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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.
A spokesperson for Bol Mel declined to comment.
CONFLICT HAS RAGED SINCE INDEPENDENCE
Since 2011, South Sudan has endured repeated bouts of armed conflict, including a 2013-2018 civil war in which an estimated 400,000 people died.
Last week, the government charged First Vice President Riek Machar — whose forces opposed soldiers loyal to President Salva Kiir in the civil war — with crimes against humanity, escalating a feud that has fueled fighting in recent months.
South Sudan is also contending with steep cuts to the foreign humanitarian aid it receives each year.
But the report said corruption best explains its sustained economic and humanitarian woes, with nearly two-thirds of its 12 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse.
The commission said the report was based on 173 targeted meetings and interviews from late 2022 to late 2024 as well as government documentation and financial data.
It said its focus on corruption was warranted because graft has undermined the government’s ability to meet its human rights obligations and directly fueled armed violence.
“Locked in a zero-sum competition for power and control of resources and territory, South Sudan’s elites continue to pursue partisan political ends, mobilizing and exploiting ethnic differences and tensions,” it said.
OFF-BUDGET ‘OIL FOR ROADS’
The 101-page report spotlights companies associated with Bol Mel, whom President Salva Kiir elevated to one of South Sudan’s five vice presidential positions in February.
The US government sanctioned Bol Mel and two companies it said were associated with him in 2017, saying one of the firms had allegedly received preferential treatment from high-level government officials to do road work in the country. The US sanctioned two more of his companies in 2021.
After the 2017 sanctions were announced, South Sudan’s government denied the US characterization of him as Kiir’s personal financial adviser and said the decision to blacklist him was based on misleading information.
South Sudanese officials have been asking US President Donald Trump’s administration to lift those sanctions during recent bilateral discussions, Joseph Szlavik, a lobbyist working for Juba in Washington, told Reuters last month.
Those conversations have also touched on sending more US deportees to South Sudan following the arrival in July of eight men, including seven from third countries, Szlavik said.
The State Department told Reuters it does not provide details on private diplomatic communications, but called on Juba to “begin using public revenue to address the public need of the people of South Sudan rather than rely on international assistance.”
According to the UN report, South Sudan’s government disbursed an estimated $2.2 billion from 2021 to 2024 to companies affiliated with Bol Mel through its off-budget “Oil for Roads” program.
In some years, this program consumed around 60 percent of all government disbursements, the report said.
Despite the outlays, the companies affiliated with Bol Mel completed less than $500 million worth of driveable roads, inflating the value of construction contracts by overstating the length of the roads, overcharging relative to industry standards and building fewer lanes than agreed, the report said.
The report did not specify how the companies are affiliated with Bol Mel, but two of the three that it cited by name were those sanctioned by the US in 2021.
Bol Mel has never publicly responded to the accusations against him.
In his response, Justice Minister Geng dismissed the allegations about road spending, saying sums cited in the report were absurdly high given South Sudan’s economic realities.
He pointed to anti-corruption legislation enacted before independence and in July 2024 as proof of the government’s “serious commitment and will to combat corrupt practices.”
PUBLIC SPENDING DOES NOT MEET PUBLIC NEEDS
More broadly, the report said public spending priorities did not reflect the government’s obligations to its citizens.
Little of the more than $23 billion raised from oil exports since independence has gone to address pressing needs like education, health care and food security, it said.
For example, in the 2022-2023 national budget, more money was allocated to the Presidential Medical Unit than to the community, public, secondary and tertiary public health care systems across the entire country, it said.
The government’s response did not specifically respond to this point, but said it was working to promote the well-being of its citizens. The minister of presidential affairs did not respond to a request for comment. (Reporting by Aaron Ross; Editing by Ammu Kannampilly, Aidan Lewis and Ros Russell )

GURDASPUR: The fields are full but the paddy brown and wilted, and the air thick with the stench of rotting crops and livestock — the aftermath of record monsoon rains that have devastated India’s breadbasket.
In Punjab, often dubbed the country’s granary, the damage is unprecedented: floods have swallowed farmlands almost the size of London and New York City combined.
India’s agriculture minister said in a recent visit to the state that “the crops have been destroyed and ruined,” and Punjab’s chief minister called the deluge “one of the worst flood disasters in decades.”
Old-timers agree.
“The last time we saw such an all-consuming flood was in 1988,” said 70-year-old Balkar Singh in the village of Shehzada, 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of the holy Sikh city of Amritsar.
The gushing waters have reduced Singh’s paddy field to marshland and opened ominous cracks in the walls of his house.
Floods and landslides are common during the June-September monsoon season on the subcontinent, but experts say climate change, coupled with poorly planned development, is increasing their frequency, severity and impact.
Punjab saw rainfall surge by almost two-thirds compared with the average rate for August, according to the national weather department, killing at least 52 people and affecting over 400,000.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced a relief package worth around $180 million for Punjab.

- ‘10 feet high’ -

The village of Toor, sandwiched between the Ravi river and Pakistan, is in tatters — strewn with collapsing crops, livestock carcasses and destroyed homes.
“The water came past midnight on August 26,” said farm worker Surjan Lal. “It rose up to at least 10 feet (three meters) in a matter of minutes.”
Lal said the village in Punjab’s worst-affected Gurdaspur district was marooned for nearly a week.
“We were all on rooftops,” he said. “We could do nothing as the water carried away everything from our animals and beds.”
In adjacent Lassia, the last Indian village before the frontier, farmer Rakesh Kumar counted his losses.
“In addition to the land I own, I had taken some more on lease this year,” said the 37-year-old. “All my investment has just gone down the drain.”
To make things worse, Kumar said, the future looked bleak.
He said he feared his fields would not be ready in time to sow wheat, the winter crop of choice in Punjab.
“All the muck has to first dry up and only then can the big machines clear up the silt,” he said.
Even at the best of times, bringing heavy earth-movers into the area is a tall order, as a pontoon bridge connecting it to the mainland only operates in the lean months.
For landless laborers like 50-year-old Mandeep Kaur, the uncertainty is even greater.
“We used to earn a living by working in the big landlords’ fields but now they are all gone,” said Kaur.
Her house was washed away by the water, forcing her to sleep in the courtyard under a tarpaulin sheet — an arrangement fraught with danger as snakes slither all over the damp land.

- Basmati blues -

Punjab is the largest supplier of rice and wheat to India’s food security program, which provides subsidised grain to more than 800 million people.
Analysts say this year’s losses are unlikely to threaten domestic supplies thanks to large buffer stocks, but exports of premium basmati rice are expected to suffer.
“The main effect will be on basmati rice production, prices and exports because of lower output in Indian and Pakistan Punjab,” said Avinash Kishore of the International Food Policy Research Institute in New Delhi.
Punishing US tariffs have already made Indian basmati less competitive, and the floods risk worsening that squeeze.
The road to recovery for Punjab’s embattled farmers, analysts say, will be particularly steep because the state opted out of the federal government’s insurance scheme, citing high costs and a low-risk profile because of its robust irrigation network.
Singh, the septuagenarian farmer, said the water on his farm was “still knee-deep.”
“I don’t know what the future holds for us,” he said.