Unsexy Road Naming in Juba
By Malith Alier, Juba, South Sudan
June 12, 2015 (SSB) — Everyone thought that the Juba City Council was going to do a superb job when it comes to naming Juba internal roads. Who told you that every passageway in a city should end with “road” it is kind of man cannot live on bread alone.
The Juba city Council, JCC was created around 2012 or 2013 by the Central Equatoria government to manage the sprawling big village called Juba.
The JCC had done a superb job over the years including garbage collection and enactment of local laws. It has also liaised with other cities around the world to learn and implement the best practice that may be suitable for JCC and South Sudan at large. A good example of this liaison was when it received help from the Chinese government to install traffic lights around the city to help ease traffic flow.
However, there are even bigger problems facing the nascent City Council like the issue of land. Juba City consists of Juba, Kator and Munuki Payams sometime known as town blocks. These three Payams make up part of old Juba of seventies and eighties before the outbreak of 1983 civil war.
This depiction of the three ignores other areas that emerged after 2005 that now form part of sprawling suburbs. Examples include Shirkat, Juba two, Lologo and Jebel Dinka.
The management of the three town blocks under the JCC includes marking of plot numbers and naming of roads. We have few roads named as: Dr. John Garang Road, Unity Road, University Road, Tombura Road, Konyokonyo Road, Ministries Road, Airport Road, Bilpam Road etc.
Who told JCC that every passageway is only a road? This is the unsavoury part of it. There should be a variety in everything. The nature has made animals with different colours for easy identification but not only that, different colours are also meant to break boredom. We are really bored about this “road” monotony.
Can somebody tell JCC officers to include other terms like street, boulevard, cul-de-sac, avenue, drive, highway, free-way, Terrace, etc? And of course the Council shold not only dwell on just naming the roads but to also close some informal roads here identified as Y roads. There so many of them in the city.
In conclusion, we know that city roads are called streets. That is where the City Council should dwell. It should not be a simple road naming but to include redirecting some roads and close others as way of modernising the city – the mantra of the JCC.
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