CAPITALISTS IN JUBA

For visitors familiar with the five-star hotels of Africa's main
cities, Mango River's reputation as one of the best places to stay in
Juba, the capital of semi-autonomous south Sudan, can be misleading.


Not only does it have no stars, it is not even a hotel. Instead it is
a camp, which mixes the bleak uniformity of an army barracks with a
few other-worldly creature comforts, and, in the process, has become
an emblem for the rough-and- tumble boom town.


Guests are housed in khaki tents that trap the 40°C heat like an oven
but also have wireless internet access and a bar that serves Bloody
Mary cocktails. Until a recent price war it was charging $132 (€91,
£68) a night and is the peculiar product of the wild-west capitalism
driving a vibrant, foreign-run economy in Juba.


But as entrepreneurs repatriate their quick bucks, the town's economy
is stagnating and the process of development has barely started.


The divide between the two does matter because it means south Sudan is
not building what it needs: the foundations of a viable state. Its
government was formed by Christian bush fighters in 2005 after they
signed a peace deal that ended a five-decade civil war with the
Arab-led north and promised a referendum on secession in 2011.


But the administration has struggled to manage a unique combination of
forces: $1.1bn of non- humanitarian aid over the past two years,
$1.3bn of annual oil revenue, and an influx of United Nations
peacekeepers and tough- minded business people.


Because of inexperience, corruption and the absence of any state
apparatus - as well as the international community's decision to focus
on Darfur - it has little to show for its efforts. Until three years
ago Juba was a garrison town controlled by Khartoum and it remains
little more than a super-sized village with barely 1km of paved road.


Nobody is sure how many residents it has - estimates range from
320,000 to 1m - but most live in mud huts and their number is reckoned
to have doubled in the past three years as refugees return.


The beneficiaries of the boom are outsiders such as Henrik Tobiesen, a
former United Nations de-mining expert from Denmark, who last year set
up another place to stay called Global Camp. "I looked around and it
was ridiculous," he says. "There was no competition. You could do
anything."


Juba has at least a dozen similar camps charging up to $250 a night,
most of them filled with UN officials and aid workers. They are owned
by Kenyans and Egyptians, or companies such as Afex Group of the US
and Unity Resources Group from Australia, which controls Mango River.
The majority of their employees are non-Sudanese too.


The same is true of the bars and restaurants that cater to development
workers as well as civil servants and soldiers from the Sudan People's
Liberation Army, whose wages consume 70 per cent of south Sudan's
oil-flushed budget, according to one donor consultant.


Whereas Juba was supplied by air from Khartoum during the war, today
almost everything consumed by the town's better-off inhabitants - from
potatoes and pineapples to Pringles crisps and Johnnie Walker whisky -
is imported by road by Ugandan traders, although their supply lines
have been disrupted by Kenya's chaos.


The traders congregate in Custom Market, a bustling maze of shacks and
parasols where Caroline Ninisima, who is saving to study business
administration in Kampala, sells paint brushes, pliers and pipes to
the construction industry.


"I came to make money," she says. "In Uganda there are very many
competitors, but here the need for building materials is big and the
competitors are few."


David Gressly, the deputy resident co-ordinator for the UN, says the
town's cowboy capitalism must be tamed: "One of the key challenges . .
. is to put in place an investment code, together with clear laws on
property rights that are enforced by the judiciary."


The camp hotels contribute "peanuts" to the government, says Barri
Wanji, chair of the south Sudan parliament's finance committee. But he
adds: "Let me reassure you we know what's going on. We've decided to
let them have a good time until we get the legal system in place."