Even if you have followed all the horrors of war in the wider East Africa and Horn of Africa region, the barbarities that continue to come out of the South Sudan conflict are still likely to shock you.

Giving up, or looking away in cynicism is no longer possible – that’s how bad things are in the world’s newest nation.

When a murderous war broke out between President Salva Kiir’s Dinka-dominated faction of the ruling SPLM, and his former deputy Riek Machar’s mostly Nuer camp, Uganda intervened.

Officially, Uganda said it intervened to prevent a genocide. However, in the end, the Uganda People’s Defence Forces became little more than a crude praetorian guard for Kiir.

It probably prevented a fight for control being centred on the capital Juba, and that may have meant fewer people were slaughtered, but it also made Kiir intransigent, unwilling to yield in negotiations and using the opportunity to rearm.

And so we have arrived where we are today. Matters are so desperate, even the thoughtful (by South Sudan standards) former SPLM secretary-general, Pagan Amum, who is now leader of the SPLM-Former Detainees, has suggested that his country should become a temporary United Nations Protectorate to save it. Otherwise, he warned, its collapse will be total and final.

There are several possible solutions to the crisis in South Sudan, but in the long-term Uganda can play the most constructive role, if President Yoweri Museveni’s political calculations permit it.

If we look at the length of immediate post-Independence breakdown wars that happen in modern Africa, Mozambique’s lasted 15 years and Angola’s 27. Going by those two, it is conceivable that the current conflict in South Sudan could last about 20 years – meaning the guns could only go silent around 2036. It’s too appalling a prospect to contemplate.

So what would help? First, the world should support a second capital for South Sudan in Nimule, close to the Uganda border.

That would create an alternative centre of gravity away from Juba, which has become bedevilled by fratricidal Dinka-Nuer political competition. There is a view that the people of Eastern Equatoria, and most of the wider Equatoria zone in South Sudan, are more pragmatic and business-minded, meaning you can cut deals with them.

But the goal of bolstering Nimule would be to have a place where a Ugandan force, acting in concert with other regional and international players, can quickly intervene and create a protection zone, even over the objection of the murderous warlords in Juba. They would also create a humanitarian corridor for taking emergency supplies in, and taking non-combatant civilians out.

Along with that, Uganda could create a South Sudan economic free zone in a small swathe of its territory at the two countries’ common border, allowing companies from the country to trade and hold their assets – like cash – there.

That would not only protect their business and assets from destruction, seizure, and looting by the myriad militias, but offer South Sudan its version of what Eastleigh, in the suburbs of Nairobi, was to Somalia in the worst of its nightmare years.

It would create in reserve a financial and business infrastructure that would be valuable in the reconstruction of South Sudan, once its present overlords have died or been ousted, and the country climbs out of its grave.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3