POWER SUPPLY IN JUBA IS A NIGHTMARE
By Loro Louis Yugu (Guest Writer)
This service fella has made me to have a say. He has taken the zeal to speak out point blank that the world has rated our country to be the least in electricity supply to its citizens. This nationalist is someone called Tom Remis, serving the country as the Undersecretary in the Ministry of Energy and Dams.
For years, Juba had battled with high costs of electricity to the extent that some patients had perished in the hospital due to power blackout.
Juba as the only centre of modernity in the country will never compete with other cities if our servicemen continue to sit like robots in their offices without tangible plans to light the city and other towns in the country.
At the moment, the electricity in Juba is too expensive for the ordinary citizens to afford leaving the populace to use candles as their only source of light. How can we have only 1 percent supply of electricity in the country of abundant oil? The Ministry of Energy and Dams should not be the ministry of darkness and power blackout. We cannot have a ministry of Energy and Dams when we don’t have any single dam in the country? We don’t want a ‘Ministry of Unknown Dam.’ I think the Ministry should be renamed until a dam is constructed in South Sudan because where there is no light there is no life.
This Ministry should begin by dealing with the electricity companies that are robbing the citizens in broad day light by fixing high electricity bills for the poor citizens in the name of the US dollar rate.
It is high time the leadership of this country know that electricity is an essential part of modern life and it helps us in many different aspects.
Electricity is used for lighting, heating, cooling, and refrigeration, for medical purposes and for operating appliances, electronics, computers, public transportation systems, and much more. In this modern era, we are nonentity without power.
The citizens want to see the South Sudan where electricity is used for modern agricultural methods, whereby the process of conditioning and storing grains and grass on farms is carried out by modern electrical machinery, as well as milking and cooling milk in dairy farms. This is where development will boom in all parts of the Country.
In Juba, electricity is only seen along the Munuki, Juba town, Nimra Talata and few other streets but the outskirts of Juba are in total damning darkness including the Freedom Bridge road leading to Jebel Market. Something must be done urgently to light all parts of Juba to call it a city of the republic of South Sudan.
It is worth mentioning that adequate power supply indeed is an inevitable requirement to any country’s growth. Mechanization and rejuvenation cannot be achieved without reliable electricity.
Otherwise if the power sector is abundant, South Sudan will continue to remain far from the centre of modernity.
The Author is a Senior Editor with No.1 Citizen Daily Newspaper. He can be reached via email: lorolojokudu@gmail.com