“Wild West” seeks cowboys

By Peter Guest | Published: 24 November, 2010

Mr Ensor is instead thinking of more practical matters. “We obviously have to make sure the [mobile] sites are filled up with diesel well in advance of it, because what tends to happen is that they tend to restrict movements during the election process. We will try to get sites filled up in good time, we will try and do our maintenance schedule to try to plan to do it before or after, not during. We will try to limit our movements going out. However, if a site goes down, we will take precautions – but we will still have to go out.”

A few miles away, down a waterlogged road near Juba’s half-constructed new airport, Vikash Patel’s preparations for the fractious end to 2010 consist of stacks of frozen Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas hams. A Kenyan, Mr Patel runs Nature Valley Organic Farms Ltd, one of South Sudan’s largest importers of meat, dry goods and cleaning supplies. As with many of the entrepreneurs who have made it in South Sudan, his company was beset by teething troubles and had to engineer creative solutions to some of the country’s infrastructure and procedural challenges, not least the construction from scratch of not only the storage facility, but the entire graded access road.

Nature Valley’s products are all imported from Kenya, and need to be kept entirely frozen. Despite his yard’s proximity to the airport and the long journey times overland from Kenya, Mr Patel’s early experiences with air freight were unsuccessful.

“It’s easier to control the temperatures by road than by air because of the infrastructure that they have here,” he says. “The holding capacity in Nairobi is OK outside the airport but not inside. And also here, as soon as it gets down here you’re basically fighting time trying to get into the airport to pick up the stuff off the runway, because there’s no holding facility, bonding facility… We did a couple of trial shipments by air, but they were bust.”

Everything, then, had to come by road. “The first consignment that came in by truck took us almost nine days. Now we’ve got it down to three,” Mr Patel says.

This improvement was not down to material changes in the infrastructure or customs procedures, but by a clever – and expensive – new process. “We use smaller trucks and we do all the pre-clearances before. We also use two vehicles to move one truck of meat up. There’s a meat truck, and we have a pickup truck that goes up with the documents,” Mr Patel explains. “If we are going to wait 8 hours at the border, we’re going to lose about 7-8 degrees [centigrade of cooling] in the back. The pickup truck also has an extra driver and a [refrigeration] technician on it, with gas and all that on it, so they can sort out any issues on the road… We basically drive our truck like a bus. Wherever it’s safe to drive at night, we just drive throughout.”

This, added to the requirement to construct infrastructure, the high cost of running generators continuously – Juba Power, the local grid supplier, is not yet reliable and would require the company to pay for its own poles and wiring – as well as the variable tariffs, duties and land rents, means that the outlay adds up. “The cost of doing business in Juba is ridiculously high,” Mr Patel acknowledges. Even so, he is enjoying a roaring trade, bringing in around 6 tonnes of meat per month.

“Initially when we came in we had one competitor, which was South Sudan meats. He’s also from Kenya. But there’s so much potential that these things have cropped up everywhere. You’ve got the boda-boda [motorbike taxi] salesmen from Uganda bringing in stuff by bus. Then we have a lot of Lebanese who are bringing in chicken.”

As with other importers, Mr Patel’s concerns around the referendum mainly focus on the closing of the borders harming his ability to stock up, but with the Christmas period typically lean – the legions of expats returning home for much of the season – he is not overly worried.