The Boa has nothing to do with the following about Juba:



Subject: Juba, as the SPLA take over, and the LRA are on the way out
In Juba, everyone knows that the LRA was based just 10 km beyond the radio station at Gumbo, at the junction that used to lead to Uganda through Nimule or to Kenya through Torit. I went up to Gumbo yesterday crossing the bridge (controlled by the SPLA since last week) into a few km stretch (still controlled by Government soldiers, who will be gone before long). The whole area before the bridge, formerly a busy market and place to catch buses was cleared during the war/siege which cut Juba off from the rest of the world.
The East Bank road (if you think of it, part of the Cape to Cairo highway) is overgrown; the new university buildings which the Northern army is about to quit are seen in the distance.
Juba-Yei road is already open and quite busy, with vehicles with Congo, Uganda and SPLM registrations all arriving, and prices falling as the market re-orients itself to be supplied from the south by road rather than from the north by air (though some barges with food and a small number of returnees have also started arriving).
The LRA was well-known to be directly supported by the Northern government and as the SPLA consolidates its hold on Juba, they have given them notice to quit – which is what one part did last week already rampaging its way to Congo (and leading to security problems in Yei) and then, it appears, hoping to surrender to MONUC . It was such common knowledge about the LRA in Juba and who supported it that it makes Uganda’s explanations about why they are not defeated pretty thin – it just needed political will.
So, because of the funeral of John Garang, the SPLA have made a peaceful entry into Juba and even in the two days I have been here control has shifted, day by day, into the hands of the new GoSS (President Salva, VP Riek) from the GoS now known as the GoNU (Government of National Unity).
Some things are not sorted out – Central Equatoria State (there are ten southern states now) will have its capital in Yei? Or in Juba? What will be the GoSS roles vis a vis States’ powers? If we try to solve a problem in Juba we are just helping one state … unless we talk to GoSS, but it is not clear at the moment when their Ministers are not appointed how it will work out.
Tellingly, when we were arranging to go to Torit (fly only - very land-mined road) one UN person said to another, but we haven’t got security clearance from XX – the answer, no point, he’ll be back in Khartoum soon, he has no power any more.
Yesterday SPLA troops moved into the radio Juba compound, a few days ago the SRRC took over from HAC (the Northern Humanitarian Affairs Commission). Now the SRRC travel document allows you temporarily to move and work everywhere in the south.
The UN peace-keeping force is starting up, flights to places we never dreamed of reaching other than by road years ago. Lafon, and Bor, for instance. Military Observers (Norwegian police in Equatoria) in smaller and smaller towns, though there is no seeming likelihood of war again. Big UN cars in Juba. Can’t be long before the Cultural Centre (by day), bar and disco (by night) revives. Meanwhile accommodation is very difficult to find and since almost all Arab shops in Malakiya and the Konyo Konyo market were burned at the time of Garang’s death, setting up a programme in education would require a lot of expensive importing (by air or barge from Khartoum) or by road from Uganda until trade routes re-establish themselves. It was very similar when I first arrived in Bunia. (Afex, the people who set up tented cities for UN and NGO people already have more than fifty tents, on the river bank, full all the time. )
You can now fly UN to Loki in Kenya, and since Entebbe will start up as the logistical base this week, there will no doubt be flights there too.
I saw Juba Day school yesterday. The chairs in the staff room and head master’s office are still in the same position as when I left 20 years ago! Now nearly 1500 students of 4 secondary schools are in the one compound, but it is ordered and disciplined. Since one of these schools is Yei Day school it can be a test case – the best help may not be to increase the size of Juba Day, but to help these three schools to go home. Another is Kajokaji secondary school one of the many offshoots of that school which was twice (at least) forced to flee as boys were forcefully press-ganged in the SPLA). There is the huge Comboni secondary school in Kajo Kaji itself, so Kajokaji secondary school in Juba may now be more of an ‘orphan’ school.
All state primary schools except one (Buluk A) now run in Arabic but the private school sector is said to have 45 schools operating in English (including St Joseph’s, one of the biggest). It may well be that most children actually attend school in English. Similarly the 1500 attending in English in Juba Day are not a tiny minority but a significant portion of the secondary population. Of course figures are always misleading as the UNICEF man pointed out to us the difference between enrolment and attendance can be a factor of 2 or more (a rare admission from UNICEF, but he is an engineer!)
With the opening of the Yei road and the gradually opening of other roads (Rokon is accessible, Terekeka too) there will be population movements in both directions, and that will change things too.
All this after two days!
==

