Dr Ajak, State trade barbs as feud drags on

The government last week fired a response against the recent accusations of activist Dr Peter Biar Ajak (pictured) perhaps confirming a longstanding feud between the self-exiled critic and the state.

Dr Ajak took to the podium to tear into President Salva Kiir’s regime before the Senate on Foreign Relations Committee recently in United States.

While testifying before the Senate committee on March 10 this year, Dr Ajak accused Kiir’s regime of suppressive ruling, arbitrary arrest, torture and extra judicial killings people with dissident opinions.

He went on saying that people of South Sudan had continued to pay the price of the failed government of Kiir, living below the poverty line without access to basic and social services despite regular incomes government earns from the oil and other natural resources of South Sudan.

“Indeed, it’s the people of South Sudan who bear the brunt of Kiir’s mismanagement of their country,” the statement partially read.

Countering Dr. Ajak’s claims against the President and the government, Minister of Presidential Affairs Nhial Deng Nhial rubbished all the allegations.

“During the recent US Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the state of democracy in the Word, Dr. Peter Biar Ajak testified making series of largely unsubstantiated allegations against   President Slave Kiir and the government of South Sudan,” Nhial said in a statement issued on Monday last week.  

“The charge incessantly repeated by Dr. Ajak that he narrowly escaped the death at the hands of the South Sudanese security agents in Nairobi is potentially false,’ he continued saying in the statement.

Dr. Ajak who lives in US sought asylum after his release from detention in 2020 when President Salva Kiir pardoned him and other prisons sentenced to various jail terms by the court.