Equatorial Guinea’s government has resigned after failing to meet its objectives, Vice-President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue said.
Obiang, who is also the son of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, said the prime minister had presented the resignation of all members of the government because it had barely reached 10% of its targets.
He did not specify the targets but a statement by the ruling party said the president had observed that the government fostered corruption and failed to diversify the economy.
President Obiang is the world’s longest-serving leader who has ruled the oil-rich West African country since 1979 with a strong grip, while naming family members to key government roles.
The president appointed the outgoing government in 2024, with Manuel Osa Nsue Nsua as prime minister.
On Tuesday, the vice-president said the resignation was in line with “the principle that responsibility in public management must be accompanied by results”.
“The degree of execution achieved is clearly insufficient in relation to the expectations and commitments undertaken,” he posted on X.
In a statement on Facebook, the ruling Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE) said the president was dissatisfied with the management of the outgoing government. A new government is expected to be appointed.
The statement further cited the misuse of state resources for personal interests and stagnation in the implementation of development projects.
The president also noted that the government had not implemented policies to diversify the economy especially in the agricultural sector, which would cut reliance on imported goods that can be produced locally.
Equatorial Guinea’s economy is heavily reliant on petroleum, with oil and gas accounting for most of its exports and revenues.
In spite of its oil wealth, much of its 1.8m population has not benefitted, as poverty remains rampant. In recent years, the economy has been on a decline amid reduced production and demand for oil.
On August 22, 2025, a relatively unremarkable ceremony took place at the State House in Juba. Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit, eldest daughter of President Salva Kiir Mayardit, was sworn into the position of Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programmes. The occasion was presented publicly as an administrative appointment, a routine expansion of the presidential advisory structure. State media covered it dutifully. Critics condemned it privately as nepotism. And the rest of the world moved on.
That was a mistake. Because what was installed at State House on August 22, 2025 was not merely a presidential advisor. It was the formalisation of a parallel governance structure that had been operating in the shadows of the Juba establishment for years, now given a title, a desk, and, for those who needed reminding, an official state imprimatur.
Adut’s formal position as Senior Presidential Envoy gives her oversight of government initiatives, management of international partnerships, and coordination of investment programmes. In a country where every major economic decision flows ultimately through the President’s office, and where her father’s deteriorating health and compressed inner circle have made informal access to the President the single most valuable political commodity in South Sudan, this mandate is effectively unlimited. There is no constitutional definition of its scope. There is no parliamentary oversight of its activities. There is no published framework governing what decisions she can make or what she cannot. Professor Jok Madut Jok of Syracuse University, one of the most respected scholars of South Sudanese governance, told Radio Tamazuj in June 2026 that her position’s constitutional basis, mandate, and limits of authority remain entirely unclear. She wields influence, he observed, that reaches into economic affairs, appointments, and state security without any institutional check.
She is not, moreover, the first figure to occupy this void. Her predecessor in the Senior Presidential Envoy role was Benjamin Bol Mel, the construction magnate and longtime Kiir financial associate who was briefly elevated as heir-apparent before being unceremoniously cast aside in November 2025. Bol Mel, himself placed under US sanctions in 2017 for corruption and described by multiple analysts as the person who managed the Kiir family’s finances, was stripped of his position without explanation. The revolving door of loyalty and disposal that has characterised the Kiir inner circle for years swung shut on Bol Mel and opened for the President’s own blood.
The International Crisis Group’s March 2026 briefing on South Sudan captured the trajectory of Kiir’s consolidation with clinical precision. In October 2024 he dismissed his long-serving intelligence chief, General Akol Koor Kuc, dismantling the sprawling security apparatus that had protected him for a decade. He removed his long-standing Vice President James Wani Igga, briefly installed Bol Mel, then reversed that decision and reinstated Igga. He arrested First Vice President Riek Machar in March 2025, placed him under house arrest, and later charged him with treason. As his circle of trust shrank toward zero, Kiir began concentrating what remained of his authority within his own family. Adut’s appointment was not merely nepotism. It was the President’s answer to a survival problem: when you can trust no one else, you trust your children.
“Amid visible signs of worsening ill-health, President Salva Kiir Mayardit has been moving to protect his authority and succession.” — Africa Confidential, May 2026
Behind the scenes, sources cited by Radio Tamazuj and by political analysts inside Juba confirm that Adut’s ambitions are not confined to the advisory role she formally holds. She has reportedly expressed interest in assuming the Vice Presidency in place of Wani Igga, and in being elevated to First Deputy Chair of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. Both positions would place her directly on the succession trajectory. The prospect of Adut Salva Kiir as the next President of South Sudan is no longer merely the speculation of exiled critics. It is being discussed, according to Professor Jok, by people who work closely with her.
Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit
Whether or not she achieves formal power, she has already achieved something more immediately damaging to South Sudan’s 12 million people: control over its money.
PART TWO: THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXTRACTION — HOW CRAWFORD CAPITAL WAS BUILT
Crawford Capital Ltd. is incorporated in the United Kingdom. Its website presents the company as a forward-looking technology firm dedicated to digital transformation in emerging markets, promising seamless and secure solutions to governments and organisations. The corporate language is polished. The registered address in the UK lends the company a veneer of Western respectability. The reality documented by the United Nations, the United States State Department, and multiple independent investigations is categorically different.
Crawford was awarded its foundational government contract on November 16, 2019, in an agreement signed with the Ministry of Information, Communication Technology and Postal Services under Minister Thomas Tut Lam. The contract was not competitively tendered. There was no public procurement process. There was no parliamentary authorisation. There was no published contractual framework. The company was handed exclusive control of South Sudan’s entire e-government services infrastructure through what the UN Commission described as a process fundamentally inconsistent with South Sudan’s own Public Procurement and Disposal of Assets Act, 2018.
What Crawford received through this no-bid arrangement was not modest. Its platforms now control e-visa processing, e-tax collection, trade permit issuance, customs clearance, and most critically the Electronic Crude Oil Accreditation Permit system, the ECOAP gateway through which every single barrel of South Sudanese crude oil exported to international markets must be cleared. The company operates at the intersection of every revenue stream the South Sudanese state possesses. It sits, in the terminology of public finance, directly on top of the national treasury.
The terms of the contract are what transform this from a story about digital services into a story about organised looting. Under the November 2019 arrangement, Crawford Capital retains 75 percent of all revenues collected through its platforms. The government of South Sudan, the sovereign authority that owns the taxes being collected, receives 25 percent. Three quarters of every pound, every dollar, every shekel of non-oil revenue that passes through Crawford’s digital gateway goes to a UK-registered private company. This is the arrangement that the UN Commission, in its September 2025 report Plundering a Nation: How Rampant Corruption Unleashed a Human Rights Crisis in South Sudan, described as unjustifiable and indicative of abuse of public office.
CONTEXT: South Sudan’s Public Procurement and Disposal of Assets Act, 2018 requires competitive bidding for government contracts of significant value. The Crawford contract was signed without any such process. The contract also, according to documents reviewed by the UN Commission, proposed that the Ministry of ICT should ‘be the face of the project’ while Crawford remained the operational principal an arrangement that effectively disguised private capture of public revenue as a government digitalisation programme.
The crude oil component alone illustrates the scale of extraction. Every cargo of South Sudanese crude requires ECOAP clearance, with a 0.03 percent levy on cargo values flowing to CapitalPay. A single shipment generates fees of between 146,000 and 166,000 US dollars. Between January and October 2025 alone, South Sudan exported 22 cargoes of Dar and Nile blend crude oil, according to a UN Panel of Experts report reviewed by the Global Trade Review. The financial accumulation for Crawford and its principals across the years of the contract runs into tens of millions of dollars.
The contract was also, according to the UN Commission’s documents, constructed to maximise Crawford’s financial insulation. It purports to exempt the company from paying any taxes, including corporation tax, import tax, and value added tax, during the first ten years of implementation. A company collecting the state’s taxes is simultaneously exempt from paying any taxes of its own. The circular absurdity of this arrangement is not an oversight. It is the point.
“Crawford’s e-Services have facilitated organised corruption and predation, resulting in further revenue diversion.” — UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, Plundering a Nation, September 2025
PART THREE: THE OWNERSHIP WEB — GARANG MAYOM, JEREMY GISEMBA, AND THE KIIR FAMILY
The formal ownership structure of Crawford Capital, as documented by the UN Commission and multiple independent investigations, lists Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek as the majority shareholder, holding approximately 68 percent of Crawford Capital Ltd. and 61.2 percent of CapitalPay Ltd., its operational payments arm. He also holds 95 percent of a third entity, Crawford Laboratory Ltd. The second largest shareholder is Kenyan businessman Jeremy Gisemba, who holds approximately 26 percent of Crawford Capital and 23.4 percent of CapitalPay. The company’s CFO and Chair, Ariech Wol Mayar Ariec, rounds out the principal executive figures. Crawford Capital is, furthermore, registered to dual South Sudanese-UK citizens, including Garang Mayom Malek, one Deng Daniel, Ariech Wol Mayar, and a Kurtis Lathanial Dinnall-Bateman, a name conspicuously British in character, suggesting deliberate use of the UK corporate framework to present an international face to what is, at its operational core, a Juba political enterprise.
Who are these people? Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek, the company’s CEO and Managing Director, is not a technology entrepreneur who built a platform from nothing. He is, according to the UN Commission, the son of a former deputy minister and parliamentarian, a politically connected insider whose access to government contracting machinery was central to the firm’s ability to secure a single-source contract that should never have been awarded without open competition. Ruey Majok Guandong, the company’s other co-founder, who previously held a 50 percent stake at incorporation, is the son of South Sudan’s ambassador to Turkey. The founding equity of Crawford Capital was, from its very inception, distributed among the children of powerful political families.
The Kenyan dimension is equally significant and has so far received insufficient attention. Jeremy Gisemba, holding a substantial minority stake in both Crawford and CapitalPay, is a Kenyan national. His presence as a significant shareholder in a company now sanctioned by the United States for siphoning public funds from South Sudan’s treasury places Kenya’s financial sector in a deeply uncomfortable position. The UN Commission’s September 2025 report, as cited in the East African, noted explicitly that South Sudan’s political elites have been aided by rogue Kenyans to siphon billions of dollars out of South Sudan by acting as fronts of the political elite. Gisemba has not publicly responded to questions about his role, and Kenyan regulatory authorities have maintained notable silence about their citizen’s involvement in a now-sanctioned entity.
Then there is Adut. Her photograph appears at the apex of the organisational chart titled The Crawford/CapitalPay Looting Squad that has been circulated by South Sudanese accountability researchers and adopted by international investigative outlets. The chart shows her at the top, with Garang Malek as CEO below her, Ariech Mayar Wol as CFO and Chair, and connections running laterally to the National Communications Authority, whose senior leadership has its own documented relationship with the Crawford network. Africa Confidential, whose South Sudan reporting is among the most meticulously sourced in the world, described the entire structure as Adut Salva Kiir’s shadow treasury.
The family business connection predates Crawford itself. Radio Tamazuj’s investigation established that Garang Malek and Ruey Guandong, Crawford’s co-founders, previously formed a separate company together with Mayar Salva Kiir, the President’s son, through a vehicle called Air Afrik Aviation Limited, incorporated in 2013. The Kiir family’s commercial partnership with these same individuals runs back more than a decade. Crawford Capital is not a new relationship. It is the latest and most lucrative iteration of a longstanding arrangement.
PART FOUR: THE REGULATORY CAPTURE — HOW THE NCA BECAME PART OF THE MACHINE
The Crawford/CapitalPay Looting Squad organogram does not confine itself to the company’s own executive structure. It extends outward to the institution that regulates the digital communications sector in South Sudan: the National Communications Authority. The implications of this connection have not been adequately scrutinised in international reporting on the scandal.
