How South Sudan blew billions of Dollars budgets

By Steve Paterno

April 19, 2009 — The government of South Sudan is in a dire situation of financial bankruptcy after squandering billions of US dollars of its oil revenue through rampant corruption and mismanagement. As a result, the government is pounded with criticism from all directions which is sinking its credibility to the lowest ebb. As expected, the government is fighting back to ward-off the condemnations, though in a poorly orchestrated public campaign that include denial, untruthfulness and obstructions.

For example, while in a visit to the US to beg for funds to cover-up for budget shortfall, largely due to previous looted budgets and mismanaged revenue generations, Pagan Amum who is the secretary general of South Sudan ruling party, Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM), denied that the South ever received the estimated figure of 7 billion for the last four years of the interim period. He instead put the total net figure received thus far at about 4 billion. This low figure is however contradicted by the UN estimates, which reported the net worth of South Sudan oil revenue for the last two years alone, amounted to more than 4 billion, leaving the years 2005 through 2006 aside. Actually, when the sales of oil was at its highest peak, the UN reported a transfer of over 2.5 billion remitted to government of South Sudan between the months of January through November of last year alone. The UN figures are generally supported by figures of other reputable institutions, including Sudan’s ministry of finance and national economy. South Sudan does not provide periodic publications on the same for public consumption. Yet, South Sudan officials still believe the public can be taken for granted by concealment of the actual amount of the oil revenue remitted to the government while giving out unsupported figures to the public to rationalize for untraceable amount of the funds.

As the government is not good in concealing facts, it is equally poor in proposing methods to fight corruption. It starts with faulty premises that corruption in South Sudan is not as rampant as it is being reported compared to Khartoum. The officials instead challenge the public to come forward with any evidence of corruption if any against its officials. This preposition defeats the very purpose of the government with all its institutions by abdicating official roles and betraying the oath of duty. With this attitude, it now becomes clear why South Sudan appears ungovernable and seems like on a verge of collapse.

Even more obscene to the general public, the officials in South Sudan advocate that corrupt officials should be compared with the HIV & AIDS infected patients, and the public must shout on top of their heads for the wrong they have done so as to shame them in public. The public shame, they argue, will eventually cause deterrent effect. They say if that have worked well in reducing HIV & AIDS infections in Uganda it will similarly work well to reduce corruption in Sudan. One wonders whether Uganda has done anything along that line, but it is apparently clear that what is being advocated is disgusting, despicable and uncultured.

Though it is universally understood that risky behavior increases chances for HIV & AIDS infections, majority of infected patients (spouse, children etc) never lead dangerously risky life or choose to get sick unlike officials who lead life of corruption and decide to steal. There is no sane culture that advocates for the public taunting of the sick and compares the sick to the thieves and criminal behavior. God forbids any of the corrupted officials would ever also contract HIV & AIDS disease, which they label as stigma to be equated to criminal activities. But this is even besides the point, because if the government can come with such offensive campaign strategy as a means for public awareness in curbing corruption, then what other equally repulsive programs are out there designed to combat diseases such as HIV & AIDS. Perhaps it is right time that the HIV & AIDS activists evaluate what programs that government has in place, if any.

Due to the incompetence, attempted cover-up and complacency, the government has many of these strategies in place, which are hastily planned with the intention to distract the public from the actual ongoing corruption practices. The strategies, senseless as they are, don’t deserve to be mentioned in this piece. The government officials must come to the moment of reckoning. First, they should know the amount of their salaries and compare it to their current assets and their expenses in the country and abroad. A person with a salary of two thousand dollars per month cannot afford to live like a tourist in a hotel that cost over one hundred dollars a day, moreover in one’s own country. This same individual cannot afford to build a mansion in Juba that cost two hundred thousand dollars, buy a ninety thousand luxurious car, and make a purchase of six hundred thousand home in Khartoum. The arithmetic cannot just add up unless some forms of stealing public funds are factored in.

Whatsoever style or approach these leaders used to gain some respect and credibility from the population, nothing will work. It is common knowledge that the public knows the people tainted in this exercise. Since corruption has reached to this massive level, it is paramount that the process to tackle it must start with the individuals involved to self audit themselves and return to the public what belongs to the public. This process will consequently be followed through with thorough investigations, which must result into prosecutions of the culprits and confiscation of properties acquired by public funds siphoned off.

The self audition process must also be applied in human resources recruitment, where those in leadership who use tribalism, nepotism, and cronyism as a means of employment are obligated to reverse their actions by considering competence and national representations in employment. This must start with none other than President Salva Kiir. President Kiir one time had a misfortunate of embarrassing himself when he visited the US and in a public rally, he declared zero tolerance for tribalism. One of his accompanying ministers quipped, “What is President Salva Kiir talking about; he must first look into his own office before he talks of tribalism.” The facts show that tribalism in South Sudan is institutionalized; it is practiced to the extreme level with President Kiir leading the bunch.

There is much talks and discoveries of ghost names in government payrolls, which already cost the public fortunes in terms of finance and services delivery. These names don’t appear out of the blue, but are put there or sanctioned by individuals in key positions. Such acts are the easiest cases to prosecute and eradicate once and for all. A government minister once confided that the list of names in the payroll in his ministry seem to have triple the actual number of the personnel he sees working. Yet the minister takes no action to rectify the situation. Another minister bragged on his ability to form a ministry from the scratch, but yet he contradicted himself by complaining that there are a lot of ghost names existing in his ministry, and he blames it on the old Sudan system. Under normal circumstances, one would have expected such a minister to know his employees since he hired them when he set-up the ministry from the scratch since day one of its creation. One would have also expected that such a minister cannot attribute all the illegal activities of the corrupt system he boastfully claimed to have instituted from the start to another old system, which never existed before. These examples, which are common by the way, underscore the real level of corruption, incompetence and complacency the ministers represent, besides what goes in the lace up bureaucracy.

In order to fight corruption, the government must avoid creation of many institutions, but rather strengthen some existing ones and abolish those which are ineffective. What transpires is that the government institutions in South Sudan are themselves instrument and source of corruptions—validating a famous line by an American President Ronald Reagan that “government is the problem.” Imagine an institution which is suppose to uphold the rule of law like ministry of legal affairs practicing illegal overpayments for its staffs in violations of public service regulations. Or think of institutions such as the Anti-Corruption Commission, which its existence is so much hyped only to give a fake sense of combating corruption. The Anti-Corruption Commission plus many others with the name ‘commission’ appended to them, contribute as much to the problems as they are trying to solve them. In a conventional situation, a commission suppose to be created in a particular period of time to carry out specific task, and upon a completion of its mandate, it should therefore, be disbanded. However, in the case of South Sudan, they are created as duplicates to already existing government institutions with sole purposes of accommodating some favorable corrupt names. Hence, it is no wonder these institutions, not only lack mandates for public service deliverance, but should not have existed in the first place.

So, the government should not only strengthen the existing institutions, but respect their mandates and allow them to function effectively to manage the finances, regulate public activities, and prosecute crimes such as corruption. It is certainly not the duty of the general public to identify corrupt officials and parade them along with the sick to shame them in public. Else, all these attempts on public display by government officials are just smokescreen with some of them downright offensive and detrimental to the good of general public.