UNHCR here have changed my programme so that we can have the proposals all wrapped up before I go, meaning that I will not get to other destinations on this trip – a bit of a waste of my time, since the main conclusions are all ready, but I have to wait for Tim Brown and my other colleague (also a Paul M) to get back from Lokichoggio where they attended a big education strategy meeting. If theymake it today, I may be able to visit one other place.
Interesting potential for disagreement between the Juba people who see themselves as heroes for having lived through 20 years of hell (and it was very grim) and the SPLM who believe they should be grateful for being liberated (and incidentally should give up their posts and jobs to the incoming SPLMs who ‘enjoyed’ -- according to Juba people -- in exile). It will be resolved though; there is a huge amount of goodwill. There’s a PhD here for someone to study what 20 years of ‘enclavement’ do to a population.
We are all waiting for someone to release the 1.5 BILLION dollars promised as start up money for the new Southern government. No sign of any of it, of course. Lost in some UN black hole called the Trust fund. Sounds familiar?
Still, it is great to be back, to walk around with no security worries, even though SPLA are everywhere with their guns. Every second person is a former student, and I have really been made welcome. Echo Bravo could start up at the drop of a hat, and may well do so. My proposal for training to British Council/AET/DfID has made the short-list. Meanwhile I still represent Windle Trust who will be partners with UNHCR for the education of returnees, and with the authorities for upgrading the teachers and converting many of them from teaching in Arabic to teaching in English.
This is one of the few countries where UNHCR deals with returnees and they are just feeling their way on education. Every instinct tells them that they should just drop the returnees at the border with a $22 dollar bag of pots and pans and a plastic sheet, but they are being asked to think ahead when it comes to education. Just like UNICEF when it started education – they couldn’t see beyond the vaccination mentality. (Let’s inject you with maths today, Geography tomorrow).
I was in Yei just after the LRA attack – that was tense (and if I had been UN, I couldn’t have been there, shades of Uganda ladies in Hargeisa).
OCHA here are superb – free internet access (you have to fight your way to the connections though among assorted NGO, hi-powered UN visitors and Italian nuns (they usually win)).
Went on a helicopter mission with OCHA to Torit – found the road from Kenya (Loki) is now de-mined and open to there; the road from Uganda is open to Juba and prices are already dropping in the market. There’s a PhD here for someone to study what 20 years of ‘enclavement’ do to a population.