Rizik Dominic Samuel, who assumed the role of NCA Director General in November 2025, comes directly from the Office of the President, where he previously served as Chief of State Protocol and Executive Director. He was not appointed to the NCA through any transparent meritocratic process. According to The Juba Mirror, a South Sudanese outlet, Rizik Dominic had been secretly lobbying Adut Salva Kiir and Garang Malek to push for his appointment, describing the NCA role as one he coveted while Garang Malek was simultaneously implementing the digitisation of government services through Crawford’s e-Tax platform. Rizik Dominic secured the appointment in November 2025, the same period in which Crawford’s operations were deepening and the company was extending its contractual reach. He has since begun his duties as, in his own words, a regulator committed to digital transformation.
The NCA Board, meanwhile, is chaired by Tejwok Simon Ajak, who simultaneously serves as Deputy Chairperson of E-Government in the very Ministry of ICT and Postal Services that signed the original Crawford contract and acts as the formal government face of Crawford’s operations. Tejwok’s dual role, overseeing the telecom regulator while holding a senior position in the ministry that administers Crawford’s government partnership, represents a conflict of interest of breathtaking directness. The Chairperson of the body supposed to regulate South Sudan’s digital communications sector is simultaneously an official in the ministry that underwrites the digital monopoly he is supposed to regulate.
What this means in practice is that the regulatory architecture of South Sudan’s digital economy, the NCA, the Ministry of ICT, and the presidential economic advisory machinery, form a single interlocking system with Crawford Capital at its commercial core and Adut Salva Kiir at its political apex. No reform can succeed in this environment. No ministerial directive can take hold. When Trade Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk issued her suspension order against Crawford in March 2026, she was not merely challenging a company. She was challenging an entire ecosystem of power. She lost within 24 hours.
“The engagement of Crawford Capital was not a unilateral decision, but the result of extensive deliberations by the Economic Cluster, presided over by H.E. the President.” — VP James Wani Igga, overturning Crawford Capital suspension, March 6, 2026
PART FIVE: THE HUMAN CATASTROPHE BEHIND THE CORPORATE STRUCTURE
It is necessary to pause the architecture of the scheme and confront what it means for the 12 million people of South Sudan.
The UN Commission’s September 2025 report documented that the government of South Sudan has received more than 25.2 billion US dollars in oil-related inflows since independence in 2011. The World Bank estimates the economy contracted by 24 percent in 2025. The International Monetary Fund projected a further 4.3 percent contraction for the same year with inflation running at 65.7 percent. South Sudan ranks at the absolute bottom of both the UN Human Development Index and the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. These are not rankings that improve by accident. They are the arithmetic of sustained, deliberate looting.
International donors now spend more on South Sudan’s basic services than the government itself. The health system has functionally collapsed. The education system is in crisis. Most civil servants are either underpaid or have received no salary at all. The Commission’s Chairperson, South African human rights lawyer Yasmin Sooka, said that corruption is not incidental, it is the engine of South Sudan’s decline, driving hunger, collapsing health systems, and causing preventable deaths, as well as fuelling deadly armed conflict over resources.
Crawford Capital sits inside this catastrophe as one of its most efficient instruments. Between 2020 and 2024, less than 48 percent of collected non-oil revenues reached core government services. Health received under 0.9 percent of the national budget on average. Education received approximately 2.3 percent. Every percentage point absorbed by Crawford’s 75 percent share was a percentage point that did not reach a hospital in Juba, a teacher’s salary in Malakal, or a borehole in Jonglei.
In 2024, the predation extended even into humanitarian operations. Crawford extended an unlawful levy onto fuel imports by tax-exempt humanitarian organisations, a direct contractual violation of the immunities international law affords humanitarian actors. The UN Commission documented how this contributed to the disruption of critical World Food Programme distribution operations at a moment when, according to WFP’s own data, over 60 percent of South Sudan’s population was already experiencing severe food insecurity. A company retaining 75 percent of the national treasury reached into the supply lines keeping starving children alive and extracted a toll from those too.
The $10 million advanced to Crawford for a 2022 Ebola and COVID preparedness project was never fully accounted for. The UN Commission’s documents on this disbursement describe an advance that was made, a project that largely did not materialise, and a financial trail that leads nowhere the government can publicly explain. In a country where the average annual health expenditure per person is measured in single-digit dollars, ten million dollars is not a rounding error. It is a year’s difference between a child dying of a preventable disease and surviving it.
STATISTICS: The UN Commission’s analysis documents that South Sudan’s president’s personal medical budget exceeded the government’s total expenditure on public health. This single data point, if it requires elaboration, should require none.
PART SIX: THE PURGE REGIME — HOW ADUT ELIMINATES INCONVENIENT PEOPLE
The abduction of Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit from Nairobi on June 10, 2026 did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the most extreme expression of a systematic pattern of repression that Adut’s network has been deploying against its critics, its former associates, and anyone who has accumulated knowledge of how the shadow treasury operates.
The wave of arrests that swept through Juba’s financial and security establishment in early 2026 provides the immediate context. In late February, in the space of a single week, a former central bank governor, a former finance minister (Bak Barnaba Chol, apprehended attempting to cross into Uganda), a former undersecretary for the Ministry of Petroleum, and a general in the domestic intelligence agency previously posted to the same ministry were all detained. The government’s spokesman declared the arrests were not political and constituted a direct response to irregularities identified within the monetary system. The arrests were political. The affected individuals all possessed detailed knowledge of how South Sudan’s revenue systems had been operating under Crawford’s dominance. Their removal from any position to speak publicly about what they knew served the network’s interest regardless of what they were formally accused of.
This is the pattern that defines the Kiir-Adut governance structure in its current form: officials who could challenge the revenue architecture are fired, arrested, or both. South Sudan has had nine finance ministers since 2020. Each removal is delivered without stated reason. The pace of dismissals has accelerated precisely as Crawford’s operations deepened and as international scrutiny of those operations intensified. Marial Dongrin Ater, fired as finance minister in August 2025, was subsequently arrested. Bak Barnaba Chol, who replaced him in November 2025, was arrested in February 2026 while attempting to flee the country. The message to the financial technocracy is unambiguous: do not ask where the money is going, and do not try to leave.
Trade Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk’s experience illustrates what happens to officials who challenge the machine through formal channels rather than flight. She issued her suspension order against Crawford on March 5, 2026. She was overruled by Vice President Igga within 24 hours, publicly humiliated, and her directive nullified by the invocation of a Council of Ministers resolution that had itself been signed by the President. She subsequently lifted the suspension. The episode sent a message to every other minister in Juba: do not try this.
Meanwhile, Adut’s alleged campaign against her own network’s insiders has been documented by sources with direct knowledge. Multiple accounts describe her ordering arrests of business associates and employees suspected of leaking sensitive information about her financial arrangements. She has allegedly used government security mechanisms to file criminal cases against individuals outside South Sudan who possess knowledge of her financial dealings, branding them enemies of the state engaged in espionage. The espionage designation is doing a great deal of work here: it transforms financial whistleblowing into a criminal act triable before security courts, removes the accused from civil judicial protections, and places them in the custody of the NSS’s Internal Security Bureau, the same body whose Director General, Akec Tong, allegedly issued the arrest warrant for Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit.
The Juba Mirror had already, in September 2024, documented Rizik Dominic Samuel’s alleged role as an intelligence operative with connections to rebel networks in Western Bahr el Ghazal, while simultaneously lobbying Adut and Garang Malek for a senior appointment. That this individual is now Director General of the NCA, the regulator of the very digital infrastructure at the heart of the Crawford scandal, and is named in sources as a co-financier of the Athorbey abduction operation, illuminates the depth to which the network’s tentacles have reached into South Sudan’s regulatory institutions.
“If you work for Adut, please reconsider, because eventually, just like those who worked for her father, you may end up exiled, disappeared, dead, or jailed.” — South Sudanese opposition network warning, June 2026
PART SEVEN: THE ABDUCTION — WHAT ATHORBEY KNEW AND WHY HE HAD TO DISAPPEAR
Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit, known to those around him as Gadafi or Daffi, was not a passive victim of a political machine he did not understand. He understood it precisely, and he had spent months ensuring that others understood it too. A Kenyan-South Sudanese national living in Nairobi, he had direct familiarity with the inner workings of the Crawford structure, its revenue flows, its ownership connections, and its political protections. He had been circulating this information to investigative journalists, accountability researchers, and international oversight bodies. His materials contributed to the evidentiary foundation that informed UN Commission findings and, ultimately, US sanctions decisions.
He knew the risk. He filed statements at multiple Nairobi police stations before he disappeared, each statement making the same explicit declaration: if I am harmed, abducted, or killed, you should investigate Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit and Garang Mayom Kuoch. Those statements are now evidence in an abduction that has confirmed everything he feared. The deterrent failed. The operation was authorised anyway.
At approximately 3 a.m. on June 10, 2026, Athorbey left Lucky 8 Casino near Yaya Centre in Nairobi’s Kilimani district and boarded a Bolt ride arranged by casino staff. A white pickup carrying masked, armed men blocked his vehicle, overpowered him at gunpoint, and bundled him inside. His wife, speaking to Radio Tamazuj, described calling him repeatedly through the night, receiving no answer, tracing his phone signal to a hospital on Kiambu Road, searching the facility without result, and finally being informed by a relative that a police report had been filed: her husband had been taken.
From Kilimani, Athorbey was transported to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, where Amnesty International Kenya, issuing an emergency statement the same morning, warned he was being held ahead of imminent deportation. Amnesty International Kenya Section Director George Morara described the incident as bearing the hallmarks of an enforced disappearance, a grave violation under both Kenyan and international law. The deportation that Amnesty feared then materialised. Sources in Lokichoggio and Nadapal, the Kenya-South Sudan border region, confirmed vehicles waiting to receive deportees. Athorbey crossed the border and arrived in Juba, where he is now held at a military intelligence facility on fabricated espionage charges whose arrest warrant was allegedly issued by NSS-ISB Director General Akec Tong.
His family’s fears are not abstract. Athorbey has underlying medical conditions requiring regular attention. Military intelligence detention facilities in Juba are not equipped for medical care. The conditions under which political prisoners are held in the NSS system have been documented by the UN Commission and multiple human rights organisations as constituting cruel and degrading treatment. His relatives have warned publicly that if he is tortured, denied medical care, or held in harsh conditions, the consequences could be fatal. If that occurs, the responsibility will lie with the people who ordered his abduction: Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit, Garang Mayom Kuoch, Ariech Wol Mayar, and the security officials who executed the operation.
PART EIGHT: THE UK’S ACCOUNTABILITY GAP — HOW CRAWFORD HIDES IN PLAIN SIGHT
Crawford Capital Ltd. maintains its registration in the United Kingdom. This is not incidental to the scandal; it is load-bearing. The UK corporate framework gives Crawford access to international banking relationships, credibility with potential business partners, and a degree of insulation from the informal pressures that would otherwise render a purely South Sudanese entity more vulnerable to scrutiny. The British flag on Crawford’s corporate filing is a commercial weapon.
The question that UK regulatory authorities should now be answering publicly is this: how does a company incorporated in the United Kingdom, now designated as a corrupt entity by the United States State Department under sanctions authority for siphoning public funds from one of the world’s poorest countries, continue to maintain its registration in good standing? Companies House, which maintains Crawford’s corporate records, has no formal mechanism to act on foreign sanctions designations. The Financial Conduct Authority, which oversees financial services, has limited jurisdiction over a company operating primarily as a government services contractor in a foreign country.
But the UK’s National Crime Agency, which has powers under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and the Criminal Finances Act 2017, does have jurisdiction over the proceeds of corruption that pass through UK-linked corporate structures. Unexplained Wealth Orders, available under the 2017 Act, can compel UK-connected individuals to explain the sources of their wealth. The Bribery Act 2010 creates liability for UK companies that engage in or facilitate corruption abroad, regardless of where the acts occurred. The UK Government has the legal tools to pursue Crawford Capital and its principals. The question is whether it has the political will to use them.
