You must have heard that South Sudan was migrating from the East African Time Zone to West African Time Zone on February 1, 2021, right?

Many people have questioned the process in accurately switching from one time zone to the next. And, there is a possibility that some South Sudanese people may have gone to their workplaces earlier than the reporting time. Now, this is how you switch to the new time zone.

Mobile phone

When using your mobile phone, you can manually change it by going to the settings, then time and date, then you deactivate automatic time set and reset it. Alternatively, you can go to the settings, put your automatic time reset on, then switch off your phone then switch it on. It will automatically pick the new time. Some phones have provisions for using ‘provided time’ and this function uses the GPS to track location so it will definitely switch to the new time zone.

Laptop/Desktop

When using a laptop or a desktop, go to the control panel and click change time zone. Deactivate the automatic time zone button and click on (UTC+2:00 Khartoum) and click on synchronise.

The decision to change the time zone was hatched when the cabinet met last month and approved the switch to the new time zone after the realisation that Juba was on erroneously on the EAT.

“The cabinet came to realise that our current time zone is not our actual zone. We are in longitude 30 and the difference between Greenwich Meantime of the UTC and the longitude is every 15 minutes is one hour. So, we are in the 30th longitude and as such we are supposed to be two hours ahead of the Greenwich Meantime,” Minister for Information and Broadcast Michael Makuei told the press on Friday.

He added: ‘‘…it was clear that far east is 2.4 hours and far west is 1.6 hours. If you combine it will be 4 hours and the average time is 2 hours. It was therefore passed by the cabinet that our official time should be 2 hours from the Greenwich.’’