Juba City Council Must reform or risk wider criticisms
6 min readBy Thon Atem Ayiei, Juba, South Sudan
November 10, 2016 (SSB) —- The encouraging factor for the developing cities is when people rank their stuff. Over the years, a variety of organizations and academics have had their say on which cities are the best in the world under a variety of criteria: which cities are the most inhabited, or the more friendly to millionaires and the poor. The ultimate accolade, though, the gold standard of city rankings, is to become a “world city”: importantly not just to a country or region, but to the entire globe.
While the questions vex, is our capital city ranked among others top cities in the world? Is Juba among others clean cities in the world if not why are we not marching others cities while our city Mayor’s had been attending global cities conference in other part of the world? Are those experience acquired by our mayors through their trips to difference cities not enough to help them improve their service in Juba.
The Juba municipality will never improve her services unless the capital city differentiate her activities from the state authority, to be independent and handle things uniformly without identifying other section to be the truth soul mate of the city council. This means, the employment opportunity, distributions of land in juba city council must be given equally or to the qualify candidate irrespective of their tribes and the state where they came from. Juba city council should stop making coordinated fines of the business people as their top priority in daily business of the council activities otherwise, it meaningless to punish someone with money, with a routine crime which can be committed again and again.
If by any chance you visited juba city council, you will find officials in charge are speaking to one another through their language which is punishable by our constitutions. You will start from the get-man up to the top administration all from one tribe, is this not a total disrespect to the law, discrimination within juba municipality. We need to be sincere in all our distribution of resources because it’s where the problems all started.
The fine is ok but prison sentence should be adopted in conformity with the underlying, so that law violators could respect assigned rules and regulations of the municipality. In case you happened to have misunderstood with juba city council operations personnel, then they take you to their office, and given an estimated written handbook to go and pay your fines in an official account whether you have committed a punishable crime and payable ones but surprisingly all crimes are uniform according to juba city council authorities and all is to pay fines in huge sums into individual hands.
Fine should be in accordance with the article of the rules and regulation of the city council so that the law offenders could also get fair justices of their crime. The must also save prison sentence so that next time they have to respect rule and regulations.
If these conning does not stop, Juba city council could deviate from their objectives of transforming our capital city to world standard leading to a remarkable city recognition and turn to non-profitable city and then to a community entity where the status of a city can no longer be accorded.
A city is a composition of different diversities, foreign nationals, nationals and the world community. Not how Juba city council wants us to believe that council has to be one ethnic group, jobs from the gatekeeper to the top of the structure one group. To be a world city, you need good transport networks to tie you into world economy that means, local roads must be workable so that others common goods can moves freely within the residential areas, city should be full of high-value jobs in the international corporations, mainly in the services, finance and media industry and Standard airport.
And if you have all these things then you probably have an economically powerful, international-looking, multicultural population that would transpire to a credible city then to global recognized city.
But with the case of our city, you can’t move in other areas of juba specially place like Gumbo, behind Jebel Market to mention few without covering your noise to avoid the prevalence of bad smell and contraction of diseases like cholera and etc. Everywhere is scattered with the empty bottle of water, soda, garbage’s can be accumulated within business centers, houses hotels due to lack of vehicles and poor road network and all these blames to the mismanagement of the city council. Communities have been served with unclean water, collected directly from the running water of river Nile which is very in-hygienic to our lives.
The harmful petroleum had gone into hands of uneducated people, who had no experiences in regard to the danger liquid its impact to the individuals and general public around. What surprises me so much about petrol business around juba along mains roads is the manner in which the oil producing country sells fuel in bottles at the roads sides.
The moment the juba city council operations patrol showed on the road, it is either confiscating the bottles of fuel from poor women children or the property of surviving vendors whose confiscated items get disappeared before reaching the city council office. That kind of city management can be termed as lootings because, vendors’ property are not officially recorded and kept, the issue in contention is not addressed amicably for them to realize their mistakes.
Is either you reform from the ethnic capital city or risk wider criticisms and fair game will huge on waste communities and individuals are incurring on daily basis for the seeks of transforming the capital city to be world recognized city while the resources generated from the suffering citizens are not used in a manner of not achieving fundamental development for the Capital city.
We will not continue entertaining excuses of blame games of funds from the national government even the institutions that can provide themselves more than national government, is either you stop fining business people; individual’s and rely on the funds from the national government than to continue taking resources from people for selves-enrichment.
In conclusion, Lord Mayor H/W Stephen Wani Michael has a lot to transform in juba city council especially the losses incurred by his predecessor Mr. Chris Wani. Lord Mayor, you need to deliver services like providing quality water and waste management, services to juba city, that protect the environment, health, improve the quality of life, support planned growth and maintain public trust, provide quality Bus Parks and recreation services and finally to provide reliable, sustainable infrastructures for our communities with a focus of exceeding customers’ expectations.
I will rest my case here but the part two of this article will be release with the evidence of individual’s names if the situation remained the same and in case of any response from the institution. Not emotional. God bless residents of Juba city and entire people of south Sudan.
The author of this article is a south Sudanese national, live in Juba and a student of Kampala University and can be reach on thonatemayiei@gmail.com or +211922888553
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