A14 The World
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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2010
MOHAMED NURELDIN ABDALLAH/REUTERS
Southern Sudanese living inKhartoum boarded a convoy that will take them back to their home region so they can register to vote in the independence
referendum.Many southerners fled during the civil war.
Awaiting independence vote, southern Sudan has high hopes
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to building a newstate BY REBECCA HAMILTON
Butwar-torn region’s poverty is a challenge
warrap state, southern su- dan — Aguek Deng is the only doctor at the government hospi- tal in Kuajok, southern Sudan’s newest state capital. The hospital ward, which
serves nearly 1 million people, has just 11 beds, none of which has a mattress. The on-site phar- macy boasts mainly acetamino- phen and vitamins; Deng says injections for pain relief, pneu- monia and malaria run out too quickly. In the ward, Atong Akol, who
says she doesn’t know how old she is but who looks to be about 15, sits on the edge of a bed frame. In front of her lies her 10-day-old daughter, Akot, who Deng thinks has “some kind of infection.” The odds are stacked against the baby’s survival; according to the United Nations, one in six chil- dren in southern Sudan dies be- fore turning a year old. The state of health services in
Kuajok is indicative of health services across southern Sudan, an area the size of Texas that is likely to become the world’s new- est nation next year. On Jan. 9, southern Sudanese will vote in a referendum that will mark the final stage of a 2005 peace agree- ment that ended 22 years of war between the Sudanese govern- ment based in Khartoum, in the mainlyMuslim north, and rebels based in the mainlyChristian and animist south. Southern Suda- nese are widely expected to choose independence, freeing themselves from the rule of Presi- dent OmarHassan al-Bashir. If the vote goes as expected, southern Sudanese will be start- ing their nationhood under in- auspicious circumstances. “After decades of brutal war,
poverty, neglect and the displace- ment of millions of its people, southern Sudan is one of the poorest and least developed re- gions of the world,” said Louis Belanger of the anti-poverty group Oxfam. “It is being built almost from scratch and needs the support of the rest of the world to help provide develop- ment and security.” The United Nations has com-
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piled a set of “Scary Statistics” to illustrate the problem: 90 per- cent of the south’s roughly 10 million people live on less than $1 a day; one in six women dies in pregnancy; and barely one-quar- ter of girls attend primary school. But many southerners say they
expect that their lives will im- prove radically after the referen- dum. “At the grass-roots level, the
belief is that after independence they will have roads, schools and hospitals,” said community orga- nizer Druini Jakani.
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Counting on oilmoney Many believe oil will be their
savior. “After the referendum it will be
okay here because we will have ourownbudget from the oil,” said Deng, voicing a common refrain. “People are expecting very
quick development of the south because they believe the problem until now is that the oil wealth has been in the hands of Khar- toum,” said Edmund Yakini from the pro-democracy group Sunde. “Up to now there is no one who has been engaged in expectations
PETER MARTELL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Awoman dipped her finger in ink to show she had registered to vote in the referendum. Officials say 1.3 million people have registered.
management. It’s a huge risk.” Sudan is the third-largest oil- producing country in sub-Saha- ran Africa, and most of its 490,000 barrels per day come from fields in the south. Under the 2005 peace agreement, south- ern Sudan was granted semi-au- tonomy until the 2011 referen- dum and has its own interim government, headed by former rebel commander Salva Kiir Ma- yardit. Since the signing of the agree-
ment, Sudan’s oil wealth has been split between Kiir’s administra- tion and the Sudanese govern- ment, rendering inaccurate the local perception that all the oil revenue is still going to Khar- toum. According to the southern government’s Ministry of Fi- nance and Economic Planning, 98 percent of the south’s budget comes from oil and over the past six years this has amounted to more than $8 billion in revenue. “The oil money has not been
well spent,” acknowledged south- ern Cabinet AffairsMinister Kos- ti Manibe Ngai. The southern government has been battling widespread corruption, but Ngai said the primary problem has been that southern officials never believed that Bashir’s regime wanted to implement the peace agreement, “so there was always in our minds the possibility that we would go back to war.” As a result, he said, the south spent a lot of money on security and very little on development projects. “In the last six years, the gov- ernment as such has not built a new health facility,” southern HealthMinister Luka Tombekan- Monoja said at a forum of south- ern state governors in Juba last month. The focus on security has also
come at the cost of investing in what Ngai says could be the south’s ticket to self-sufficiency— agriculture. At the forum, southern Agri-
cultureMinister Anne Itto plead- ed for her government to reduce its oil dependency by investing in development across the south’s fertile land. “We need to diversify, or else
when the oil dries up we will also dry up,” she said. In the 2010 budget, her minis-
try was given $16.8 million, but the military was given $472 mil- lion.
Education deficit President Kiir said he is aware
of the development challenges that lie ahead. At his offices in the southern capital, Juba, Kiir laid out the main argument of those who say southern independence will herald the birth of a failed state. “They say that because they think we don’t have the capacity
to run a state,” he said, explaining the concern that there are not enough educated people in the south. According to U.N. statis- tics, 85 percent of southern Suda- nese cannot read or write. Kiir argues that there are plen-
ty of educated southerners; the problem is that they have left the region. Millions fled during the war, either to the relative safety of the north or to begin new lives in other countries. “When we divorce [from the
north], we hope the divorce will be peaceful and then these people will come back to us,” Kiir said. But Tombekan-Monoja, the
health minister, said he is not counting on emigres to return. “If they have not come,” he
said, “for me they don’t exist.” The Health Ministry has al-
ready seen its hopes dashed in regard to what qualified return- ees can contribute. In 2007, they offered financial incentives to attract medical practitioners. But when the bonuses had to be cut after the global financial crisis and a drop in oil prices, most of the returnees left again. And of those who stayed, many
movedfrom rural centers to Juba, where living conditions are bet- ter than in the rest of the south. In the education sector, the
capacity challenge is exacerbated by the southern curriculum, which requires English as the language of instruction. During colonialism, the British enforced English as the lingua franca of the south, which they adminis- tered separately from northern Sudan. But during the post-indepen-
dence years of war, successive Sudanese governments tried to enforce Arabization (and Islam- ization) on their southerncompa- triots, so the return to English is part of an effort to reclaim the south’s identity.However, most of those who have enough educa- tion to teach received their schooling in the Arabic-speaking north. “We are trying our level best to
get them English training,” said Peter Majock Deng, the head teacher at Jul-jok primary school in northernmost Warrap state. He relies on international groups to help his teachers. Classes at Jul-jok meet outside
under the trees; tents donated by UNICEF in 2008 for the school’s use have been reduced to tatters by the extreme climate. “After the referendum, every-
thing will change.Everything will be easy,” teacherMyauDengAdur said. “For sure we will have build- ings.”
Hamilton is a special correspondent who reported from Sudan on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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