One day, Bentiu's Grand Hotel may live up to its name
From the Grand Hotel, Bentiu, Lindsey Hilsum blogs that South Sudan needs to harness the potential of its oil wealth if the new country is to realise its potential.
The manager of the Grand Hotel, Bentiu, Unity State, South Sudan told me he’d had a hard day.
“I had to go a very long way to find charcoal,” he said.
That’s what his staff are using to cook for their guests. As I write this, we’re waiting for three people to join us for dinner – they’ll be served roast goat, while cameraman Ray Queally and I are sticking to vegetables and rice.
The Grand is the best hotel in Bentiu. It has electricity some of the time, which elevates it above others. No running water, but you can’t have everything.
In our short stay here, we have grown accustomed to bucket baths in the wooden bathroom shack. It’s so incredibly, unbearably, stiflingly hot that I don’t care whether the water’s in a tap or I have to pour it over myself using a broken plastic jug.
Credit: Ray Queally
Any water feels good before trying to sleep on my cot, which dips like a hammock beneath the mosquito net.
So Bentiu is poor. Yet it sits next to the greatest asset of this new nation – oil. They welcomed us to Unity Oilfield, proud that on Saturday it will officially belong to South Sudan. For the last six years, since the peace deal which brought to an end the long war between south and north Sudan, the revenue from oil has been shared 50/50.
Most of the oilfields lie in the south, while the refineries and ports – everything needed for export – are in the north. After Independence the south will still depend on the north until it builds new pipelines, but the oil revenue will immediately provide a staggering 98 per cent of South Sudan’s budget.
The real question is whether the wealth from oil will trickle down to the people. So far it hasn’t. There are a few more roads, but that’s about it.
People complain that the government is corrupt, that senior members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – the political group whose guerrilla army fought the north for independence – are creaming off the oil profits. With independence, there should be new accountability.
They will also need good relations with the old enemy, their northern neighbour. At the moment, food is expensive in Bentiu, and basic items such as bread and tomatoes are unavailable because most items are brought from Khartoum.
The Sudan government has blocked the supply since May, maybe to make sure southerners know how dependent they will continue to be.
If independence is to benefit ordinary citizens, South Sudan needs to use its oil wealth to invest in agriculture, infrastructure, industry, education and pretty much everything else, to provide jobs and create wealth.
Only then will people’s lives improve, and the Grand Hotel, Bentiu, be able to live up to its name.
Follow Lindsey Hilsum on Twitter: @lindseyhilsum