The presence of Kurtis Lathanial Dinnall-Bateman, a conspicuously British name, among Crawford Capital’s registered directors in the UK creates additional exposure. A UK national serving as a director of a company now under US sanctions for foreign corruption is not a position that falls outside the reach of UK law enforcement.
PART NINE: THE INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY AGENDA — WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW
The Crawford Capital scandal has now attracted the attention of the US State Department, the UN Commission on Human Rights, Africa Confidential, AFP, the Global Trade Review, Radio Tamazuj, and a widening circle of international investigative outlets. The abduction of Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit has escalated the case from a financial corruption story to a transnational repression story with a victim who holds Kenyan citizenship and whose safety is in direct jeopardy. The following accountability actions are now imperative.
The Government of Kenya must act immediately and publicly. Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit is a Kenyan citizen. His abduction from Kenyan soil, detention at a Kenyan airport, and deportation across the Kenyan border to a military intelligence facility constitute a cascade of violations of Kenyan law, Kenyan sovereignty, and Kenya’s international obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1969 OAU Convention on Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. Kenya must demand his immediate and unconditional return, conduct a full investigation into how a Kenyan citizen was removed from the country without judicial process, and identify and prosecute any Kenyan officials who facilitated or failed to prevent the operation. Kenya’s reputation as a regional hub for international organisations and civil society depends on its willingness to enforce its own laws when powerful foreign interests violate them.
Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit
The United Kingdom must investigate Crawford Capital’s UK corporate structure. The US sanctions designation provides a basis for UK authorities to examine Crawford’s financial flows, the role of UK-registered directors, and whether revenues passing through UK-linked accounts constitute proceeds of crime. The NCA, the FCA, and the Serious Fraud Office should each assess whether Crawford Capital’s UK presence falls within their respective mandates. The Bribery Act 2010 should be examined for its application to UK nationals associated with the company.
The UN Security Council’s South Sudan Sanctions Committee must expand its designated entities list to include Crawford Capital and its principal shareholders. The existing sanctions regime on South Sudan has focused primarily on individuals associated with military violence. The Crawford evidence base, now publicly documented by the UN Commission, the US State Department, and multiple independent investigations, justifies the addition of the company and its leadership to the Security Council’s designations, triggering asset freezes and travel bans at the multilateral level.
The African Union must address the transnational repression dimension. The abduction of Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit from Kenya to South Sudan, conducted by masked operatives using an arrest warrant from a national security service on fabricated charges, is a textbook case of the enforced disappearance practices the AU’s own human rights instruments prohibit. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights should receive an urgent communication on this case and respond accordingly.
The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers the Crawford Capital sanctions designation, should now examine whether secondary sanctions are warranted against third parties facilitating Crawford’s continued operations, including the international oil traders who pay ECOAP fees to Crawford-linked accounts and the banks that process those payments.
“Our Commission has repeatedly identified systemic impunity, economic predation, and deliberate subversion of peace agreements as central drivers of recurrent armed conflict.” — UN Commission Chairperson Yasmin Sooka, February 2026
PART TEN: THE RECKONING
South Sudan’s local journalists do not write stories like this one. They cannot. The consequences are too immediate: a knock at the door, a white vehicle in the dark, a one-way journey to a facility where mobile phones do not work and lawyers do not arrive. The abduction of Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit was, among other things, a message to every South Sudanese journalist and activist who has been following the Crawford story. The message is: we will reach across international borders. We will use state security infrastructure to silence you. We are watching.
This publication is not intimidated by that message. And neither, it should be said, are the many foreign correspondents, accountability researchers, and international oversight bodies who are now engaged with this story in a way that cannot be undone by further abductions. Adut Salva Kiir’s shadow treasury has been dragged into the light of the most powerful investigative apparatus the world possesses. The US State Department has named it. The UN Commission has documented it. Africa Confidential has profiled it. Radio Tamazuj has traced its corporate wiring. The Global Trade Review has followed its oil money. AFP has reported its latest crime from Nairobi’s streets.
The Kiir family’s calculation, that abducting a whistleblower would contain the story, has failed with spectacular completeness. Every day that Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit remains in military intelligence custody in Juba is another day that the world’s attention focuses not merely on Crawford Capital’s contractual terms but on the willingness of a dying president’s daughter to reach across international borders, violate the sovereignty of a neighbouring state, abduct a citizen of that state, and hold him on fabricated charges to protect a revenue machine that has been stealing from South Sudan’s starving population for seven years.
There is a South Sudanese civil society activist who has said, on the record, that this regime is very desperate, and the good news is that it is coming to an end. Those words carry the weight of a people who have endured more than most nations are ever asked to survive: two civil wars, a famine, four million displaced, a collapsed health system, and a ruling elite that has responded to every humanitarian catastrophe by stealing more. The shadow treasury is exposed. The network is named. The principals are identified. The accountability mechanisms exist.
The question that remains is whether those with the power to act will choose to do so before the next person who knows too much is loaded into a white vehicle in the dark.
— — —
THE CRAWFORD NETWORK: KEY PRINCIPALS
ADUT SALVA KIIR MAYARDIT — Eldest daughter of President Salva Kiir Mayardit; Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programmes since August 22, 2025; alleged apex of the Crawford/CapitalPay network as documented in the Looting Squad organogram; described by Africa Confidential as the operator of a ‘shadow treasury’; named by Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit in his safety filings as the principal person to investigate if he came to harm.
GARANG MAYOM KUOC MALEK — CEO and Managing Director, Crawford Capital; holds approximately 68 percent of Crawford Capital Ltd., 95 percent of Crawford Laboratory Ltd., and 61.2 percent of CapitalPay; son of a former South Sudanese deputy minister and parliamentarian; co-formed Air Afrik Aviation with Mayar Salva Kiir (President’s son) in 2013; named in Athorbey’s safety filings.
ARIECH WOL MAYAR ARIEC (ARIECH MAYAR WOL) — CFO and Chair of the Board, Crawford Capital and CapitalPay; alleged co-financier of the Athorbey abduction operation, alongside NCA leadership elements.
JEREMY GISEMBA — Kenyan businessman; holds approximately 26 percent of Crawford Capital and 23.4 percent of CapitalPay. His presence as a major shareholder in a now-sanctioned entity raises serious questions for Kenyan regulatory authorities.
RUEY MAJOK GUANDONG — Co-founder of Crawford Capital; son of South Sudan’s ambassador to Turkey; previously held 50 percent at incorporation.
KURTIS LATHANIAL DINNALL-BATEMAN — UK-registered director of Crawford Capital Ltd.; his nationality makes him subject to UK corporate and criminal law as a director of a company under US sanctions.
RIZIK DOMINIC SAMUEL — Director General, National Communications Authority, since November 2025; previously Chief of State Protocol in the Office of the President; allegedly lobbied Adut Salva Kiir and Garang Malek for the NCA appointment; named in sources as a co-financier of the Athorbey operation.
TEJWOK SIMON AJAK — Chairperson, NCA Board of Directors; simultaneously serves as Deputy Chairperson of E-Government in the Ministry of ICT — the same ministry that administers Crawford’s government partnership. Represents a direct conflict of interest in the regulatory structure.
BIONG DENG BIONG — Director of Finance, National Communications Authority; listed in the Crawford network organisational chart.
AKEC TONG — Director General, NSS Internal Security Bureau; allegedly issued the fabricated espionage arrest warrant for Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit.
JAMES WANI IGGA — Second Vice President, South Sudan; chairs the government’s Economic Cluster; on March 6, 2026, publicly overruled Trade Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk’s suspension of Crawford Capital operations, citing a Council of Ministers resolution ‘presided over by H.E. the President.’ His intervention protected the network at the most critical moment of domestic challenge it had faced.
BENJAMIN BOL MEL — Former Vice President (November 2025); Adut’s predecessor as Senior Presidential Envoy; described as the person who managed the Kiir family’s finances; himself under US sanctions since 2017 for corruption; stripped of his position without explanation, illustrating the volatility of the inner circle.
THE VICTIM
ATHORBEY AL-GADDHAFFY-DIT (GADAFI ATHORBEY GUET, ‘DAFFI’) — Kenyan-South Sudanese citizen and whistleblower; abducted from Nairobi’s Kilimani district at approximately 3 a.m. on June 10, 2026, by armed masked men; held at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport before deportation to a military intelligence facility in Juba; faces fabricated espionage charges; has underlying medical conditions requiring regular care; named Adut Salva Kiir and Garang Mayom Kuoch in advance safety filings at multiple Nairobi police stations. His life is in danger.
Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit — Eldest daughter of President Salva Kiir Mayardit; Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programmes since August 2025; alleged principal of Crawford Capital / CapitalPay network; named by Athorbey in his safety filings as the person to investigate should he be harmed.
Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek — CEO and Managing Director of Crawford Capital; holds approximately 68 percent of the company and 61.2 percent of CapitalPay; named alongside Adut in Athorbey’s safety filings.
Ariech Wol Mayar Ariec (Ariech Mayar Wol) — CFO and Chair of Crawford Capital / CapitalPay; alleged financier of the abduction operation.
Jeremy Gisemba — Kenyan businessman and significant shareholder in Crawford Capital and CapitalPay.
Akec Tong — Director General of the NSS Internal Security Bureau; allegedly issued the arrest warrant for Athorbey on fabricated espionage charges.
Brigadier General Rizik Dominic Samuel — Director General, National Communications Authority; named in the Crawford network chart.
James Wani Igga — Vice President of South Sudan; overruled Trade Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk’s suspension of Crawford Capital operations in March 2026, directly protecting the network.
Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit (Gadafi Athorbey Guet, ‘Daffi’) — Kenyan-South Sudanese whistleblower, businessman, and Crawford Capital exposé source; abducted from Nairobi on June 10, 2026 and transported to military intelligence detention in Juba; suffers underlying medical conditions.
THE SNATCHING
The last person to speak with Athorbey Gadafi Guet before his world went dark was his wife. She told Radio Tamazuj she last heard his voice at approximately 10:19 p.m. on Monday, June 8. By 3 a.m. on the Wednesday morning, when he had still not come home and his phone lines had gone dead, she knew the moment she had long dreaded had arrived.
According to a police report filed at Kilimani Police Station and seen by AFP, Athorbey had left Lucky 8 Casino near Yaya Centre in Nairobi’s upmarket Kilimani district and boarded a Bolt ride arranged by casino staff. What happened next took no more than minutes. A white pickup carrying masked, armed men blocked his vehicle, overpowered him at gunpoint and bundled him inside. His wife, tracing his phone’s last signal to a hospital on Kiambu Road and finding nothing, received a call from a relative who had seen the police report. Her husband was gone.
Amnesty International Kenya moved with unusual speed, issuing a statement within hours expressing grave concern and naming what it believed was happening: an enforced disappearance. The rights organisation said it believed Athorbey was being held at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport awaiting deportation to South Sudan and described the incident as bearing the hallmarks of a grave violation of both Kenyan and international law.
“If Mr Gaddhaffy-Dit is suspected of any offence, the only lawful course of action is to proceed through Kenya’s justice system, not through abduction, incommunicado detention, and deportation.” — Amnesty International Kenya
The deportation feared by Amnesty swiftly materialised. Sources in the border towns of Lokichoggio and Nadapal confirmed that Athorbey was driven across the Kenyan frontier and transported toward Juba, where he arrived at a military intelligence detention facility. He is now reportedly held on fabricated espionage charges, the arrest warrant allegedly issued by Akec Tong, Director General of the National Security Service’s Internal Security Bureau. He is accused, in the darkly ironic language of authoritarian retribution, of leaking information about Crawford Capital.
