UN report details ‘systematic looting’ by South Sudan’s rulers as citizens went hungry

South Sudan Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel at the burial of SSPDF commander General David Majur Dak in Juba, March 19, 2025.

Photo credit: Reuters

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 (UNCHR) in South Sudan, where average gross domestic product per capita is now a quarter of what it was at independence in 2011.