November 1,2012 (BOR) - A former local government officer, who once served as a commissioner in many districts including Rumbek, Malakal and Bor, which encompasses the present Duk, Twic East and Bor counties, who is blind, says he is receiving an inadequate pension.

Isaiah Ayuen Deng Kuai Pach, near his house at Langbaar in Bor, Jonglei, October 29, 2012 (ST)

Isaiah Ayuen Deng Kuai Pach, from Makuach payam [district] of Bor county, was born in Malek where he grew up under late Bishop Deng Atong, where started his primary school.

“I began my work in September 1972 and I got appointed to group B [pay grade] and then a year I was promoted to grade 7. Later on in 1977, I was promoted to grade 5 and there I began to develop this eye problem,” said Pach.

Despite being an important administrator since the early 1970s and his blindness, Pach says he has not been upgraded to grade one or three, as many of his colleagues have.

He lost his job in October 2011 due to blindness.

"Is this not discrimination?” asked Pach. “The ones I trained myself are now in grade three, others went to grade one but they were later on brought down to grade three again", he added.

The local government administration paid him according to his grade when he was laid-off by the state government.

By way of explanation for the corruption Pach claims to have witnessed in government, he claimed that “when people left the towns for the bush in 1983 [war with Khartoum], we released a lot of people who were jailed because of corruption.”

He currently lives in a thatched hut in Bor and may be displaced under a new land allotment scheme.

Pach was a primary four pupil at Malek Elementary school in 1955, a year before Sudan gained independence from British colonial masters, when he was asked to deliver a letter written by Southern Sudanese politicians to the Governor General.

The letter was in protest to the unitary Sudan proposed by Alexander Hypno, the last condominium Governor General of Southern Sudan.

(ST)