As for who gave the order: multiple sources with direct knowledge of the operation have identified Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit and Garang Mayom Kuoch as the principals behind the abduction. The operation is said to have been financed by Ariech Wol Mayar Ariec, who serves as CFO and Chair of Crawford and CapitalPay, and by elements within the National Communications Authority leadership.
Athorbey had anticipated this. Before he disappeared, he filed statements at multiple Nairobi police stations warning that if he were harmed, abducted, or killed, investigators should examine links to Adut Salva Kiir and Garang Mayom Kuoch. Those statements are now evidence of something far worse than he hoped they would ever be used for.
Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit, also styled Gadafi Athorbey Guet or ‘Daffi’, holds dual Kenyan-South Sudanese citizenship. His abduction therefore also constitutes a violation of Kenyan sovereignty and a failure of Kenya’s duty to protect its own citizens. Relatives confirm he has underlying medical conditions requiring regular attention; the conditions in military intelligence facilities in South Sudan are not compatible with adequate care.
THE MACHINE HE EXPOSED: CRAWFORD CAPITAL’S ARCHITECTURE OF PLUNDER
To understand why a man was snatched from the streets of Nairobi in the dead of night, you must first understand what he knew. And what Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit knew about Crawford Capital Ltd. was enough to embarrass a president, implicate a president’s daughter, and help trigger sanctions from the world’s most powerful nation.
Crawford Capital Ltd. is registered in the United Kingdom, a corporate detail that has allowed it to present itself as a legitimate fintech company while functioning as something altogether different: a private tax collection bureau operated primarily for the benefit of South Sudan’s ruling elite. Its operational arm, CapitalPay, controls the country’s entire e-government service delivery infrastructure, the electronic gateway through which businesses must pass for e-visas, trade permits, customs clearances, and crucially the Electronic Crude Oil Accreditation Permit, the ECOAP system through which every single barrel of South Sudanese crude oil exported must be cleared.
Crawford secured its stranglehold through a November 2019 no-bid contract with the Ministry of Information, Communication Technology and Postal Services, signed under Minister Thomas Tut Lam. The terms of that contract, reviewed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan and reported on extensively by Radio Tamazuj and other investigators, are staggering in their audacity. Under the arrangement, Crawford retains 75 percent of all revenues collected through its platforms. The South Sudanese government, the owner of the taxes being collected and the supposed custodian of the public interest, receives 25 cents for every shilling that should flow to its treasury.
The UN Commission’s September 2025 report, titled Plundering a Nation: How Rampant Corruption Unleashed a Human Rights Crisis in South Sudan, described profit splits of this nature as unjustifiable and indicative of abuse of public office. The more precise word is robbery. Banks were reportedly directed to route non-oil revenues into accounts controlled by Crawford rather than official treasury channels, severing the public money supply from the public good entirely.
The crude oil levy alone illustrates the scale of the haemorrhage. Every cargo of South Sudanese crude requires ECOAP clearance, with a 0.03 percent levy on cargo values flowing directly to CapitalPay. Single shipments have generated fees of between 146,000 and 166,000 US dollars. South Sudan exported 22 cargoes of Dar and Nile blend crude oil between January and October 2025 alone. The financial accumulation for Crawford and its principals over the years of the contract is, as the UN Commission noted, enormous.
The humanitarian cost of this arrangement is not abstract. Between 2020 and 2024, less than 48 percent of collected non-oil revenues reached core government services. Health received under 0.9 percent of the national budget on average. Education received approximately 2.3 percent. In a country where, despite receiving more than 25 billion US dollars in oil-related inflows since independence in 2011, more than half the population faces acute food insecurity and four million citizens have been displaced, the Crawford arrangement was not merely corrupt. According to the UN Commission’s own framing, it was a direct driver of the human rights catastrophe gripping the country.
“Crawford’s e-Services, implemented through Crawford Capital Ltd., have facilitated organised corruption and predation, resulting in further revenue diversion.” — UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, September 2025
In 2024, Crawford’s reach extended even further into the humanitarian sector. The company extended an unlawful fuel import levy onto tax-exempt humanitarian organisations, including organisations supplying critical food aid operations. The UN Commission documented how this move contributed to the suspension of World Food Programme distributions at a moment when tens of millions of South Sudanese were already facing acute starvation. A company capturing 75 percent of national revenues was not content with that bounty; it reached into the lifeline supplies keeping children alive and took a cut from those too.
The 2022 Ebola and COVID preparedness project deepened the pattern. A 10 million dollar advance disbursed for pandemic response was never fully accounted for, illustrating how the Crawford network used every crisis, digital, fiscal, or public health, as another opportunity for financial extraction.
ADUT AT THE APEX: THE SHADOW TREASURY AND ITS ARCHITECT
The formal ownership structure of Crawford Capital lists Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek as holding approximately 68 percent of the company and 61.2 percent of CapitalPay, with Kenyan businessman Jeremy Gisemba holding a significant stake alongside him. Ariech Mayar Wol serves as CFO and Chair. Ruey Majok Guandong, the other co-founder, rounds out the disclosed principals. On paper, this is a private fintech company with South Sudanese and Kenyan shareholders, no more and no less.
But accountability researchers circulating an organisational chart titled The Crawford/CapitalPay Looting Squad have placed a different face at the very top. That face belongs to Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit, the eldest daughter of President Salva Kiir and the woman currently serving as Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programmes. Africa Confidential, the authoritative intelligence outlet reporting on the continent since 1960, described Crawford’s network as her shadow treasury. The description has proven durable because every piece of subsequent investigation has reinforced it.
The connection between Adut and Crawford runs deeper than a simple accusation. Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek and Ruey Majok Guandong, Crawford’s co-founders, have a documented history of forming companies with politically connected individuals. Notably, radio Tamazuj’s investigation revealed that the same Malek and Guandong previously formed a company together with Mayar Salva Kiir, the President’s son, through a vehicle called Air Afrik Aviation Limited in 2013. The Kiir family’s commercial entanglement with these same founders predates Crawford by years.
Syracuse University professor Jok Madut Jok, one of South Sudan’s most respected scholars, told Radio Tamazuj in an interview published this week that Adut’s position as Presidential Envoy for Special Programmes operates without any clear constitutional basis, mandate, or limits of authority. She has effectively created a power centre outside all formal institutions, answerable to no one but her father, and wielding influence over the economic architecture of the state.
The succession dimension is the most alarming element of this picture. Sources cited by Radio Tamazuj indicate that Adut is actively being discussed in political circles as a candidate for Vice President in place of James Wani Igga, and possibly as First Deputy Chair of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, a positioning that would place her directly on the trajectory to inherit power from her ailing father. Those within her networks, Professor Jok told Tamazuj, have heard her express precisely these ambitions.
The Crisis Group, in a March 2026 briefing, confirmed how Kiir has dramatically concentrated power within his family as his health has deteriorated and his circle of trust has shrunk. In October 2024, Kiir dismissed his long-serving intelligence chief, General Akol Koor Kuc. He then removed long-time Vice President James Wani Igga, briefly elevated business associate Benjamin Bol Mel, and later reversed that decision. In August 2025, with his succession options narrowing and his family loyalties sharpening, he appointed Adut to the senior envoy role. The consolidation of the Crawford revenue machine and the consolidation of Adut’s political ambitions are not separate stories. They are one story.
BACKGROUND: Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit is the eldest child of President Salva Kiir Mayardit and First Lady Mary Ayen Mayardit. She is also known as the founder and chairperson of the Adut Salva Kiir Foundation (ASK), a nominally philanthropic vehicle through which she has cultivated a public profile. She assumed the Presidential Envoy role on August 21, 2025.
THE PROTECTED COMPANY: HOW CRAWFORD SURVIVED EVERY CHALLENGE
That Crawford Capital has survived multiple attempts to scrutinise or suspend its operations is not an accident. It is the direct result of presidential family protection deployed at every level of government.
The most dramatic episode unfolded in March 2026. Trade and Industry Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk issued a formal directive on March 5 halting Crawford’s operations pending a 90-day review. It was a courageous move, and it lasted less than 24 hours in effective terms. Vice President James Wani Igga, writing to the minister, told her that her unilateral decision violated the principle of administrative order and the rule of law. Igga invoked the authority of the Council of Ministers, citing Resolution 34/2024 as formal cabinet endorsement of the Crawford contract, a resolution presided over by the President himself. The suspension was overturned. Crawford continued operating.
The parliamentary route fared no better. A parliamentary committee moved to support the minister’s position, only to find itself outmanoeuvred by the same mechanisms of executive protection. Crawford’s contract, its ownership, its revenue arrangements, and its political patrons have never been subjected to parliamentary oversight, competitive bidding processes, or published contractual frameworks. The government’s own South Sudan Revenue Authority has been accused by the UN Commission of complicity in the arrangements.
Then came Washington. On May 12, 2026, the United States State Department imposed sanctions on Crawford Capital Ltd., naming it as a corrupt entity that had siphoned money from South Sudan’s treasury and stolen foreign assistance funds intended to support the South Sudanese people. Visa restrictions were simultaneously applied to associated officials. For a company that had draped itself in the veneer of UK corporate respectability, US sanctions were a catastrophic reputational blow.
Juba’s response was immediate and furious. At least four government ministries and the national revenue authority issued defensive statements within a day. The regime argued that Crawford was a legitimate digital services provider delivering government modernisation. It pointed to the company’s formal contract. It said the UN Commission’s findings were intended to disparage the South Sudanese people. What it could not explain was why a supposedly legitimate government technology contractor needed to keep 75 percent of the nation’s taxes.
SILENCING THE WITNESSES: A PATTERN OF TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION
Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit
The abduction of Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit did not emerge from nowhere. It is the most extreme expression of a pattern that sources inside the Crawford network and inside Juba’s political circles have been documenting for months.
As international scrutiny of Crawford intensified following the US sanctions and the global circulation of the Looting Squad organogram, Adut Salva Kiir allegedly turned her coercive apparatus inward. Multiple sources have described her ordering the arrest of business associates and employees suspected of leaking sensitive information about her financial empire. She has reportedly used government mechanisms to file criminal cases against individuals outside South Sudan who possess knowledge of her financial dealings, designating them enemies of the state engaged in espionage. Athorbey was not the first person in her network to face these threats. He was simply the one foolish enough, or brave enough, to go public.
What made Athorbey a uniquely dangerous target was the specificity and credibility of his knowledge. A Kenyan-South Sudanese citizen with direct familiarity with the inner workings of the Crawford structure, he had been circulating information about the company’s ownership network, revenue arrangements, and political connections. His materials, passed to investigative outlets and international accountability bodies, contributed to the evidentiary foundation that eventually informed UN reports and US sanctions decisions. He knew exactly how the money flowed, who benefited, and which officials had signed what. That knowledge, in Juba’s calculus, made him not merely an inconvenience but an existential threat.
His preemptive police filings in Nairobi, explicitly naming Adut and Garang Mayom Kuoch as the people to investigate if he came to harm, were a calculated attempt to create a deterrent. He understood what he was dealing with. The deterrent failed. The abduction was authorised anyway.
The message sent to the wider network around Crawford is now impossible to misread. If you worked for Adut, if you had access to documents, if you spoke to journalists or international investigators, you are now being watched and potentially targeted. Sources within the network who spoke to this publication did so only under strict conditions of anonymity, describing an atmosphere of intense fear.
“Eventually, just like those who worked for her father, you may end up exiled, disappeared, dead, or jailed.” — Warning circulated in South Sudanese opposition networks, June 2026
Athorbey is also not the only person believed to have been taken from Kenya in connection with the Crawford investigation, according to sources at the Kenyan border. The full scope of this transnational repression operation remains unclear, and Kenyan investigative and immigration authorities have yet to offer any public accounting of what they knew, when they knew it, and what role, if any, their personnel played in facilitating or ignoring the removal of a Kenyan citizen from Kenyan soil.
