Amidst a quietly raging war with neighbours Sudan, which has continued to attack its territories in intermittent air strikes, Africa’s newest nation, South Sudan is hoping to launch infrastructure projects after it secured an $8 billion loan from foremost investor, China.
Only some one-week ago, officials from South Sudan’s capital city of Juba alleged the killing of 10 people in Bentiu and Panakuach from bombs dropped by Sudanese warplanes. Asides the loss of lives, such bombings have equally been destroying social infrastructure, which are usually not quantified.
Information Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin has revealed that the loan will finance projects in agriculture, infrastructure, telecommunications and hydropower projects.
“China has offered financial funding to the value of $8 billion for major development projects,” he said. “China will consider an offer to finance an alternative oil pipeline to Kenya’s northern coast that would bypass Sudan’s pipelines.”
The funds are to be provided over the next two years and Chinese companies will conduct the projects.
The loan announcement comes just after President Salva Kiir Mayardit’s first official visit to China, which has major oil interests in both South Sudan and its northern neighbour, Sudan.
Through its oil giants, China National Petroleum Corp and Sinopec, the world’s most populated country is already the biggest investor in oilfields in South Sudan. But it has continued to balance its concerns in both countries, as Beijing’s support for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir predates the latter Sudan’s independence 11 months ago.
The two Sudanese countries have been embroiled in a gradually intensifying dispute over control of the oil-rich province of Heglig along their shared border; oil export fees; border demarcation; and citizenship, leading to substantial plummeting of oil production in the two countries, which combine to form one of the continent’s most important oil producers.
South Sudan depends on oil for nearly 98 percent of its state revenue and the dispute-induced shutdown of oil facilities is pressuring its economy. Although it received control of three-quarters of the oil production it initially shared with Sudan, many of the pipelines to export the oil are located in Sudan. It is, therefore, seeking to build two alternative pipelines, one through Ethiopia and Djibouti, and the other to a port in Kenya.
