Roads, navigation and agriculture should top the next development programme

Since our nation has halted oil production in all our fields following looting of the biggest proportion of our oil resources by Khartoum, while the whole nation waits for next programme for our survival, the wise austerity financial measures taken should consider all the ministries raising revenue through their activities. The ministry of finance and economic planning should take stock of all the ministries involved in revenue collection, get involved and take charge of all the revenue raised in these institutions.  While the backbone of the funding of government activities will be through systematic collection of taxes and other charges such as custom and excise duties all other taxation should be taken into consideration so that all monies collected by government institutions should go straight to government coffers controlled by the ministry of finance.  Agriculture, our mainstay since time immemorial should be modernized by application of tractors and other farming equipment. Since the ministries of agriculture at national and state levels have no farms they should get into the fields to fund the rural cultivators by supplying them with seeds, fertilizers, tractors on loan basis, and give them extension services. Only practical work and not theories or statements will make us to reap the harvests of our deeds. In our agriculture venture, we should introduce irrigation because at certain period of the year we may face drought so that we can have alternative means of watering our crops. Irrigation cannot be necessarily done by building dams across the Nile but our ministries of agriculture can import water drawing or pumping equipment to supply our crop fields grown along the Nile so that we can have plenty of harvests. Besides agricultural undertaking, we should also be mindful of our road connection in South Sudan. While we have halted oil production, one of the fields of our preparation for future take-off to success should be building of roads especially inter-state roads so that when we have come to the point of resumption of oil production we should be able to export our crude to neighbouring countries using land while our black gold will flow through our own pipeline that we shall build with the agreement of friendly nations excluding Sudan. Opening South Sudan with modern roads will ease for us the transport bottlenecks that our country faces. The roads can connect our states to the Nile which is a natural highway in the middle of our nation which links six of our states namely Eastern Equatoria, Central Equatoria, Jonglei, Lakes, Unity and Upper Nile. The Nile route out of South Sudan to Uganda can be revived with the old port of Nimule renovated so that the steamers can connect the two countries which are good trade partners for trade to flourish. The Democratic Republic of Congo can be added to this waterway. To make the Nile waterway busy we need to invite investors to undertake shipbuilding so that we can have modern vessels for transportation of oil, goods, and passengers. We should undertake these development activities at this time and we should not wait and the outcome will be pleasing to every citizen.