3 We are heading out of Juba on a bumpy road, and David, the Kenyan driver I have hired for the day, is complaining.‘The rubbish here is terrible. In Kenya, we recycle.You should go to Kenya, Joshua, and see how we deal with this problem.’ Scopas Lukudu, the Public Health Inspector for Juba Payam, is offended and I find myself temporarily the unwilling adjudicator in a competition between Kenya and Sudan.Thankfully, the argument soon stops, as Lukudu, heavy and saturnine in the back seat, concedes,‘one day we will have recycling. We have heard how you can make money from this thing’. We drive pass a market, with piles of okra on display next to plastic bottles full of oil. In reality, recycling is already happening in Juba. Young boys, thin and playful, wander the streets collecting empty water bottles; twenty-four such bottles can be sold at the market for one Sudanese Pound (30 cents), and will be used to store cooking oil. This is clearly not the sort of recycling Lukudu was referring to, as he continues telling me about his ambitious plans for the future: three more rubbish dumps, a sewage treatment plant… it is just a question of getting the money. Scopas Lukudu was Juba’s health inspector in the 1970s.When the war broke out, he joined the World Health Organisation, then after 2005, slotted seamlessly back into his old job. Thirty years of working for NGOs had marked Lukudu, and, like many in South Sudan’s nascent government, he spoke in the strange language of bureaucratese endemic among aid workers. I thought as we left Juba town that this language of technocratic intervention, the lingua franca of government in so many parts of Africa, will be the NGOs’ most enduring contribution to the continent. As we drive further along the road to Yei, we pass under the shadow of Jebel, the mountain that marks the boundary of Juba. Buildings are less and less frequent, and soon the squatter settlements begin. In 2009, 30,000 people were evicted from Juba town. Two years later, much of the land the squatters were forced from remains fenced off and empty, sold to investors uncertain about South Sudan’s long term political stability but greedy enough to buy up the land in case there is a future profit to be made. Many squatters simply moved slightly further out of Juba, to the sides of the Yei road.We pass their ad hoc assemblages of UNHCR canvas and cardboard boxes which, in their austerity, have the look of Potemkin villages: recently built for the visitors’ benefit. According to the 2008 Land Act, it is the communities of South Sudan who own the land.What this means in practice is obscure.The ministry that gives out land permits in Juba has refused new applications for a year now. Still, amid rumours of speculation and corrupt community elders taking payments from large companies, houses continue to be built in Juba. Many of the squatter settlements outside of Juba are populated by members of the very community that should own the Juba area. Squatters’ huts are arranged on one side of the road. On the other side, a long line of garbage fires greets us like a crowd before a procession.‘Companies are always cutting corners’, Lukudu complains, gesturing at the rubbish; rather than taking it all the way to the dump, they drop it off at the side of the road, just before the checkpoint at which licensed companies have to pay 5 Sudanese pounds to use the dump; unlicensed companies pay 15.
Just past the squatter settlements are the first signs of the new United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) complex – indications of a new, more permanent status for the mission. For the first six years of peace, UNMIS rented a large site near the airport, but now the owners want their land back. Here in the shadow of Jebel Mountain, a lone Rwandan soldier stands guard over an empty valley.‘That’, Lukudu tells me,‘was the old rubbish dump’. We slow as we approach the military checkpoint just before the dump. I see trucks being checked, and anticipate a long wait. Thankfully, Lukudu is waved through and we drive on past the huts and the squatter settlements, into the bush. It is the height of the dry season, and the ground is cracked, dotted with sparse bushes struggling under a strong sun that crushes colour into the valley floor. In the rainy season when the dust and the rubbish turn into a toxic slick that renders the roads impassable, the grass here, says Lukudu, is taller than a man is high. The only adornment on the arid landscape are large signs, every fifty metres or so, demarcating plots.This place, I realise, is going to be the site of frenetic development. In 2005, the South Sudanese government took over the offices of the state government. Now they are moving on. All the signs indicate land acquired for the future buildings of different ministries. One sign is for the Land Commission: the printed words loom large, standing over an empty landscape. Just as the signs finish, the rubbish begins. Rather than the small piles of burning garbage I saw earlier, now there are huge mounds of smoking rubbish, burning slowly in the noonday heat. All this momentarily confuses me: I understand the need to burn rubbish in the town, but why burn it here, in the arid emptiness of this landscape? I find my answer amid the smouldering trash – neatly arranged piles of scrap metal, delicate constructions as intricate as Jenga towers.They burn the rubbish, Lukudu tells me, interrupting my thoughts, to retrieve the metal, which they sell to Ugandan merchants who take it to Kampala to be recycled.
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Giulio Petrocco
Giulio Petrocco
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