NAIROBI: UN investigators on Tuesday accused South Sudanese authorities of plundering their country’s wealth, including by paying $1.7 billion to companies affiliated with Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel for road construction work that was never done.
The payments from 2021 to 2024 were just one example of “grand corruption” in the impoverished nation, according to the report by the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, where average gross domestic product per capita is now a quarter of what it was at independence in 2011.
“The country has been captured by a predatory elite that has institutionalized the systematic looting of the nation’s wealth for private gain,” said the commission, which was created in 2016 by the UN Human Rights Council.
The report cites an annual budget allocation to the president’s medical unit that exceeded health spending across the entire country.
In an official written response sent to the UN commission, Justice Minister Joseph Geng said the report was based on figures that do not match the government’s own data and attributed South Sudan’s economic problems to conflict, climate change and falling sales of its chief export, crude oil.
