Juba in South Sudan. The coutry has been battered by years of fighting South Sudan, the world's newest country, has announced it will not celebrate its independence day this year.
Why not? It simply doesn't have the money.
"We decided not to celebrate the July 9 Independence Day, because we don't want to spend that much," information minister Michael Makuei Lueth told reporters on Tuesday, according to Al Jazeera. "We need to spend the little that we have on other issues."
South Sudan declared independence from Sudan on July 9, 2011, after a bloody civil war with Sudan's ethnically Arab north that had lasted decades. In a referendum that year, almost 99 per cent of voters cast their votes for independence, and much of the international community swiftly recognized the fledgling nation.
This year, the second Saturday of July would have been the fifth anniversary of the country's independence. However, while the country has celebrated in past years — even as it struggled with a new civil war post-independence — the financial burden of the celebrations was just too much this year.
Lueth said that the cost of the celebrations would be at least 10 million South Sudanese pounds, the Associated Press reports, which is more than $450,000. “If we can get this amount of money, we would prefer to use it for resolving our problems in the economy, such as issues of payment of salaries and so forth,” Lueth explained.