For blog and website
At the beginning of 2005, I was finishing a consultancy for Windle Trust on ‘Training for the new South Sudan’. During the year I did a total of eight months in Somaliland mainly for AET and UNESCO-PEER (with brief forays to Puntland) and an interesting two weeks back in Congo for War Child.
Now, as 2006 starts, I am based until the beginning of February in Juba, working for Windle Trust on a project for UNHCR to help youth who have started coming back to Sudan, even before the official repatriations. Most of them were refugees in Uganda.
We are training them to be emergency English teachers, since Juba has become a very Arabised town during its years of isolation. Inevitably, they are mainly male, since the first ‘venturers’ in these situations will usually be boys and men. A surprise was that they were older than expected (but the war has gone on for 20 years). We are also supporting the English medium schools to take more students.
It was, you can see, a year of going back. Well, in my kind of work that is inevitable. The Tahiti, and Bangkok and Shangri-la jobs never seem to come up. By taking up the job in Hargeisa, I was re-occupying the role I had in 1997 and 1998 as Head of Office (though this time I did not cover Djibouti). Though I had actually been appointed as Project Manager of the large Secondary Programme – which I had been involved in designing, in the early stages, I ended up, once again, handling financial records, and large sums of cash. I got very little time to look at the actual quality of teaching, and I was dealing with the same Ministry of Education I had worked with before, who in contrast to the Ministries in South Sudan, never seem to have education as their main focus.
For Congo, it was a chance to work on education; in both my jobs there I had been head of a sub-office with little chance to do much education work (apart from HIV/AIDS). The main education work I did there was the ‘Back to School’ project after the volcanic eruption in 2002 which destroyed 41 schools. So this time, I went to South Kivu, for War Child Canada and War Child Holland.
As for Juba, Sudan, it was back after 20 years to a town stuck in a time warp. Apart from my additional weight (kilos, not authority), there is nothing different between my time in Juba in the early eighties and now. I am even riding a motor-bike (actually there is less tarmac than the 6 km there used to be).
Perhaps it is actually a little hotter (the surrounding areas have no vegetation after years of being cut off). And, yes, the University is no longer there. It flitted to Khartoum in 1989 when Juba was on the point of starvation. There are mobile phones, in theory, but they hardly ever work, the electricity is just as poor as ever, and, as before, it doesn’t do to look too closely at the water. I live in a grass-thatched tukul (= hut) in the middle of town on the compound we have been given by the Ministry because the accommodation is too expensive (and it was impossible to rent for short-term).
There is hope though that it will change. Next week marks one year since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed. Some oil money is filtering through from Khartoum, though it still seems to be stuck at the Government of South Sudan level. The next level down, the ten States, still don’t have funds to spend. Contracts have been issued for roads and electricity.
The roads are, nevertheless, full of posh Government of South Sudan cars (and South Africa gave GoSS two passenger planes). The GoSS vehicles outnumber the agency vehicles (though UN agencies and UNMIS, the peace-keepers, mainly Bangladeshis in Juba make up a lot of the traffic).
Every kind of number plate is seen from the Arabic/Latin plates of Juba, to the ‘NS’ of New Sudan, the Congo plates sold in Ariwara and Aru as a local income-generating activity, Uganda numbers and others.
Since the road from Yei opened, a huge new market has grown up at Custom, where the road from Yei enters Juba, still the only viable road because of the presence of the LRA between Torit and Juba. At Custom, Fellata traders (Hausas) from Western Sudan trade alongside young Sudanese brought up in Uganda and prices oscillate between items brought from the north and items brought from East Africa.
Uganda money and Sudanese dinars are both accepted at Custom, and Rwenzori water from Uganda has replaced bottled water from the north (since everything from the north still comes by plane – the barges have only fitfully resumed). Prices are horrendously high, but that is mainly because of the huge demand from the agencies setting up in Juba. (The GoSS has said that every agency must have decision makers based in Juba, not in Khartoum or East Africa). There has been a good side – for the first time for 20 years there is new employment in Juba and, for instance, anyone who can drive either drives a hire car at $100 a day or has got a job with an agency. The more educated are also being swept up by the UN.
So far the tensions usually experienced between returnees (‘we suffered in exile’) and stayees (‘we suffered while you enjoyed in Uganda/diaspora’) have not been too evident, though they will definitely arise as less educated stayees (or fighters in the civil war) find all the jobs taken by the educated who were outside. It has more or less happened already at Ministerial level. [Yes, stayee is a new – to me – agency word used for those who never left for one reason or another].
Boda bodas are coming in and supplementing the one bus route (same as in 1981), though the population of Juba regards them with suspicion (too fast, these boys might abduct you or rob you, or give you AIDS- a commonly expressed fear about the returnees).
The Thuraya satellite telephone is king – every SPLM/GoSS cadre has one, though this may change if new mobile companies come in. I wish I had shares, as at up to $3 a minute it must be a most lucrative business.
Juba is full of my former students, some returning like me. The school I was involved in founding in 1981 is still running, in English medium, and, rather coincidentally (but not bad for the image) UNHCR was giving the school things when I arrived. The Windle Trust project is also helping them.
One of my first students, Onesimo, is now Pastor Onesimo and father of five sons. To him, being cut off for twenty years (when other classmates had got out) has left him struggling to catch up. He came for Christmas to Entebbe, and started getting up to speed on e-mail (the first public e-mail opened less than 6 weeks ago in Juba) and internet.
The situation of Juba (and the other garrison towns) is fascinating. They are still under Khartoum for the moment, and, in spite of our assumptions, it is not obvious to them that they should join the SPLM/GoSS system without some discussion.
In education it is made even more complicated by the fact that the GoSS Minister of Education, is not from the SPLA but, though a Southern Christian from Raga, named by the National Congress party (as specified in the CP Agreement).
Students who study in Arabic in Juba want to take the Khartoum exams (the SPLM side still has not provided a secondary exam) and go to University in Khartoum.
Oh, and there are two armies – the government army in the barracks and the SPLA camped near Custom (and near John Garang’s grave). By the time I left the SPLA had still not been paid (though the government army is).
4TH Feb
Yesterday we drove in the evening to Rejaf West. (East is still problematic - the LRA are on that side. Many on the East side are displaced; for some years now the Congolese community there has been living on a miserable patch of land near Konyokonyo with no access to their farms).
> Curiously you still pass through Northern army check-points; not SPLA. They don't stop you and are quite friendly - only two or three soldiers at each. At Lilogo you pass the refugee camp for Anywak refugees (100 of them ended up in Juba somehow after the killings in Gambella - tall and black Ethiopians speaking a language like Acholi). Then the Dinka women's transit camp - the Dinka men, expelled from Western Equatoria, went ahead with their cattle, to Bor. The international community looks after their wives and children (but it's a very transient, bleak, open place.)
Djibouti was like that. The Somali men were all doing good jobs in the
> Gulf while leaving UNHCR and UNESCO to look after their wives and children. They came back once a year to keep the population growing. There is virtually nothing now at Rejaf West. I was told the expatriate graves (from Emin Pasha's time and later) are still there. So is the hill, of course, and it looks as though Taban lo Liyong's road continues a bit - but it may be an informal reopening not of that Kajo Kaji-bound road but of the old Route Royale, the Belgians
> attempt to get a foothold on the Nile, which joins the Juba-Yei road somewhere
> like Kagwada. (by the way with the rebuilding and de-mining Juba Yei is now taking less than 4 hours.
I looked for where we used to picnic, but the river was high and there were no exposed stones to be seen. I hadn't realised that they could actually disappear under the water. The banyan trees are also there.
Yes, a DJ from Kiryandongo camp was lost when I asked him to be the translator for non-English speaking youth in the Echo Bravo Youth Club we are setting up.

Unfortunately that's the language they are usingon the radio.


Simple example: Everyone in Juba says moya barda / moya sukhna now. When I was there it was moya barid /sukun

And the lad working around my hut - whose father used to work for British Council - has his telephone (largely a prestige object in Juba since the mobile system hardly works)set to Arabic script and can't look up any words in your dictionary because he has not mastered the English alphabet, though he is in secondary school.
We are working on him (and the rest of them).