KENYA’S COMPLICITY PROBLEM
Kenya’s record on the forced removal of South Sudanese nationals has not been clean, and the international community has not forgotten. The deaths of South Sudanese figures previously transferred from Kenya to Juba under murky circumstances, cases that civil society organisations have cited in their condemnations of the current abduction, loom over the Kenyan government’s response to the Athorbey case.
Amnesty International Kenya, in its June 10 statement, was blunt: Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit holds Kenyan citizenship. Abducting a Kenyan citizen at gunpoint in the capital, holding him at JKIA, and transferring him to a foreign intelligence facility on fabricated charges is not a matter for diplomatic discretion. It is a violation of Kenyan law, Kenyan sovereignty, and Kenya’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1969 OAU Convention, both of which prohibit refoulement to persecution.
Kenya has spent years cultivating its reputation as a regional hub for international organisations, diplomatic missions, and civil society bodies precisely because of its nominal commitment to the rule of law. Every time Nairobi allows a foreign government to conduct an enforced disappearance on Kenyan soil, that reputation corrodes further. Kenya’s silence in the initial hours and days following Athorbey’s abduction has been conspicuous and damaging.
It is tempting, when writing about companies and contracts and revenue splits, to lose sight of what those numbers mean on the ground in South Sudan. The UN Commission’s data does not permit that abstraction.
Since independence in 2011, South Sudan has received more than 25 billion US dollars in oil-related inflows. It has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of every global human development index. More than half its population faces acute food insecurity. The health system has functionally collapsed. Education spending has averaged around 2.3 percent of the budget in the years of Crawford’s operation. The President’s personal medical budget, the UN Commission found, exceeded the government’s total expenditure on public health.
Crawford Capital did not single-handedly create this catastrophe. The catastrophe has been decades in the making, built from civil war, elite predation, ethnic violence, and international indifference. But as the UN Commission concluded, Crawford became one of its most efficient instruments in the digital era. Every percentage point captured by the 75/25 split was a percentage point that did not reach a hospital in Juba, a school in Jonglei, a food distribution in Upper Nile.
The 10 million dollars advanced for Ebola and COVID preparedness in 2022, which disappeared without full accounting, represents roughly the same amount that the government spent on health for hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese in an entire quarter. The fuel levy extended to humanitarian agencies in 2024, the one that contributed to WFP distribution suspensions, placed a financial toll on the organisations trying to prevent mass starvation in a country where 70 percent of the population already required humanitarian assistance.
This is what Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit was exposing. Not an abstract financial scandal. A machine that had been eating the South Sudanese state alive from the inside for seven years, protected at every turn by the President’s daughter, her business associates, and the coercive apparatus of a regime that has never hesitated to use violence against its critics.
THE RECKONING THAT CANNOT BE STOPPED
Adut Salva Kiir’s response to international exposure has been to escalate. Arrests. Threats. Disappearances. The seizure of a Kenyan citizen from a Nairobi street at 3 a.m. by masked operatives. Each escalation has produced not silence but the opposite: more coverage, more investigations, more international attention, more sanctions. The regime’s desperation is visible in the crudeness of its methods.
Major international news organisations are now actively investigating Crawford’s contracts, ownership structures, and the human cost of the 75/25 arrangement. Africa Confidential, Radio Tamazuj, the Global Trade Review, AFP, and accountability networks from New York to London are all on this story. The UN Commission has issued 54 detailed recommendations to the South Sudanese government. The United States has landed direct financial sanctions on the revenue machine that has been shielding the presidential family. And now the abduction of a whistleblower who explicitly named Adut and Garang Mayom Kuoch in his safety filings has confirmed, in the starkest possible terms, what the accountability community has been arguing for years: this network will not stop until someone forces it to.
The Kenyan government must act. It has an obligation to demand Athorbey’s immediate and unconditional release, to investigate how a Kenyan citizen was removed from Kenyan territory without judicial process, and to hold accountable any Kenyan officials who facilitated or ignored the operation. Failure to do so is not neutrality. It is complicity.
The United Kingdom, as the jurisdiction in which Crawford Capital Ltd. is registered and where its corporate existence is maintained, has accountability obligations of its own. UK financial crime investigators have the authority to examine the flow of funds through a UK-registered entity subject to US sanctions. The question of how a company collecting national revenues in South Sudan, retaining three quarters of those revenues for itself, and protecting that arrangement through the abduction of witnesses, maintains its UK registration in good standing is one that Companies House and the Financial Conduct Authority should be asking loudly and publicly.
As for Crawford Capital itself, the game is over. The organogram is public. The ownership is documented. The UN Commission report is on the record. The US sanctions are in force. The arrest of Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit, far from burying the story, has guaranteed that Crawford Capital’s name will now appear in every future UN Security Council debate on South Sudan, in every future US foreign policy review of the region, and in every future accountability audit of revenue diversion in fragile states.
Adut Salva Kiir believed she could build a shadow treasury beneath the ruins of her father’s government, capture the digital arteries of a broken state, and silence anyone who noticed. She has instead created the most thoroughly documented corruption scandal in South Sudan’s history, triggered the most significant US unilateral action against Juba’s ruling elite in years, and ensured that the name Crawford Capital will follow her, and her father’s legacy, into every historical account of how South Sudan failed its people.
Athorbey Al-Gaddhaffy-Dit must be released immediately. His medical conditions are known. His captors are named. The world is watching.
The South Sudanese people have paid for this empire with their hunger, their displacement, their children’s future, and now with the disappearance of one of the men brave enough to document what was being done to them. The reckoning is not coming. It is already here.
MOGADISHU, June 11, 2026 — The controversy surrounding Somali referee Omar Artan’s deportation from the United States has taken a dramatic new turn after the militant group Al-Shabaab issued a statement defending the official and accusing Washington of hostility toward Somalis.
In a propaganda release circulated on Wednesday, the group seized on the growing international debate over Artan’s treatment, claiming the decision to deny him entry to the United States reflected broader discrimination against Somali citizens. The statement accused the U.S. government of pursuing policies that undermine Somalia and its people, while portraying Artan’s case as evidence of what it described as ethnic prejudice rather than legitimate security concerns.
The intervention by Al-Shabaab comes as criticism and support continue to pour in from political leaders, football officials and members of the Somali public following Artan’s deportation days before he was expected to participate in activities linked to the FIFA World Cup.
The United States has defended its decision. Andrew Giuliani, Executive Director of the White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup, said American authorities acted on security grounds and would not compromise national safety.
“There are some things we cannot talk about, but one thing is for sure: anybody communicating with bad actors to plan harm against the US is not going to be granted entry,” Giuliani said in an interview with Sky News.
He added that U.S. authorities had concerns arising from the vetting process and suggested investigators had examined possible links between Artan and individuals associated with extremist networks. No public evidence has been released linking the referee to any terrorist activity, and Somali officials have strongly rejected any suggestion that he posed a security threat.
The case has triggered a diplomatic and political storm in Somalia, where Artan returned to a hero’s welcome after being sent back from the United States.
Omar Artan.
Former Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo described the incident as a reflection of deeper governance challenges facing the country.
“The circumstances surrounding this event remind the Somali people that whatever goes wrong in governance and politics has a direct impact on the structure of our nation and our valuable individuals,” Farmaajo said.
Somali Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre also rallied behind the referee, saying the setback would not define his career.
“I told our Somali referee Omar Artan that while his World Cup officiating dream may have been delayed, it has never been diminished. Long before a ball is kicked, he has already won the hearts of millions and secured his place in history,” Barre said.
The Somali Football Federation likewise defended Artan, describing him as a respected international referee who has represented Somalia with integrity on the global stage.
Security analysts say Al-Shabaab’s decision to publicly champion Artan is likely an attempt to exploit a highly emotional issue for propaganda purposes and position itself as a defender of Somali interests. The group has frequently sought to capitalize on political grievances and disputes involving foreign governments to strengthen its narrative among sections of the population.
While the militant organization’s statement has added another layer of controversy to an already sensitive case, Somali officials have largely focused on defending Artan’s reputation and demanding greater transparency from U.S. authorities regarding the reasons behind his deportation.
For now, the Omar Artan saga has evolved from a sporting controversy into a wider geopolitical dispute touching on immigration policy, counterterrorism, national identity and Somalia’s relationship with the United States. With Washington standing by its decision and Somali leaders continuing to demand answers, the debate shows little sign of fading.
Ousted Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko won unanimous re-election on Saturday as the head of Senegal’s ruling party, solidifying his political standing amidst a deepening national crisis.
Sonko, a powerful mentor-turned-rival to President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, easily secured the leadership vote from 583 party delegates at a congress of their Pan-African Pastef party in Diamniadio, outside the capital city of Dakar.
Faye originally won the presidency after authorities barred the widely popular Sonko from standing in Senegal’s 2024 election. Sonko then anointed Faye to run in his place and subsequently served as his prime minister.
However, months of mounting tension between the two leaders culminated on May 22, when Faye sacked Sonko from the premiership.
Just four days later, Sonko promptly responded to his dismissal by winning the election to his current post as speaker of the National Assembly.
This ongoing rift has triggered severe political upheaval for the West African country and brought intense uncertainty to Pastef, which remains the largest party in parliament.
In an effort to calm the mounting political friction, President Faye delivered a speech on Thursday, urging against further dividing the nation, stating that no quarrel, however bitter, is worth tearing apart their shared country.
Burkina Faso’s military rulers have intensified a crackdown on critics, targeting prominent figures, worshippers, and students who question the junta’s authority.
Last week, influential Sunni imam Mohamad Ishaq Kindo was detained and taken to an undisclosed location, drawing widespread condemnation. Kindo, previously a supporter of the regime, criticised a draft law regulating religious freedoms in a country where approximately 60 per cent of the population is Muslim.
“The terror has reached its peak,” an ally of the imam told AFP, describing the arrest as excessive.
“Brutally abducting a religious leader and preventing worshippers from gathering for prayer by firing tear gas even inside the mosque is taking things way too far.”
Images circulating on social media later showed the imam’s supporters, some of whom had protested his arrest, dressed in military uniforms and undergoing physical training at a capital-based camp.
Captain Ibrahim Traore, who seized power nearly four years ago, openly rejects the label of a democratic leader. His social media supporters routinely applaud the detention and abduction of those challenging the junta’s so-called “popular progressive revolution.”
Burkina Faso Leader, Captain Ibrahim Traore
Masked men, often in civilian clothing, have become a common presence in the arrests of critics, including those questioning the government’s handling of insurgent violence, which has plagued the West African country for over a decade.
Students have also been targeted. The General Union of Students of Burkina (Ugeb) was suspended and its leader arrested after condemning arbitrary arrests and highlighting the junta’s inability to restore security.
“What this regime wants is the elimination of all student movements and the establishment of a single, uniform way of thinking,” a union official said.
Despite the arrests, some Burkinabè have begun speaking out more openly. A researcher in Ouagadougou said Kindo’s detention reflects the junta’s effort to strictly control religious discourse, yet warned that public demonstrations are unlikely to erode the regime’s support within the Muslim community.
Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan begins a three-day state visit to Russia on Wednesday to meet Vladimir Putin, turning to Moscow as her country’s reputation and relations with the West badly fray.
Western diplomats and rights groups have accused Hassan’s government of massacring hundreds of people during October’s election unrest and orchestrating a wave of abductions and murders of political critics.
While the United States reviews its relations with Tanzania and recently sanctioned a senior Tanzanian police officer for torture, Putin was one of the first to congratulate Hassan on her 98 per cent vote victory.
Hassan remains unapologetic about the political crackdown, describing activists and demonstrators as disrespectful children who should be beaten with canes.
Tanzanian president visits Russia. Credit: African Initiative – News Agency
She brought a business delegation to Moscow, hoping to cement deals in trade, tourism, and minerals during the first state visit to Russia by a Tanzanian president since 1969.
While annual trade currently stands at just over $307 million, the nation hopes to advance a long-delayed uranium mining project.
