INVESTMENT CENTRE OPENS IN JUBA AS FIRST HIGHRISE BUILDING PLANS REVEALED
The government in Juba has opened their first dedicated investment one stop centre last weekend it was learned from a regular source in South Sudans capital.
Potential investors, often taken aback by the bureaucracy involved to open shop in South Sudan, have greeted the decision with relief, as it will make visits to a myriad of different offices in different locations unnecessary, once the centre is fully operating. The source from Juba also added that the new facility would aim at halving the time needed to start a business in South Sudan from over two weeks to just one week, progress of sorts but compared with Rwanda, where RDB now guarantees a business start up within 6 hours, still way to go to make investors feel they are truly being facilitated as they expect, especially now that a number of enabling investment related laws have been passed by the parliament in Juba..
Larger scale investments are being targeted by the South Sudan government but have been hard to come by in recent months, as tensions between the South and the erstwhile slave masters in Khartoum reached new levels with regular skirmishes along the common, yet largely not demarcated border, besides the huge controversy of legitimate Southern claims to expand the territory of the new state to the 1956 borders, something the regime in Khartoum has already rejected and threatened to go to war if they could not keep the clearly illegally annexed parts of pre-independence Southern land.
At the same time it was also learned that the International Finance Corporation, the World Banks private sector lending arm, will inject some 5 million US Dollars into a property development which is set to construct Jubas first ever high rise building, dubbed the Equatoria Tower in the heart of the city. Promoted by UAP Insurance together with the Central Equatoria Investment Company, the tower will be the first modern building meeting standards already applied in the wider East African region and surely is a harbinger of things to come, once the South Sudan finds peace and the chance to develop and make economic progress. Watch this space.
