The World’s Youngest Country Wants to Build a New Capital in a Former Rhino Sanctuary

Despite being only 10 years old, South Sudan has already been beset by economic challenges, bitter disputes with its neighbours and the remnants of a five-year civil war that claimed almost 400,000 lives. 

The world’s newest country won its independence a decade ago following more than 50 years of internal conflict and rebellion against leaders in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, to the north. Yet a decade on, with the state engaged in an ongoing economic and military fight for survival, the government is holding on to a highly unusual and immensely costly ambition: it plans to build for itself a brand new capital city, entirely from scratch in an area of swampland formerly used as a rhino sanctuary.

Is it an overly-indulgent birthday gift, or a necessary tonic in a country where disunity has plagued attempts at coherent state-building, and leaders’ politics of greed has largely swallowed the hopes of ordinary people?

South Sudan’s failure until now has rested on a lack of any sense of what it means to be South Sudanese, VICE World News was told. The country is divided into three “greater” provinces; the Upper Nile in the northeast, Bahr el Ghazal to the northwest, and Equatoria in the south. Across them is a richly diverse ethnic makeup, comprising more than 50 distinct ethnic groups and languages. Some communities have as little as just a few thousand. Others, like the Dinka and the Nuer, the two largest groups, comprise 6.5 million. After a draining war in which warlords have exploited ethnic differences for personal gain, bitter distrust reigns.

The capital city, Juba, sits firmly in the centre of Equatoria. Koang Pal Chang, director of news at Eye Radio, which broadcasts out of Juba, actually agrees with the government that the current location of the capital is not conducive for national unity. 

“What is happening now in Juba, if you are from Greater Upper Nile or Greater Bahr al Ghazal, if you want to rent a house from an Equatorian, you can’t do it,” says Chang. “There is no trust between the people. The capital being there means conflict.

“The intention has been to finally unite the South Sudanese. Communities have been fighting along tribal lines for centuries. John Garang, our revolutionary leader, realised the only way to start to fix it was to bring the capital city into the middle of the three regions. That way nobody could claim the ownership. It would belong to all people.”

The site picked out for the new capital sits in this central location, at the crossroads of South Sudan’s three provinces. It has been provisionally named Ramciel, and as of 2017 the project had reportedly secured funding to begin work from the government of Morocco, following Juba’s successful courtship of the head of state, King Mohamed, during a visit earlier that year. A further deal is in place with engineers from South Korea to begin infrastructural planning. That task in itself promises to be gargantuan; despite its sensible location, Ramciel currently has no roads or provisions for electricity.

“The people of the Upper Nile feel marginalised and totally kicked out of this system,” says Chang. “That is why it is necessary to move our capital...the central government has excluded them.”

The concept of building a new capital from the ground up is rare in the urban age. Nigeria successfully relocated its seat of government from Lagos to Abuja in 1991, largely for the same reasons as South Sudan, whilst Kazakhstan and Myanmar have responded to local challenges in their countries by putting up new seats of government in the last 30 years. But Ramciel will be unique, as its proposed location currently has no urban infrastructure whatsoever.

Not everyone is convinced by the proposals. Edmund Yakani is a local civil society activist and the executive director of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organisation (CEPO) in Juba. He believes South Sudan’s particular ethnic tensions make Ramciel a poor choice for a gleaming new capital.

“The motivation is about moving away from a federal system to a centralised one,” says Yakani. “Juba, the current capital, and Equatoria are places where they believe strongly in federalism. Federalism gives people in low-level, local government a voice. That is what our country needs.”

Yakani continued: “The idea is to escape the federal system. But most of the population is so far from Juba where everything gets done, everyone lives in the countryside. It’s become like the old relationship between the south and Khartoum. We risk repeating the culture of Khartoum by moving our capital and centralising. Ethnicity becomes a kind of strength in accessing the political centre. It becomes a dominant factor in terms of politics and administering the state. It’s an ambitious project, but it comes at a moment when the country lacks industrialisation in order to have its own domestic produce, to be able to respond to the basic needs of its citizens. Instead of wasting this money, I’d rather see the money spent on industrialisation so the country can provide for itself.”

South Sudan is a state that, in the words of one analyst VICE World News spoke to, failed before it had begun. New countries rarely emerge in temperate seas, rather they are typically a product of some previous failure; the failure of whatever came before it to provide a stable, safe and prosperous climate for its people.

Before independence in 2011 the region was the southern part of the Republic of Sudan, which was controlled by a political class from the capital Khartoum, largely at the expense of oppressed Black Africans living in the resource-rich south.

In this climate, a unity was forged amongst the people of the south, a region where a mixture of Christianity and tribal beliefs prevailed. That collective was defined by the political and military fight for their social and economic rights. From 1955, a year before Sudan won independence from the UK, until 2005, a successful resistance movement organised and made ground in the southern states, through which a recognisable southern-Sudanese identity was forged. The hope was it would be carried into the independence era. The reality couldn’t have been more different.

