Ramciel lies in Yirol East County, in Lakes State, in the Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan - about 250 kilometers north of Juba. Under ideal conditions, the drive to Juba would take roughly three hours on a rough road; to Rumbek, also about three hours; to Wau, up to six. The Sudd, the largest grass swamp in the world, stretches across the middle of Greater Bahr el Ghazal and Greater Upper Nile, making direct road communication between the country's four corners almost impossible during the wet season. Ramciel was chosen precisely because it stands on the southern rim of this obstacle, a geographic center that could at least be reached from most directions for most of the year. The land is used for grazing and dry-season cultivation; during the wet season, herds move into the Nile marshes. Some observers describe the site as woodland and grassland with rocky highlands that could support a major city. Others are less optimistic about what the ground can bear.

The inhabitants of Ramciel are mainly Aliab Dinka, one of many Dinka sub-groups that together form the largest ethnic population of South Sudan. The proposed capital site lies in Makur Boma of Abuyung Payam, in Awerial County - a piece of land that is not abstract to the people who live on it. It has grazing patterns, cattle-camp names, water points, fishing spots, and generations of the dead buried in known places. The prospect of building an Abuja or a Brasília or a Canberra here raises the same questions that every planned capital has raised: who gets to stay, who gets compensated, what happens to the sacred sites, and whose version of the past becomes the foundation the new city is built on.

In 2011, Vice President Riek Machar visited the site and described plans for a major international airport in a free-trade zone at Tali Payam of Terkeka County, about 50 kilometers southwest of Ramciel. Machar suggested it could handle large cargo aircraft that other regional airports could not, and envisioned South Sudan as a continental trade hub. A contract for a survey and feasibility study was awarded in 2012. Machar visited Kenisa, also called Panhom, where a river port was supposed to be built. These plans were real, in the sense that announcements and contracts were real. They were not real in the sense that buildings started going up. The civil war of 2013-2020 absorbed the government's attention, its money, and many of its people. Ramciel stayed on the map as a plan, and off the map as a place.

A 2024 Newsweek investigation noted that satellite imagery shows practically no construction at Ramciel - the proposed capital of the world's youngest country remains, in visual terms, a promise rather than a place. Juba, meanwhile, has continued to serve as capital despite its acknowledged problems: overcrowded infrastructure, a location on the southern edge of the country, an urban growth rate its municipal services have not kept up with. Building a new capital from nothing is expensive and slow even in the best of times, and South Sudan's times have not been the best. For now, Ramciel is a thought experiment on the ground - the place where a country was supposed to plant its heart, and where, instead, a country keeps proving how hard starting over really is. The Aliab Dinka cattle keep moving to the toich in dry season and back to the grasslands with the rains, keeping time on a calendar that predates any constitution.