Engineer Kenyatta Benjamin Warille has been the Executive Director of the South Sudan Roads Authority (SSRA) since its inception in 2011.
He says the outfit is cash-strapped and that this has affected and curtailed its capacity to build and rehabilitate roads in the country. Warille also said he is not aware of the details of ongoing interstate road works in the country because his office was not involved in awarding the contracts.
Radio Tamazuj caught up with him and sounded him out about the road sector in South Sudan.
Below are edited excerpts:
Q: There is little or no public information about the roads sector in South Sudan. Why is it that the South Sudan Roads Authority (SSRA) and the National Ministry of Roads and Bridges do not put out information transparently about the sector?
A: Thank you very much for the question. I think the very reason that you are here is to close that gap and this is the kind of interaction we need so that the public is informed about the road sector.
I take this opportunity positively to talk to our public through the media. As a government agency dealing in roads, we have so many categories of roads in this country. We have trunk roads connecting the states and administrative areas.
Also, any road linking the country to the neighbouring countries is considered a trunk road and these3 roads are a responsibility of the central government.
So, currently, we have classified around 17,000 kilometres of roads, both primary and secondary roads. Out of those 17,000 kilometres, 6,500 kilometres of roads are trunk roads.
Of course, when I talk about the central government, the core of it is the Ministry of Roads and Bridges and the South Sudan Roads Authority (SSRA). As a matter of policy, the SSRA is supposed to be the implementing arm of the roads ministry on matters pertaining to roads. The ministry is charged with policy specification and oversight of what is being done on roads.
The government in its dealing with trunk roads will set up policies that are laid out by the ministry of roads and bridges and then once those policies are supposed to be implemented, then the SSRA is supposed to be doing that.
Q: Is the Authority in charge of road construction management, including facilitation and cost? What is your mandate exactly?
A: The mandate of SSRA is very simple, and is enshrined in instituting a legal framework that is the Southern Sudan Road Authority Act. It is still ‘Southern Sudan’ because it was done before independence.
According to the act, the mandate of the SSRA is to manage, develop, rehabilitate, and maintain all trunk roads in South Sudan. So, all activities from development to management to rehabilitation and maintenance of trunk roads are the mandate of the South Sudan Roads Authority. However, in carrying out its mandate, it depends on the policies laid down by the roads ministry. This is how it works.
Q: How many kilometres of roads are there in South Sudan right now, at what cost were they built and what is their quality?
A: I may not be in a position to state exactly the cost of all these roads but what I know about is we have had this 192-kilometer Juba-Nimule Road which was built with support from USAID. It was handed over to the Government of South Sudan in 2012. Of recent, we have this paved section of Juba-Bor-Malakal-Renk-Joda Road which I understand 200 kilometres has been paved all the way to Bor and work is ongoing on the section between Bor and Ayod leading to Malakal.
Another section is the Juba- Bahr el Ghazal Road and 63 kilometres have been paved up to Terekeka and it was opened by President Salva Kiir. So, 63 kilometres out of the 400 has already been paved and opened to traffic.
It is my understanding that there are other projects going on in Bahr el Ghazal but I might not have details about them because I do not manage them. Probably the Ministry of Roads and Bridges will have enough information about that.
Q: How about the Juba-Yambio-Tambura-Wau Road which was launched by the president last year?
A: Bush clearance has been done I think close to Tambura all the way from Juba. But you know in road construction, there are a series of activities that you do. You do the bush clearing, you do the formation of the road, the foundation, and then you start putting some layers until you reach the stone base and then you reach the asphalt surface. I think the project was delayed a little bit because of cash flow issues and now we have lost that advantage of bush clearance that has been done because now it has grown back into even more lush bush so you have to redo the bush clearance again. On the Juba-Torit-Nadapal Road, there are sections that have been formed and embarked but it is my understanding that no asphalt paving has been started there, again due to cash flow issues.
Q: What was the bidding process and how were these contracts awarded to the companies undertaking the various road works?
