Government turns to oil revenue to pay civil servants

​The government has reverted to oil revenue to pay civil servants.

On Monday, 1 August, President Salva Kiir met heads of three critical ministries at State House to forge a way forward on how to caution the economy from hyperinflation.
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The meeting resolved that the government will set aside one cargo of crude to raise funds to pay the workers.

The ministers included Barnaba Marial Benjamin – Minister of Presidential Affairs, Agak Achuil Lual (Finance and Planning), Puot Kang (Petroleum), Moses Makur Deng (Governor of Central Bank) and Economic professor, Lual Achuek.

“We have agreed that one cargo of crude will be earmarked for salaries, and every month that cargo will be sold (in dollars),” reads a statement posted on the social media handles operated by State House operatives.

The proceeds of the oil will, thus, be channelled to the ministry of finance and planning that will then, through the Bank of South Sudan, pay the salaries and arrears, by buying the South Sudanese pounds from the bank of South Sudan.

“The bank of South Sudan will use the dollar to stabilise and maintain the dollar rate in the market as a short-term solution,” Achuil said.

The announcement comes barely a week after the National Revenue Authority (NRA) announced that they had collected SSP 6.9 billion in non-oil revenue in the first 15 days of the fiscal year 2022/23.

Ministry of Finance undersecretary Angelo Deng Reham promised that the government would clear the arrears, running into months, in a week, last week.

Reham disclosed the government’s monthly recurrent expenditure (mostly salaries) to be in the region of SSP 8 billion.

In early in May, Achuil said that civil servants could not be paid because the oil had been pre-sold.