Analysts note that the visit offers mutual benefits for both isolated administrations.
Russia can leverage the support of a weakened Tanzanian government, potentially securing crucial abstentions during critical United Nations votes regarding the war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, a Tanzanian government report recently confirmed that last year’s election violence killed 518 people, though the document failed to establish accountability or name those responsible.
Thousands of Africans seeking to study, work, visit or migrate to the United States could soon face longer journeys and higher costs after Washington unveiled plans to drastically reduce the number of embassies and consulates processing visa applications across the continent.
Under the proposed changes, the number of US diplomatic missions in Africa handling routine visa applications will be cut from nearly 50 to just 20, according to reports by the Associated Press citing US officials and an internal State Department memo.
The changes are expected to be rolled out this month as part of the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown.
The directive, reportedly approved by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is aimed at tightening immigration controls, reducing visa overstays and strengthening security screening for both immigrant and non-immigrant visa applicants.
US officials say the move will allow resources to be deployed more efficiently while maintaining rigorous vetting standards for those seeking entry into the United States.
For many Africans, however, the changes could create a major new hurdle.
Applicants from countries that will lose routine visa services may be forced to travel across borders to attend interviews and complete application procedures at designated regional hubs. Immigration observers warn that the added travel costs, accommodation expenses and logistical challenges could make the visa process significantly more difficult for many people.
While visa services will be centralised, US embassies and consulates in countries that are not selected as hubs will remain open. Their focus will largely shift to services for American citizens, including passport renewals, emergency assistance, diplomatic visas and a limited number of special cases.
Kenya is expected to play a pivotal role in the new arrangement.
The US Embassy in Nairobi has been listed among the 20 designated visa-processing hubs that will continue handling all categories of applications. Other hubs include locations in Accra, Lagos, Johannesburg, Kampala and Kigali.
The move is likely to increase demand for appointments at the US Embassy in Nairobi, particularly from applicants in neighbouring countries that may no longer have access to routine visa processing services.
The latest policy is part of a series of immigration measures introduced under the administration of Donald Trump. Previous measures have included tighter visa vetting procedures, travel restrictions affecting several countries and efforts aimed at reducing immigration and visa overstays.
Although US officials have indicated that the changes are expected to take effect in June, no exact implementation date has been announced.
For thousands of African travellers planning to visit the United States, the shake-up could soon mean that securing a visa begins with an additional journey before the journey itself.
The United States government plans to significantly reduce the number of embassies and consulates in Africa that process visa applications, a move expected to affect thousands of travellers seeking to visit, study, work, or migrate to the US.
The UK will not have to pay Rwanda millions of pounds over the collapsed asylum agreement that was cancelled by Keir Starmer shortly after he took office, an international court has ruled.
The Rwandan government had sought to sue the UK for more than £100m, saying it had breached the terms of the deal.
Signed by the previous Conservative government, it was meant to see the UK pay Rwanda to host asylum seekers who had arrived illegally in the UK.
Lawyers representing the UK during the three-day hearing in the Netherlands had argued that it was “entirely logical” the plan would be scrapped when Labour came to power and “simple common sense” that no further payments would be due.
They also denied the UK breached parts of the deal.
“Rwanda is not entitled to any of the forms of relief it seeks,” they told the Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration.
A spokesperson for the Rwandan government said it respected the tribunal’s ruling and considered the matter concluded.
But in a statement, they added: “We note that the dissenting and separate opinion by Professor Mohamed Abdel Wahab shows that the issues before the tribunal were complex and open to different legal conclusions, including that the November 2024 exchanges relied on by the UK did not validly change the financial arrangements between the two countries.”
Emmanuel Ugirashebuja, Rwanda’s minister of justice and attorney general, previously told the court the country had incurred “significant costs” preparing for the partnership, but the UK “then sought to walk away from its legal obligations”.
He also said the UK “did not do Rwanda a courtesy of informing it in advance” that it was scrapping the deal, and leaders were “left to read about this development in the media”.
Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak introduced the scheme as a deterrent to those looking to illegally cross the English Channel in small boats.
The plan had first been announced in 2022 by then-prime minister Boris Johnson. It was designed so that asylum seekers arriving in the UK “illegally” from a safe country, such as France, would be sent to Rwanda and have their claims processed there.
If successful, they could be granted refugee status and allowed to stay in Rwanda.
The first flight that had been scheduled to take off under the plan in 2022 was grounded minutes before take-off due to an intervention from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which triggered a series of legal challenges in London courts.
The scheme faced a number of legal battles before it was ultimately scrapped.
A voluntary removals programme was subsequently announced in 2024, under which migrants whose claims were rejected were offered up to £3,000 to move to the east African country.
Only four people were voluntarily removed to Rwanda.
Dropping the scheme was one of Labour’s manifesto pledges ahead of the 2024 general election, and when Starmer came into office he declared the plan “dead and buried”.
Responding to the court’s decision, a government spokesperson said the UK had “robustly” defended its position.
They said the government was “focused on delivering vital reforms to restore order and control to our borders, including removing the incentives drawing illegal migrants to Britain and scaling up removals of those with no right to be here”.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp welcomed the court’s ruling, saying the UK “should not be in the position where such courts have jurisdiction over the decisions made by our sovereign parliament”.
But he said Labour “should have never cancelled the Rwanda plan” and that the decision has led to record crossings and asylum claims.
Imran Hussain, the director of external affairs at the Refugee Council, said on Monday the scheme caused “chaos” by pausing decisions and leaving people stuck in the system.
“The best way to get value for money is to build a fair and functioning asylum system that makes quick, accurate decisions about who can stay and who must return,” Hussain added.
NAIROBI / JUBA — In September 2019, as South Sudan was taking its first cautious steps toward mobile money and digital payments, a Kenyan businessman named Jeremy Gisemba sat down with reporters to voice concern about financial crime. He was serving at the time as business development and marketing director for LEM International, an Eritrean-owned trading firm embedded in Juba’s commercial ecosystem. His message was a warning. He told journalists that he did not feel there were currently enough controls in place on mobile money, and that all parties involved need to share anti-money laundering mechanisms, including knowing where the source of the money is coming from.
Within the same twelve-month window, Crawford Capital Ltd. was being contracted by South Sudan’s Ministry of ICT as the exclusive provider of the country’s e-Government services without competitive tender, with the backing of the National Security Service, and on terms the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan would later describe as unjustifiable and indicative of abuse of public office. Jeremy Gisemba would acquire a 26 percent stake in Crawford Capital Ltd. and a 23.4 percent stake in CapitalPay Ltd., the operational platform through which billions in South Sudanese public revenues would flow and from which his company took three-quarters of every dollar before the government saw a cent.
The man who publicly worried about anti-money laundering controls became a principal shareholder in the company that, on May 12, 2026, the United States government sanctioned for siphoning money from South Sudan’s treasury and stealing foreign assistance funds intended to support the South Sudanese people. Jeremy Gisemba, private, unfamiliar to most in Nairobi, and almost invisible in the public record of this scandal, is now formally part of it.
WHO IS JEREMY GISEMBA
Gisemba is not a household name in Kenya or South Sudan. He has cultivated that anonymity deliberately. Unlike majority shareholder Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek — whose face appears in organograms circulated by accountability researchers, whose political lineage as the son of a former deputy minister is documented in UN reports, and who serves as CEO and Managing Director of Crawford/CapitalPay — Gisemba operated in the background. No press releases. No LinkedIn profile generating headlines. No government ministerial appointments connecting him publicly to the scheme.
What the public record does show is a Kenyan national with years of direct commercial experience in South Sudan’s emerging digital economy before he took his stake in Crawford. His 2019 role at LEM International placed him precisely at the intersection of South Sudan’s financial system and its nascent digital payment infrastructure — the same intersection Crawford would occupy exclusively from the same year. He was not an outsider who stumbled into this deal. He was an insider who understood the terrain.
The UN Commission’s September 2025 report, Plundering a Nation: How Rampant Corruption Unleashed a Human Rights Crisis in South Sudan, documents the full ownership structure of Crawford Capital Ltd. with clinical precision. Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek holds 68 percent of Crawford Capital and 61.2 percent of CapitalPay. Gisemba holds 26 percent of Crawford Capital and 23.4 percent of CapitalPay. Ruey Majok Guandong son of South Sudan’s ambassador to Turkey held 50 percent at incorporation before the structure was restructured. The Commission notes that the company’s financial beneficiaries extend further to include political elites and their close relatives, including documented links to Adut Salva Kiir, the President’s daughter.
“The company is owned and run by family members of national political elites. At least 12 government ministries and entities have enabled Crawford’s corrupt activities.” — UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, September 2025
Gisemba’s stake was not a passive inheritance. He is the second-largest shareholder in both entities. At 26 percent of Crawford Capital and 23.4 percent of CapitalPay, his equity position entitled him to a proportional share of every pound, dollar, and South Sudanese currency unit that Crawford extracted under its 75-25 revenue contract with the government. Every crude oil accreditation fee. Every e-visa charge. Every business permit processed through CapitalPay’s portals. Every levy imposed on the humanitarian agencies that the UN found were being taxed in violation of international law.
THE SCHEME HE BOUGHT INTO
To understand Gisemba’s exposure, it is necessary to understand exactly what Crawford Capital did. Beginning with its 2019 contract with the Ministry of ICT a contract the UN Commission found was awarded without competitive tender and endorsed by the National Security Service’s then-Director General of the Internal Security Bureau, Akol Koor Kuc — Crawford was given exclusive control over South Sudan’s e-Government revenue collection infrastructure.
The contract gave Crawford 75 percent of all revenues passing through its platforms. The remaining 25 percent went to the government. This was not a contractor’s service fee. It was a permanent structural diversion of public revenue into private hands. Revenues were held in Crawford’s own private bank accounts rather than channeled through the national treasury. The South Sudan Revenue Authority, which should have been the institution overseeing all of this, was documented by the UN Commission as complicit allowing Crawford’s representatives to collect and hold public funds directly, while the Authority itself was withholding 14.5 percent of collections far in excess of its legal 2 percent cap.
75% Crawford’s share of every rand, pound and dollar of public revenue it collected
26% Gisemba’s ownership stake in Crawford Capital Ltd.
192 of 192 UN Human Development Index ranking — South Sudan
$25.2 billion Oil inflows since independence, before this scandal
In September 2023, Crawford collected fees from international crude oil buyers under a mandatory Electronic Crude Oil Accreditation Permit system. In one documented transaction, Crawford pocketed more than 1.1 million dollars. The Ministry of ICT received approximately 367,000 dollars. In 2022, Crawford received a 10 million dollar advance for purported Ebola preparedness — equal to 80 percent of the entire Ministry of Health’s annual spending — despite the company having already failed on a COVID-19 related project.
In 2024, Crawford implemented a fuel import levy that was extended, in violation of international law, to humanitarian organisations, UN agencies, and diplomatic missions. The World Food Programme suspended critical food aid distributions. The UN Humanitarian Coordinator for South Sudan described the situation as a direct impediment to saving lives. The levy was eventually withdrawn following international complaints, but not before significant damage had been done to operations feeding millions of acutely food-insecure people in one of the hungriest countries on earth.
Jeremy Gisemba owned a quarter of the company doing all of this.
THE REGIONAL DIMENSION: WHY A KENYAN BELONGS IN THIS STORY
Gisemba’s nationality is not incidental to the analysis. Crawford Capital is registered in the United Kingdom. Its principals include British-linked directors alongside South Sudanese-UK dual nationals. The Kenyan Gisemba provides a third jurisdictional thread — East African commercial connectivity that gave the enterprise regional reach and, critically, the plausibility of a legitimate multi-national business operation rather than a nakedly domestic patronage vehicle.