Independence Day for South Sudan arrived on the 9th of July, 2011. The new president, a former leading figure in the resistance movement named Salva Kiir, steered this new country through an economic crisis but in relative peace until an attempted coup by his deputy, Riek Machar, in December 2013, tipped South Sudan into a civil war, one of the most wide-reaching, brutal, and under-reported conflicts of the 21st century.

“The question we should be asking is what went wrong? The answer is very simple,” says Chang. “Our liberators turned out to be wealth seekers. The focus shifted from building a nation to building personal wealth. They forgot what they fought for, and in their own interests they divided the country along ethnic lines. The problem of identity amongst the south is part of the cause. For the last 30 years I have worked as a journalist to make people informed in order to create an identity that is South Sudanese. But there is none.”

The civil war, which was brought to an end by a peace agreement signed in 2018, was characterised by indiscriminate brutality; private militias in the pay of rebel political leaders roamed the country’s towns and villages, torching homes and laying waste to South Sudan’s mostly rural population with acts of maiming, murder and extreme sexual violence.

The young country’s many ethnic seams were ruthlessly exploited by a new class of warlords, entrepreneurs of violence who butchered the country to line their pockets, making a mockery of the idea that South Sudan had been “liberated” from the oppressive north.

“During the independence struggle, the people of the south fought against marginalisation and oppression by the [north],” says Yakani, the civil society activist. “After independence, we came to realise that a political culture of marginalisation still continued to exist amongst ourselves.

“We used the term in Africa ‘the independence curse’; liberators believe that when they liberate a country, they own the citizens and the country. Our politicians are suffering from this syndrome, which is very disturbing.”

Some observers VICE World News spoke to feel it is South Sudan’s fate to be condemned to infighting, that a state built on the premise of opposition is destined to look for an internal enemy against which to exercise its habit. Others are less pessimistic.

Dr Luka Kuol is a Professor of Security Studies in Washington DC, who has made a detailed study of the country’s fortunes since independence. He believes that, beyond the bloodshed, there is hope for the world’s newest country to make the most of its hard-won independence.

“Some scholars have said that South Sudan was a failed state before its birth, and therefore doomed to collapse,” says Kuol. “Others have attributed the failures to the tragedy of ethnic rivalry between the Dinka and Nuer [the major ethnic groups]. Yet, analysis shows that ethnic diversity need not be polarising. Instead, much depends on how this is managed.”

Externally, the uneasy relationship with Sudan to the north has also dictated the new republic’s fortunes. One year after independence, the president Salva Kiir took the decision to shut down the country’s entire oil industry, some 900 wells, in a dispute with Khartoum over pipeline fees.

Oil reserves, which are mainly concentrated in South Sudan’s north near the border with Sudan and which have been a major factor in the wars that preceded and followed independence, contributed to around 98 percent of the government’s state revenues in 2012. In a country without a functioning electricity grid and where most people depend on petrol-powered generators for household power, the consequences of an oil shortage proved catastrophic.

The price of some food staples quadrupled, inflation rocketed to almost 80 percent and public funding was slashed. Huge queues became a common sight across the capital, and the full collapse of the embryonic state was touted internationally as a real possibility.

South Sudan alleged Khartoum was stealing its oil, literally by siphoning it off once it entered Sudanese territory and figuratively by charging an extortionate rate to use its pipeline. Juba’s logic was that it was better to see the country’s oil stay in the ground than have it stolen by their neighbour. The proposed solution was a new line, to be built through Kenya and arriving at a new port to be built on the north Kenyan coast.

A $3 billion deal was agreed to construct the new facility in 2012 – “We do not know exactly when [work will begin], but the pipeline is a priority for the government,” said the oil minister at the time – but as the clock ticks over on South Sudan’s first decade, there is no sign that the new pipeline will ever materialise.

“We already have an agreement with Sudan,” says Chang, the journalist based in the capital Juba. “They should be our closest friends; not Kenya or Uganda or Ethiopia. We know them, we were one country. It should be easy. It just needs a committed leadership in our country who can convince the president of Sudan to strike a good deal. It shouldn’t need another pipeline. It should be done with words and discussion. [The pipeline is] completely unviable.”

In a country whose leaders have put more energy into fighting a futile war than they have into building infrastructure to improve South Sudan’s underdeveloped industry, any solution that targets discussion and diplomacy over costly building work has obvious advantages. Though the dispute over tariffs with Sudan has largely been resolved, wells in the areas worst hit by the conflict have remained shut down, causing a 40 percent reduction in the country’s oil output.

“There is a new political class trying to emerge, but they are being squeezed out by the current self-interested government,” says Yakani, the civil society activist. “Their spaces are shrinking, they are branded enemies of the state, they’re normally kicked out of the country and they become exiles.

“All different political colours, but none of them was clean. There is a high level of mistrust amongst our political elites. Same political personnel with the same political attitudes remain in power, and I’m pretty sure the next decade will be as explosive as the first.”