South Sudan: Oil Money without Consequences: Why the US Call Will Not Move South Sudan’s Regime

Jan 2, 2026 | Duop Chak Wuol
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The US Embassy’s New Year statement on South Sudan’s oil revenues, as reported by Radio Tamazuj, is framed as a principled appeal for peace, accountability, and social responsibility. Its call for the payment of civil servants, soldiers, and police acknowledges an undeniable reality: the state has failed its most basic obligations despite possessing significant oil wealth. On the surface, the statement appears aligned with the interests of ordinary South Sudanese citizens.

Yet, precisely because the problem is neither new nor misunderstood, the statement’s restraint becomes its central weakness. What the U.S. presents as diplomacy instead reads as a familiar exercise in moral signaling—careful, non-confrontational, and ultimately inconsequential to those who hold power in Juba.

The appeal overlooks the core political fact underlying South Sudan’s crisis. The non-payment of salaries is not a technical failure or a capacity issue, but a product of entrenched corruption and a deliberate political choice made by an authoritarian, highly centralized, and personalized regime. Oil revenues have long flowed, but the regime has never translated them into public goods because accountability has been systematically resisted. By not naming those responsible or identifying sources of obstruction, the U.S. merges perpetrators and victims into a single moral space. This is a policy of moral equivalence—or perhaps selective morality; it is not neutrality, and it distorts reality.