This matters for accountability purposes. Kenya’s Assets Recovery Agency and Directorate of Criminal Investigations have jurisdiction over Kenyan nationals engaged in cross-border financial crimes. The Financial Reporting Centre, Kenya’s anti-money laundering intelligence unit, is legally empowered to investigate suspicious financial flows involving Kenyan citizens operating abroad. The question of whether any portion of Crawford’s revenue stream the company’s 75 percent share of South Sudanese public taxes, fees, and levies passed through Kenyan bank accounts, Kenyan-registered entities, or Kenyan commercial infrastructure is now a matter of pressing national interest for Nairobi.
The US sanctions on Crawford Capital do not name Gisemba individually. But they name the company in which he is the second-largest shareholder, for conduct in which that company’s revenues were generated by the scheme he co-owned. Secondary exposure under sanctions regimes is a well-established legal reality. Any financial institution that continues to process transactions for Crawford Capital, CapitalPay, or their associated entities including transactions involving their shareholders does so at risk of sanctions violation.
THE POLITICAL SHIELD AND WHY IT CANNOT PROTECT GISEMBA
Crawford Capital’s immunity within South Sudan has been underwritten at the very highest levels of the Juba government. When Trade and Industry Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk issued a 90-day review directive in March 2026 citing technical failures, unreliable connectivity, and disruptions to legitimate trade operations she was overruled within days by Vice President James Wani Igga, who invoked a Council of Ministers resolution presided over by President Salva Kiir himself. The minister reversed her directive within eight days. The episode confirmed what accountability advocates had long suspected: Crawford operates under direct presidential protection.
That protection is rooted in ownership. The UN Commission documented that the company’s founders, Garang Malek and Ruey Guandong, previously formed other companies with Mayar Salva Kiir, the President’s son. Investigative reporting by Radio Tamazuj has established that CapitalPay is widely believed to be linked to Adut Salva Kiir, the President’s daughter and Senior Presidential Envoy, whose image appears at the apex of the network structure documented by accountability researchers.
But presidential protection in Juba does not translate into immunity before the United States Treasury, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office, or Kenya’s own law enforcement institutions. Gisemba’s protection is political. His exposure is legal. Those are not the same shield.
“The corrupt activities of these individuals robbed critical resources from a war-torn country.” — US Treasury, on earlier South Sudan sanctions designations, a template now applied to Crawford Capital
THE HUMAN COST OF A 26 PERCENT STAKE
Seven point seven million South Sudanese face acute food insecurity. Two point three million children are acutely malnourished. The entire South Sudanese health sector received less than 0.9 percent of the national budget between 2020 and 2024. The Ministry of Agriculture received less than 0.4 percent. The government spent 2.57 dollars per school-age child on education in 2023 to 2024. More than four million South Sudanese are internally displaced or living as refugees in neighbouring countries.
These numbers exist in the same document the UN Commission’s 101-page September 2025 report — as the ownership structure of Crawford Capital Ltd. They are not separate stories. Crawford’s privatisation of South Sudan’s non-oil revenue streams is one thread in the systematic looting that has produced these outcomes. Jeremy Gisemba’s 26 percent stake makes him a shareholder in that thread.
The man who in 2019 told journalists that people need to know where the money is coming from now faces a version of the same question directed at him. Where did Crawford Capital’s revenues come from? They came from South Sudanese taxpayers, crude oil traders, humanitarian organisations, businesses seeking permits, and citizens applying for visas at 75 cents on every dollar, before the government saw its quarter. And where did the proceeds of Gisemba’s 26 percent equity go? That is the question Nairobi, London, Washington, and Juba now have cause to ask him to answer.
JUBA — When the United States Department of State announced sanctions against Crawford Capital Ltd. on May 12, 2026, the move sent shockwaves across Juba’s political establishment and prompted a defensive chorus from at least four government ministries and the national revenue authority. Within hours, officials who rarely agree on anything had found common cause: defend the company at all costs.
The spectacle was revealing not for what it said about Crawford Capital but for what it confirmed — that the firm’s tentacles had wound so deeply into South Sudan’s state apparatus that sanctioning it was tantamount to sanctioning the government itself. That is precisely the point. Crawford Capital Ltd. is not simply a corrupt company operating in a corrupt environment. It is the corruption, systemized and laundered through the language of digital transformation, presented to the world as a modernization initiative while stripping the country’s already catastrophic revenues bare.
The evidence assembled by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, by Radio Tamazuj, by Eye Radio, and now confirmed by the United States government, paints a portrait of institutional plunder so brazen, so multi-layered, and so ruthlessly protected that it stands as one of Africa’s most documented cases of state capture in the digital age.
South Sudan ranked last — 192nd out of 192 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index. It ranked 180th out of 180 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Despite receiving more than 25.2 billion dollars in oil-related inflows since independence in 2011, more than half the population faces acute food insecurity, the health system has functionally collapsed, and more than four million South Sudanese are either internally displaced or have fled as refugees to neighbouring countries. Crawford Capital did not create this catastrophe. But as the UN Commission bluntly concluded in its September 2025 report, Plundering a Nation: How Rampant Corruption Unleashed a Human Rights Crisis in South Sudan, it became one of its most efficient instruments.
THE BIRTH OF A DIGITAL RACKET
Crawford Capital Ltd. is registered in the United Kingdom, a corporate detail that has allowed it to drape itself in the veneer of respectable Western business practices while functioning as a private tax collection bureau for South Sudan’s ruling elite. Its operational arm, CapitalPay, controls the country’s e-Government service delivery infrastructure — the electronic portals through which businesses obtain trade permits, visas, crude oil accreditation certificates, tax payments, and a growing list of government services with mandatory online processing.
The architecture of the arrangement was set in November 2019, when Crawford was contracted as the exclusive provider of e-Government Services under an agreement with the Ministry of Information, Communication Technology and Postal Services, then headed by the powerful and long-serving Michael Makuei Lueth. The terms of that contract were not the result of open competitive bidding. There is no publicly available record of a tender process, despite requirements under South Sudan’s Public Procurement and Disposal of Assets Act of 2018. Instead, the UN Commission found that the procurement was endorsed by key ministries and, critically, by the National Security Service’s Internal Security Bureau, whose director general at the time, Akol Koor Kuc, personally wrote in support of the arrangement, proposing that Crawford should work in partnership with the intelligence service’s ICT department because the company was, in his assessment, aiming to create large databases and integrate online services. The intelligence service’s blessing on a commercial contract for a private fintech firm was not incidental. It was foundational.
Documents reviewed by the UN Commission reveal that Crawford itself proposed the Ministry of ICT should be the face of the project while the company remained in the background but retained its majority share of all revenues generated. This was not a service contract. It was a hostile takeover of state revenue collection, dressed in the clothes of e-governance.
“Crawford proposed the Ministry should be the face of the project, while the company remained in the background but still retaining majority shares.” — UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, September 2025
Under the contract’s terms, Crawford was entitled to 75 percent of all revenues collected through its platforms. The government’s share the money meant to fund hospitals, schools, roads, and the basic machinery of a state was capped at 25 percent. This split was not limited to administrative fees. It applied to taxes, visa charges, trade permits, customs-related levies, and crude oil accreditation fees. Every South Sudanese pound that passed through Crawford’s digital gateway was, by contractual design, routed primarily to a private company registered in the United Kingdom.
The UN Commission described profit splits of this nature as unjustifiable and indicative of abuse of public office. The more apt description is highway robbery but with paperwork.
THE OWNERSHIP MAP: FOLLOW THE FAMILY CONNECTIONS
Crawford Capital Ltd. is majority owned by Garang Mayom Kuoc Malek, who holds 68 percent of the parent company and 61.2 percent of CapitalPay Ltd. He also owns 95 percent of Crawford Laboratory Ltd., a related entity. Garang Malek is the son of a former deputy minister and parliamentarian. He is not a technology entrepreneur who built something from nothing. He is a politically connected insider whose access to South Sudan’s government contracting machinery was, according to the UN Commission, a core reason the firm was able to secure a single-source government contract that should never have been awarded without open competition.
The second-largest shareholder is a Kenyan businessman, Jeremy Gisemba, who holds 26 percent of Crawford Capital Ltd. and 23.4 percent of CapitalPay Ltd. Ruey Majok Guandong, the son of South Sudan’s ambassador to Turkey, previously held 50 percent of Crawford Capital at the time of its incorporation, before the ownership structure was restructured in ways the Commission found difficult to fully trace.
But it is the company’s link to President Salva Kiir’s own family that transforms this story from a tale of ordinary elite capture into something far more disturbing. The UN Commission and multiple independent investigations have documented that Crawford Capital’s financial beneficiaries extend beyond its formal shareholders to include political elites and their close relatives. Garang Malek and Ruey Guandong previously formed another company together with Mayar Salva Kiir, the President’s son.
Most significantly, investigative reporting by Radio Tamazuj has established that Crawford Capital and CapitalPay are widely believed to be linked to Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit, the President’s daughter and Senior Presidential Envoy for Special Programs, whose photograph appears at the top of the network chart titled the Crawford/CapitalPay Looting Squad circulated by accountability researchers. The organogram shows Adut at the apex, with Garang Malek listed as CEO and Managing Director below her, and Ariech Mayar Wol listed as CFO and Chair of the Board of Crawford/CapitalPay. To the side, connections run to the National Communications Authority, headed by Brigadier General Rizik Dominic Samuel as Director General, with Biong Deng Biong listed as Director of Finance and Tejwok Simon Ajak as Chairperson of the Board.
“Both founders have deep political lineage, and Malek and Guandong have a history of forming companies with politically connected individuals.” — Radio Tamazuj investigation, March 2026
Radio Tamazuj’s investigation further noted that Crawford Capital is registered to dual South Sudanese-UK citizens, including Garang Mayom Malek, Deng Daniel, Ariech Wol Mayar, and Kurtis Lathanial Dinnall-Bateman — the last name conspicuously British, suggesting deliberate use of the UK corporate framework to provide a veneer of Western legitimacy to what is, at its operational core, a Juba-based patronage enterprise.
The company also registered Capital Pay Ltd. and Capital Pay Software Solutions Ltd. in the United Kingdom. All of these entities, according to investigative reporting, are used as business concerns to collect taxes on behalf of the South Sudan Revenue Authority and collect other monies from the public under the banner of e-Government Services.
THE NUMBERS: A REVENUE HEIST QUANTIFIED
The scale of the diversion documented by the UN Commission is staggering. Crawford began in 2020 by taking more than 75 percent of government visa fees collected through its new e-Visa portal. In 2021, it moved into e-Tax collections, receiving what the Commission described as a highly inflated proportion of taxes. In 2022, despite having demonstrably failed to deliver on a COVID-19 related project, Crawford was advanced 10 million dollars equal to 80 percent of the entire Ministry of Health’s spending for 2022 to 2023 ostensibly for Ebola preparedness.
In 2023, after then-ICT Minister Michael Makuei proposed a new fee for buyers of crude oil exports, Crawford collected a 0.3 percent levy from international oil traders seeking the mandatory Electronic Crude Oil Accreditation Permit. The UN Commission documented one specific transaction in September 2023 in which Crawford pocketed more than 1.1 million dollars from this arrangement while the Ministry of ICT received approximately 367,000 dollars a 75-25 split applied even to fees extracted from the global petroleum trade passing through South Sudan’s infrastructure.
In 2024, Crawford implemented a new fuel import levy on trucks entering the country, again proposed by Minister Makuei, again at the 75 percent profit share. This levy was extended, unlawfully, to tax-exempt humanitarian organizations UN agencies, international NGOs, and aid operations whose vehicles and logistics are protected from taxation under international legal frameworks. The result was not an administrative oversight. Crawford’s collection apparatus began imposing fees on the very trucks and organizations keeping South Sudanese alive.
