Arne's Observations

Arne Doornebal is a Dutch freelance journalist working out of Kampala, Uganda. For Club Africa he shares his experiences living and working as a journalist in Africa

The worlds’ newest capital city Juba

Africa’s most expensive city

A three-bedroom house, air-conditioned but really nothing special. In the worlds’ newest capital city Juba you will easily pay 4,000 US Dollars per month to rent it.

A new year, a new country, a new challenge. Since two weeks I am an inhabitant of Juba, arguably Africa’s most expensive city. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard a fellow journalist was paying ‘one-five’ per month for one, non-self contained room. ‘One-five what?’ He meant one thousand five hundred dollars. “A good deal for Juba, since it includes breakfast and dinner.”

Influx of expatriates

Where do these extraordinary prices come from? When in 2005 a peace deal was signed here, the massive influx of United Nations staff and expatriate NGO workers had to find accommodation. Owners of the few brick houses left standing after two decades of war seized the opportunity and asked for thousands of dollars rent. Juba can make you very rich. It can also make you very poor. Those were the days that Juba didn’t have hotels. Quick money makers put up compounds full of tents, which they rented out at a hundred bucks per night. Nobody liked them but everybody had to pay up. The tents then made way for prefab and the type of containers soldiers around the world spend their nights in. As faith in a good future for South Sudan increased, more brick buildings sprang up and by now you can find yourself a tiny hotel room for 35 dollars per night.

Sleeping on the floor

This is still too much for a man like David Maduku, from Uganda. “Juba is now like Europe,” he told me. “We believe that whoever goes there, will come back rich.” So David sleeps on the floor of a recently completed building, side by side with a group of builders- fellow Ugandans. Juba might not be the ‘promised land’ that many East Africans first thought it was anymore.

There is nothing I can do for David. He has been here a month, and his savings are melting rapidly. Food in Juba is expensive too, since almost all of it is imported from abroad, having been transported 2,000 km by road from the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

I keep wondering why the prices of houses are not coming down. The building boom is massive, so property gets to the market every day. I guess when the standard is set, people keep overpaying. It’s the kind of bubble we also saw in Kampala for many years. Embassies were willing to pay two thousand dollars for an apartment, so everybody who owned an apartment put the price exactly there. No matter if it was worth it or not. The only way to bring it down is to re-negotiate and not carelessly paying every amount which is asked for. Bubbles will eventually burst, is the lesson Western economies are teaching us these days.

Question: do hyper expensive cities benefit Africa’s growth?