine and others can meet in marketplaces where cash buys what is needed. When the climate changes, people must change with it.
I asked my uncle why farming methods weren’t changing when the climate and the environment have already changed.
“There is no other way,” he replied.
His response struck me. Floods and violent rains seem to be recurring events in South Sudan for the foreseeable future. In the words of Prof. John Akec, Vice Chancellor of the University of Juba, “People must learn to live with water.” With the government so reluctant to build resilience of these affected communities of Upper Nile Region, Prof. Akec’s statement sits at the heart of South Sudan’s painful debate over dredging the Nile tributaries and the Sudd wetlands. Dredging the Nile was seen as flood intervention measures by the supporters of the project who argued that opening blocked waterways, including the Naam River and parts of the Bahr el Ghazal basin, could reduce flooding in low-lying areas, allow displaced communities to return to their land, and open river transport for economic activity. Opponents warn that dredging without serious environmental and social studies could damage the Sudd, a wetland that supports fishermen, wildlife, grazing systems, rainfall patterns, and the livelihoods of communities who have lived with water for generations. President Salva Kiir, who acknowledged that both sides had raised serious arguments, suspended the project. For communities like mine, the issue is not just a technical debate about water flow; it is a question of survival, land, memory, and sustainable livelihood which have shaped their lives.
I asked again. Farming starts in May. Maize is planted in small backyard gardens, sorghum in bigger fields. Maize matures between May and August, sorghum extends to September, the month of heavy rain. “Why not plant maize in larger quantities than sorghum, since maize escapes the harsh season?”
“Whoever tries that,” he said, “will be asked by the community: what happened?”
But for me, “what happened” was not an answer. I know, as a son of this community, that whenever more maize is grown than sorghum, people raise an eyebrow. Sorghum, of course, is a staple food, eaten throughout the year. What confuses me is the hard work for such little return.
But what happens can wait until it becomes desperate.
Sometimes I imagine a small boy from my village standing on the bank of the Jonglei Canal, brandishing hook and line, spreading a half-cooked spoonful of sorghum to bait a giant frog, or a hunger-stricken villager pursuing a starving dog for food. Such images frighten me. They frighten me because sometimes the unspeakable does happen, desperation pushes people to a point where culture, dignity and choice are all stripped away.
In February 2026, as South Sudan was sliding back into conflict, a terrible incident happened in Pankor village, next to the village where my uncle stays in Ayod County. It was the kind of tragedy that could only grow from hunger. Fighters allied to the government moved into the village and lured civilians from their homes under the pretense of registering them for food assistance before attacking them. After the cold-blooded killing, survivors recounted harrowing stories in which 22 people were killed. This is where food insecurity becomes more than hunger; it becomes a desperation that can pull people out of their homes and place them where they can easily be preyed upon.
In my country, climate adaptation is something the South Sudanese government does selectively, not based on who is suffering most, but on whose community has a powerful individual inside the ruling elite. In the same way, the government confronts some armed civilians while allowing others to destabilize and terrorize communities.
South Sudan is blessed with oil, but that blessing has little to show for it. The oil-producing Unity State is below water. Its people survive on water lilies and humanitarian aid. Repeated oil pollution events have poisoned community water and have come with serious reports of birth defects. While citizens are left to face these disasters on their own, political elites are dining in Dubai, Singapore and neighbouring countries, living a luxurious life that only looks like heaven in the eyes of the water-surrounded communities of Bentiu.
In April 2025, the Ministry of Environment announced a $50 million climate adaptation green fund to implement climate resilience projects. This money, as expected, and in the words of an elderly chief who described Kiir’s government as an angel of war beating communities with floodwater on the ground while bombing from the sky, has been directed to only two states: Warrap and Northern Bahr el Ghazal, the President’s home state and the wider region of his political base. The community of godforsaken Bentiu, which has spent years surrounded by water, remains a reminder of what selective climate adaptation can mean in a country where suffering is borne politically.
Some months ago, the government shifted from oil for infrastructure (a model that has already proven to be a failure as billions of dollars in road contracts went down into corruption schemes) into a new boom: minerals for roads. A $2 billion road construction is being backed by the country’s gold reserves. Critics see a new scandal developing already. While infrastructure is key to disaster risk reduction, communities exposed to climate shocks in the Upper Nile region are left out from what could become a climate adaptation if all-season roads are truly built.
