Posted on 09/18/2017 3:59:34 PM PDT by Jagermonster
HOW OTHERS SEE IT When South Sudan declared independence, its tattered infrastructure presented enormous challenges, but also a strange sense of possibility. Now, renewed fighting has stalled attempts at nation-building – in a physical sense as well as a political one.
JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN—On its face, the plan was simple. South Sudan’s largest city needed a new bridge, and a Japanese aid agency was going to build one.
It was 2012 when the announcement was made, and the capital of the world’s newest country was growing up and out hungrily: a sudden glut of new huts, new houses, and new hotels poking up from the green flatlands.
“The way the city was growing was unbelievable,” says Justin Tata, the head of the department of architecture and urban planning at the University of Juba. “But the problem was the people came first, then the plans for what to do with them afterwards.”
Indeed, the bones of the city – its roads and plumbing and power grid – couldn’t keep up with the massive growth spurt. Perhaps most alarmingly, the city had only a single, rickety bridge slung across the Nile River to connect it to the country’s most important highway, a 120-mile artery stretching south to the border with Uganda.
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South Sudan, after all, has one of the most lopsided economies in the world. Oil accounts for roughly 99 percent of its exports. The country imports nearly everything else it needs – from food and medicine to building materials and cars – at enormous cost through neighboring countries.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
But in the diplomatic community here, there are whispers that the project is likely dead for good. Anyway, many wonder, what would be the point of building a bridge only to see it destroyed again by war?
South Sudan is the mostly Christian part of Sudan that broke away from the Islamic North.
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