RUMBEK, Sudan, 20 January 2005 — The construction of a road network for southern Sudan will be crucial to rebuilding a region that, after two decades of civil war, has virtually none at all. Most of those that do exist are usable only in the dry season and all are unpaved and in desperate need of repair.
“Very few people were ready to put their transport on the road,” said the director of the World Food Program’s regional sub-office, Constance Lewanika. She said the problem had seriously hampered the UN agency’s efforts to distribute relief aid and led to inflated prices for the few available commodities.
As a result, the WFP decided to get into road building, “primarily for our purposes” but also for the overall socio-economic development of the region. Even now, around 80 percent of all food aid for southern Sudan and the adjacent conflict zones of the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile is delivered by costly flights from the Kenyan border town of Lokichoggio.
A round trip by a C-130 cargo aircraft delivers 18 metric tons of aid but costs 20,000 dollars, said WFP regional spokesman Tarcisius K. Nitta. Bringing in food by land via Uganda is much cheaper but the poor quality of the road meant it used to take as much a month for the convoys to cover the 600 kilometers from the border to the WFP’s warehouses in the provisional regional capital of Rumbek.
Trucks frequently got stuck in the mud and their cargoes of grain had to be offloaded while they are pulled free. So the agency set about repairing the worst stretches of the road using funds earmarked for emergency operations, before launching an appeal for donations to cover full repairs to the entire length from the border town of Kaya to Rumbek.
The initial phase cost $20 million and the WFP says it needs around $90 million to complete the project. So far, a 400-kilometre stretch from the border has been upgraded by Kenyan contractor Civicon. A second Civicon team has now begun work in the other direction and the two teams hope to meet up by the end of the year.
