South Sudan gets ready to celebrate becoming a nation

ROADS were blocked, the ramshackle airport closed and streetlights hastily erected yesterday in the chaotic capital of what will today become the world's newest nation.

Armies of government workers have been working around the clock to "beautify" Juba for an invasion of dignitaries arriving to celebrate the birth of the Republic of South Sudan.

The world's 193rd country will be born of the separation into two of what was Africa's largest country, Sudan. Its majority Christian south has fought the Muslim north for 38 of the 54 years since independence from Britain, and the birth of the new state stands as the final stage of a peace deal agreed in 2005.

But even as the VIPs stream into central Juba for the military march-past and the singing of the new national anthem, millions of people in the country's vast rural areas scrape by in conditions barely registering on development indices.

A 15-year-old South Sudanese girl is more likely to die in childbirth than she is to finish primary schooling - even though Britain's aid spending here, at 90 million a year, is among the highest per capita in the world.

There are fewer than 500 doctors in a country the size of France, asphalt roads and electricity are so rare as to be seen as modern marvels, and illiteracy rates run as high as 92 per cent.

All of that will be far from the view of the hundreds of delegates arriving in the new capital today, including William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN - and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Darfur.

Hollywood celebrities including George Clooney have embraced calls for South Sudan's independence in the name of peace, but in the end the closest thing to glamour in the audience was Luol Deng, the British-Sudanese basketball player.

Strict security checks across Juba have dampened festivities, but people are quietly excited.

Ahok Atem, 23, a Juba University student, said: "This is the thing our fathers fought for in the bush for so long. It is correct that the world's leaders come to see the birth of our nation and the end of our oppression."

However, the new nation's future is so fragile that the UN is poised to send a force of 7,000 military peacekeepers and 900 police here as soon as possible.

After years of war, when more than half of the south's population was at one time enrolled in the military, there are up to a million guns in the south, mostly in civilian hands. Surrounding South Sudan are some of Africa's least stable states, including the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

Inside the country, militia allied to renegade army generals still occasionally go on the offensive. Raids by ethnic groups on rivals to steal cattle leave hundreds dead each year.

Even South Sudan's borders are not yet clearly defined. There are ongoing - but virtually stalled - negotiations on this.

The key hurdle in the coming months will be just how much money the new nation can expect from its main export, oil.

Since the end of the war, in 2005, north and south Sudan have shared revenue from the oil - which lies mostly in the south - 50-50, largely because it must be refined and exported from the north. But no new deal on how to share oil cash has been agreed.

George Conway, deputy head of the UN Development Programme's office in Juba, said: "We need to be modest in managing the expectations of what South Sudan can achieve, and how quickly. There has been good progress since the end of the war, but real change is going to be generational."