A: I cannot comment on that because those projects are being run by the Ministry of Roads and Bridges and probably they are the right people to answer.
Q: -How is the state of roads across South Sudan currently?
A: I can qualitatively rate the state of trunk roads in South Sudan in general as fair. The majority of them are in the bracket of the fair to poor because I know of some roads in some parts of this country that are seasonal, to be frank. When it rains, they become completely waterlogged and are closed, they are not motorable.
Q: Why is the Authority unable to connect the whole of South Sudan with a network of paved roads?
A: Connecting roads is a process, it is not an event, and it takes a lot of planning and a lot of time to do all the activities necessary to come up with a finished road. South Sudan Roads Authority has been in existence since 2012 but unfortunately all this time it has not been resourced and mandated enough to be able to do its part in managing, rehabilitating, and maintaining the trunk roads in South Sudan.
Q: Are South Sudanese engineers involved in road construction or only foreign companies?
A: There are South Sudanese involved with all these companies but let us think about it this way; construction companies are businesses. Somebody has money as an entrepreneur and sets up a company and he or she may not necessarily be an engineer but sets up that business and hires professionals to run the business, economists, material engineers, civil engineers, project managers, etc, to run the business and of course all these professionals, some are foreigners and some of them are South Sudanese.
The real issue we have here is numbers given the amount of work that needs to be done in terms of construction and opening of up new roads and we need more engineers than what our institutions of high learning and training facilities can produce. So, there is always that gap and it is unfortunately currently being covered by foreign engineers. So, there is a need for us to up the ante in terms of producing quality engineers and also bumping up the quantities of numbers.
Q: What are the challenges facing road infrastructure in South Sudan?
A: Mainly financing because road construction is a capital-intensive industry. Financing is a main issue but even if you get financing, it is a capital-intensive industry and you need expertise in making sure that there is value for money because there is a risk if the people managing such huge amounts of money are not well grounded in ethics and law. So, to me, financing and technical capacity to manage this big financing are the main bottlenecks to the road construction industry in South Sudan.
Q: Are you the one in charge of safety and maintenance?
A: I told you about the mandate of the South Sudan Roads Authority and they are management, development, rehabilitation, and maintenance of trunk roads only. There other categories of roads that we are not responsible for are state roads originating in the same state from point A to B. These are the responsibility of the state roads ministries. Even within a state, there could be roads only within one county which county authorities take care of those and it goes on like that until you reach a situation where you have boma roads and payam roads.
Q: Does the government have the capacity to ensure all these roads are of good quality?
A: Again, the two main challenges I mentioned earlier, financing and capacity to manage these finances effectively come in. When we talk about that capacity, it includes the process of procurement because road or infrastructure procurement differs from product procurement in a sense that, for example, if you go to buy a laptop, it is already a finished product you can inspect, test and try it before you decide to buy it for that price. For infrastructure, you are buying something off the blueprints, it does not exist physically, you cannot inspect it, you cannot test it and it starts with an intellectual process and somebody imagining that that road should look like this, have this many lanes and should traverse a certain alignment between point A, B, C, D. And then people go about mobilizing all the resources to make it happen so there are a lot of unknowns when you start off.
Even the cost that you estimate at the beginning are just rough estimates and in such a project, you have a lot of cost overruns. You can estimate the cost to be 50 million and before you finish it, you are hitting 200 million. So, there are a lot of unknowns there and that is why the process of procurement has to be watertight so that you end up reasonably selecting the best contractor and consultant for the job.
If your procurement process is faulty, then you will also run into problems because you end up picking somebody incompetent to do such a job and then you need to have an extension because you cannot deliver within the timeframe or there are cost overruns and then you have to find more money and sometimes you just have to abandon the project. So the procurement process in our business is key, if not done right, then there is a huge problem.
Q: What is the cost of maintenance and how frequently is maintenance done?
