Africa, Headlines

TRANSPORT-SOUTH SUDAN: Going Nowhere, Fast

Skye Wheeler

JUBA, Mar 4 2009 (IPS) - Motorcycle Juba style: sit as far back on the seat of the bike as possible. Hold handlebars only loosely when riding but rev frequently whenever stationary.

Put a giant fake diamond into your ear, a Rastafarian or woolly gangster style hat on your head. No helmets, but sunglasses.

Go fast. So fast your shirt seems about to fly off your back. Grow your hair long and ruck it into waves that redden in the dust of your vocation.

The joyous, looping traffic-dodging irreverence of Juba’s hundreds of motorcycle boys – many pre-pubescent – or young men have become a visual centerpiece of peacetime Juba. And so have the dark pools of blood, oil or fuel that together with twisted metal and smashed glass mark yet another high-speed collision.

"We see maybe three accidents a day, mostly with the motorcycles," the Deputy Director of Central Equatoria State Police Service Latjor Peter said. Before its renovation, Juba's main hospital even had an accident and emergency wing nick-named after the most popular brand of the Chinese 125 cc bikes: the Senke Ward.

Thousands roared onto former garrison Juba's potholed streets soon after Sudan's 2005 north-south peace deal. Newly-opened borders and roads allowed in the tiny $600 bikes along with new tighter and brighter clothes, music, DVDs, handbags and high heels.

The motorcycles are not ridden just for the sheer love of speed; many provide a taxi service for the ever-increasing population in a town with few employment opportunities. There’s no industry yet. The young men have little chance in the government, having missed the chance to become part of the swollen former rebel army and lacking experience to set themselves up in other businesses after decades of stultifying war.

Those who have taken up jobs as cleaners at Juba’s new hotels, or as rock crushers or vegetable sellers in markets tend to be women. But riding motorcycles is empowering, at least a bit fun.

"They were trying to begin boda-boda businesses like in Uganda," the south's gender minister Mary Kiden said. "But now they face a lot of competition. It is difficult for them."

Too many on the roads

Prices per ride have gone down drastically as more youth – including migrants from neighboring Uganda – enter a business already jammed up. A short ride in Juba used to cost as much as $8. Now most trips cost less than a third that amount.

Competition comes in another form too: cheaper and safer buses. During the war, the garrison town had only a few beat-up buses of various sizes and colors and as late to 2007 they served only one main route.

With refugees returning and others drawn from war-broken rural areas to swiftly changing Juba whole new neighborhoods have grown up in former bush. Now hundreds of white 14-seat buses clog up numerous routes, swinging dangerously in and out of informal roadside stops.

"We're hoping eventually there will be enough public transport and the boda-boda will die out," Peter said. "They are dangerous."

They have also, so far, been irrepressible. A ban on motorcycles on some of Juba’s few miles of tarmac – treated like an ice rink by the boy riders – was ignored. But the recent appearance of buses there has knocked out an important portion of business ferrying civil servants.

"There are so many buses now, so fewer clients," Ugandan Sunday Charles said. "I am not really saving."

Like the 500 or so other Ugandan bodas he reckons are in Juba, he came to Juba looking for adventure in Africa’s newest capital and more cash. "And it’s too hot," he adds.

The metal floor of the bus Richard Sobek drives is so hot you can feel it cooking your shoes. Like many of the buses on Juba's streets, often imported through the Internet second hand from Dubai or Uganda, its exhaust is black and noxious-smelling.

Sobek talks about his job as he dodges other buses. He barely registers a near-miss as a motorcycle topped with three boys flies across the road. Like all the drivers IPS spoke to he doesn't own his bus.

He gets to choose his routes and how many hours he works for. But his boss, referred to as only ‘Deng’, demands around $65 a day from him. Sobek has to fuel the bus and pay for any small repairs. Most bus rides in Juba cost one Sudanese pound and he carries between 200 to 250 people a day. Other bus drivers work for a percentage cut of each day’s earnings.

"It's more or less about luck, having a good route," he said. "I make maybe 40 pounds ($17) a day."

He doesn't know how much the small boy who confidently finger clicks at passengers for their fare. "He came with the bus. He is someone with Deng," Sobek shrugs. Other busboys share the driver’s profits, getting the equivalent of six or seven U.S. dollars a day.

Like numerous other Eritrean and east Africans, Kenyan Samson Mburrah moved to Juba to get out of the rat race matatu (public buses) trade in Nairobi. There he used to often go home with nothing after paying all his dues to middlemen and his bosses.

Here there no gangs involved. No bus driver knew of any individual owner with more than two buses, unlike Nairobi and Kampala's cartels.

Traffic police are still being re-organized and regulation is light. Appalling driving and missing license plates are treated with an ‘early days’ attitude. There is no control over who plies the various bus routes.

"Of course we all want our own bus one day," Mburrah said. "That is the only way to make real money." With Juba’s fluidity, its constantly growing population and enormous needs this dream is easier to achieve here than back home.

Too cool for school

Appearing out of nowhere with his service, Ugandan Charles knows how to bargain and chat to customers. Southern bodas now also rush to compete for a customer. In 2006-2007, only hefty sums could pluck a motorcyclist away from his intimidatingly cool friends, clumped on market corners, to the despair of teachers or local officials who complained the boys should be in school.

Some saw them as youthful signs of peace. "They are at last aligning themselves to the machine, to modernity," Juba University professor Taban Loliliong said.

Much of the slow appearance of normalcy in town – plagued with slavery, colonialism or war for most of its existence – has come from neighboring Uganda, whose traders also dominate much of the food and drink market.

But professionalism is rubbing off only slowly. Boda Francis Lugga, who says he is 15 years old but looks 12, attempts to go around the roundabout the wrong way "because it is faster" and has a worrying tendency to look at passing traffic rather than ahead. The passenger foot rests slope to the ground. The bike is his brother's.

"I am searching for school fees," he explained. He asked for the IPS reporter's phone number and later made giggling prank calls.

But his chin tilts up when he rides. Like other southern boys, he points his flip-flopped feet downwards to get the breeze between his toes. He constantly increases speed, visibly enjoys the swerve of the bike.

Whatever happens – and analysts predict a return to conflict – at least peace has brought with motorcycles a chance for a moment of rebellious self-expression in a land locked in insurgency for most of the last 50 years.