A: No matter what amount is there, it does not mean anything if you cannot access it and this has been our issue with the budget for the last five or six years. There is money to be thrown there in the budget, you do the procurement process, you send for payment from the finance ministry and they never pay. They always say there is no money, and eventually nothing happens.
Q: So we can say your hands are tied?
A: Definitely. If you do not have money, no activity can take place. If you have to manage something effectively, you got to have boots on the ground, there should be engineers going down there to do assessments, testing, and a lot of things. If you cannot facilitate them with vehicles, do you expect them to walk 50 kilometres inspecting a road? That is impossible.
Q: What is the budget for roads and is it enough to connect South Sudan?
A: In the last few years, the government, at least on paper, has prioritized roads including ending up with policies of oil for infrastructure, but that money is released irregularly. It is one thing to have money on paper in the budget and another to have this money released within the financial year. You know our Appropriation Act has a sunset clause and when you reach 30 June, you cannot access whatever you had on that budget, used or unused. You cannot carry it forward to the next financial year so you lose it. So, whatever you are doing then needs to wait for the new financial year. So, you will budget for the next year and may not even get the money so you are stuck.
Q: What is the plan for the roads from Juba to Eastern Equatoria and Western Equatoria? When are they going to start?
A: These are running projects and there are contractors on site but I am not the one running the project. It is being run by the ministry of roads and bridges but it is my understanding that there are also cash flow issues. With this capital-intensive industry, when there is no money, nothing moves so probably we need to find a way of making sure that money flows into the project continually from beginning to finish then we can finish on time. If money stops, that means activities stop because there are a lot of moving parts. There is machinery and whether you bought it or are renting it, there are people working, suppliers of fuel and trucks and all these things need money.
Q: What is the cost per kilometer of the roads being implemented right now, especially the Juba-Upper Nile and Juba-Bahr el Ghazal roads?
A: I always hear this question and think it is misleading because there are no two roads that are equal or the same because a road runs in a certain terrain. If the terrain is mountainous, then you have to cut some of these or dig a tunnel and do a lot of things. If a road is undulating, then there are areas where for safety purposes, you have to put barriers or raise it up in terms of embankment. That means you have to import materials.
Some materials like black cotton soil are expansive and when they are wet, they increase in volume and when dry, they shrink. This fluctuation in volume will end up cracking your asphalt or the surface of the road. We call them unsuitable and you treat them chemically or physically to make them stable in terms of volume.
So, not all our projects are going to run through terrain with suitable materials around the project area, sometimes, you have to import them from distances. I know in some parts of South Sudan, suitable materials can be imported from distances of 60 or 70 kilometres away. It means that you send a truck in the morning 65 kilometres away on a road that is not paved and it has to struggle for 5 or 6 hours, load the material and come back for another 6 hours.
So, not all the roads are comparable because they run through different terrains, and as such their costs are going to be different though it is only one kilometre.
If you have a road that runs through areas with a lot of streams, then you have to build a lot of bridges.
Q: Do you think the policy of oil for infrastructure is sustainable?
A: As a policy, I think is a good one because it gives you a ring fence full of money to plan with. Whether you take only the seed money and start building a road or you put it as collateral somewhere in order to top it up with loans so that you can do even bigger projects, what matters is implementation. However, currently, I think we are using the seed money to construct that has a multiplying effect.
If I were to advise, we should leverage this money to get more loans so that we can do bigger projects.
Q: What is your message to the public?
A: The government is challenged in many ways not necessarily because we are doing things wrong, but because the challenge is enormous. There are a lot of competing priorities and they all need attention.
What we need to do now is to focus on our areas of competence to see what efficiencies we can bring on board. Individually and collectively, if we aggregate all these, will improve the efficiency of our performance as government and as people. By doing so we will actually be helping ourselves.
We can point fingers and say this is not happening because of X and Y but ultimately all of us suffer so let us concentrate on our areas of influence and try to do it right.
Let us try to do it efficiently and be considerate of the fact that we are investing not only in ourselves but in the future generation to come because we have only one South Sudan.