The World Food Programme was forced to suspend critical food aid distributions. The UN Humanitarian Coordinator for South Sudan, speaking in April 2024 after the levy caused direct suspensions of food aid operations, described the situation plainly: it is vital that our limited funds are spent on saving lives and not bureaucratic impediments. The levy was eventually suspended in October 2024 following complaints from businesses and humanitarian agencies but not before the damage had been done, and not before Crawford had collected revenues from an operation that had no legal basis and no humanitarian justification.
The South Sudan Revenue Authority, which officially endorsed and enabled Crawford’s operations, has its own documented record of malfeasance. The Authority withholds a percentage of all collections for its operational expenses, a practice that was supposed to have ended by 2023 and was never supposed to exceed 2 percent. By 2024 to 2025, the Authority was withholding 14.5 percent. The UN Commission has on file evidence of irregular withdrawals from the Authority’s retention accounts as recently as January 2025.
NATIONAL SECURITY SERVICE AS SILENT ARCHITECT
The role of the National Security Service in Crawford’s story is perhaps the most alarming detail in the entire scandal, and the one that has received the least public scrutiny. It was not merely that security officials endorsed the contract in 2019. The UN Commission found that security service networks, including former officials from the NSS Internal Security Bureau, allegedly facilitated access to sensitive government databases and revenue systems to enable Crawford’s operations.
Akol Koor Kuc’s written endorsement proposed that Crawford work in partnership with the ISB ICT Department, citing the company’s ambition to build integrated online databases. The Commission found that the nature of the intelligence service’s involvement in the single-source procurement suggests that the e-Services infrastructure Crawford controls is likely being used without any consideration for personal data protection. In other words, the company that processes South Sudanese citizens’ visa applications, tax filings, and business permit data may be sharing that data or at minimum, integrating it with South Sudan’s domestic intelligence apparatus.
This is not an allegation that Crawford is a surveillance tool. It is a documented concern raised by one of the UN’s most authoritative human rights monitoring bodies, arising directly from written communications between intelligence officials and company executives that the Commission reviewed. The implication is grave: a private, politically connected company registered in the UK has been given not merely access to government revenue streams but potentially access to population-level data flows, with the blessing of the country’s spy chief.
THE MARCH 2026 SUSPENSION: WHEN A MINISTER TRIED TO FIGHT BACK
On March 5, 2026, Trade and Industry Minister Atong Kuol Manyang Juuk did something almost no senior South Sudanese official had done in the preceding seven years: she tried to hold Crawford Capital accountable. She issued a directive ordering a 90-day administrative and technical review of the Crawford Capital Pay Digital Payment and E-Service System, citing unreliable electricity, weak internet connectivity, poor staff training, and serious disruptions to trade licensing, permits, and daily commercial operations.
The reaction was immediate and overwhelming. Parliamentary committee chairperson Mayen Deng Alier wrote to the minister urging her to immediately reconsider the decision, invoking a presidential order requiring the use of the Revenue Authority’s e-Government system. Members of Parliament accused her of undermining revenue collection and disrupting government systems. Then came the decisive blow.
Vice President James Wani Igga, who chairs the Economic Cluster, wrote to the minister on March 6 informing her that the Crawford Capital engagement had been approved by the full Council of Ministers under Resolution No. 34/2024, presided over by the President himself, and that her directive therefore violated administrative order and could not stand. Igga warned that interfering with Crawford’s operations would create revenue disruptions with consequences too severe to contemplate.
By March 13, Minister Atong had reversed her directive. She informed her Undersecretary of the reversal, citing the Vice President’s advice, while pointedly maintaining that her underlying concerns about the system’s reliability and transparency remained valid. The episode lasted eight days. It achieved nothing, and it confirmed everything: that Crawford Capital operates under the direct protection of South Sudan’s highest political authority, that no single minister possesses the power to challenge it, and that even good-faith accountability attempts within the system are structurally impossible.
“The engagement of Crawford Capital was not a unilateral decision, but the result of extensive deliberations by the Economic Cluster, which culminated in a formal Resolution No. 34/2024 of the Council of Ministers, presided over by H.E. the President.” — Vice President James Wani Igga, March 6, 2026
US SANCTIONS AND THE GOVERNMENT’S DEFIANT RESPONSE
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s May 12, 2026 sanctions statement against Crawford Capital Ltd. placed the company in the same category as entities that have siphoned money from South Sudan’s treasury and stolen foreign assistance funds intended to support the South Sudanese people. Washington simultaneously announced visa restrictions against members of the transitional government, accusing them of impeding implementation of the 2018 Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan, warning that the country stood on the brink of a return to all-out war. The sanctions further noted that South Sudan People’s Defense Forces under President Kiir’s command had launched a military offensive in northern Jonglei State that displaced 300,000 people and created the conditions for a potential famine.
The government’s response was unified and defiant. The Ministry of ICT, now led by Ateny Wek Ateny, issued statements framing Crawford as a legitimate digital transformation partner operating under Council of Ministers resolutions and government-approved reform priorities. The South Sudan Revenue Authority published a statement celebrating the platform’s role in raising monthly non-oil revenue collections to more than 130 billion South Sudanese pounds, with nearly one trillion pounds collected in eight months. The Authority insisted all engagements with Crawford were conducted lawfully and transparently.
Neither the Ministry nor the Authority acknowledged the 75-25 revenue split. Neither addressed the humanitarian levies. Neither commented on the UN Commission’s finding that revenues were being held in Crawford’s own private bank accounts rather than channeled through the national treasury. The defiance was itself a form of confession these officials knew exactly what the arrangement entailed and had decided that defending it was preferable to explaining it.
THE BROADER PLUNDER: WHAT CRAWFORD FITS INTO
To understand Crawford Capital is to understand South Sudan’s broader political economy of extraction. The UN Commission’s September 2025 report documents multiple parallel looting mechanisms operating simultaneously, of which Crawford represents the non-oil revenue strand.
The Oil for Roads programme, which received at least 2.2 billion dollars in government oil revenue between 2021 and 2024, is documented as South Sudan’s single largest corruption scheme. The construction companies linked to it, connected to Benjamin Bol Mel appointed as a Vice President of South Sudan in February 2025 built roads that cost twice the regional industry standard per kilometre, contracted lengths that overstated actual distances by 38 percent, built two-lane roads where four lanes were specified, and left most of the funds unaccounted for. Bol Mel-affiliated companies received between 1.5 billion and 1.7 billion dollars with no reasonable explanation given for the amounts.
The parallel exchange rate gap, reintroduced in late 2024, allowed elites with access to both official and market rates to arbitrage donor funding, with humanitarian organizations required to use the official rate losing up to 64.5 cents of every dollar they spent in South Sudanese pounds. At the gap’s peak in July 2024, one million dollars of donor aid money had the purchasing power of just 355,000 dollars after the conversion loss.
Monetary financing, the printing of currency through central bank overdrafts, generated 668 million dollars in inflationary financing in fiscal year 2022 to 2023 and 495 million dollars in 2023 to 2024, directly destroying the purchasing power of ordinary South Sudanese, driving food prices beyond the reach of millions, and contributing to the acute food insecurity affecting 7.7 million people more than half the country’s population documented in 2025.
During the four fiscal years from 2020 to 2024, less than 48 percent of total revenues and oil entitlements reached the regular national government budget for core services. The Ministry of Presidential Affairs spent 19 times more than the Ministry of Health. The entire health sector received less than 0.9 percent of the regular national budget across those four years. The Ministry of General Education received an average of 2.3 percent of total budget spending, in flagrant violation of the Education Act’s 10 percent requirement. The Government spent 2.57 dollars per school-age child on education in 2023 to 2024. Funding to the judiciary in fiscal year 2023 to 2024 fell below 0.1 percent of the regular national budget.
COUNTING THE DEAD AND THE HUNGRY
These are not abstract fiscal anomalies. They have faces and body counts. South Sudan has among the lowest life expectancy figures on earth. Women and girls face a higher risk of dying in pregnancy and childbirth there than almost anywhere else on the planet. In a country convulsed by conflict and sexual violence, giving birth has become one of the most dangerous things a woman can do. Most women cannot access trained health workers, and those who are available frequently lack medicines, reliable electricity, and basic surgical supplies. The photographed image of dogs sleeping on surgery beds at the abandoned Malakal Teaching Hospital, damaged in conflict and still unrehabilitated years after the 2018 peace agreement, is not a shocking anomaly — it is a representative snapshot of the healthcare system’s reality.
Two point three million children are acutely malnourished in South Sudan. The Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries together received less than 0.4 percent of total national spending from 2020 to 2024, despite South Sudan possessing fertile land and rich fisheries. The Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, the government body nominally responsible for addressing the hunger crisis, received across four budgets less than half the value of a single oil cargo. These are not funding shortfalls caused by poverty. South Sudan has received 25.2 billion dollars in oil-related inflows since 2011. The government simply chose to direct that money elsewhere.
The donors who have filled the gap have provided more than 27.5 billion dollars in official development assistance since independence — more than the government’s own spending on its people. And even this international support is declining as humanitarian needs continue to climb. The more South Sudan’s elites steal, the more dependent its population becomes on charity from abroad, and the less accountable the government is to those it governs. Crawford Capital’s revenue diversion is not a footnote to this story. It is a chapter in the active destruction of the state’s capacity to serve its own people.
“This is not mere mismanagement. It is a political economy of greed that has unleashed a human rights crisis.” — UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan
UK REGISTRATION: A CORPORATE SHIELD WITH REAL CONSEQUENCES
Crawford Capital’s UK registration is not an administrative detail. It is a deliberate strategic choice with real implications for accountability. Companies registered at Companies House in the United Kingdom are subject to British corporate law, including requirements for filing annual accounts and disclosure of persons with significant control. They can be investigated by the UK’s National Crime Agency and the Serious Fraud Office. They can, in theory, be sanctioned or de-registered.
The UK has previously sanctioned Michael Makuei Lueth the very minister who presided over Crawford’s 2019 contract — for obstructing the political process in South Sudan and impeding implementation of the peace agreement. Yet Crawford Capital’s UK entities Crawford Capital Ltd., Capital Pay Ltd., and Capital Pay Software Solutions Ltd. have faced no equivalent scrutiny from British regulators, despite the company’s principals and their connections to sanctioned individuals being a matter of documented public record. The UK government’s failure to investigate or act on the Crawford Capital network, despite abundant evidence in UN reports and investigative journalism, represents a significant gap in the West’s stated commitment to combating illicit financial flows from fragile states.
CRAWFORD’S DEFENDERS AND WHAT THEIR DEFENCE REVEALS
The South Sudan Revenue Authority’s defence of Crawford deserves particular attention. The Authority cited nearly one trillion South Sudanese pounds collected in eight months as evidence that the system works. It did not mention that the South Sudanese pound has been systematically destroyed by monetary financing, that the parallel exchange rate gap has rendered revenue figures in pounds effectively meaningless for comparative purposes, that the Authority itself has been withholding 14.5 percent of collections in excess of its legal mandate, or that the UN Commission has documented irregular withdrawals from its accounts.
Michael Makuei Lueth, who as ICT Minister designed and blessed the Crawford arrangement from 2019 onward and who as Government Spokesperson called the UN’s damning 2025 report unsubstantiated and lacking evidence, has since been reshuffled to become Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs — the very ministry responsible for the rule of law in a country whose laws Crawford Capital has been systematically violating. The appointment is a statement of impunity as government policy.
Vice President Igga’s March 2026 intervention, invoking the President’s personal authority to protect the Crawford contract, confirmed what accountability advocates have long argued: the company is not merely tolerated at the highest levels of government. It is protected by them. The question of whether Crawford Capital is owned by, controlled by, or simply politically operated on behalf of the Kiir family is, in practical terms, immaterial. The outcome is identical.
WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY WOULD REQUIRE
The US sanctions are a start and not an end. Sanctions without supporting action from South Sudan’s international partners, from the UK government, from regional bodies, and from the financial institutions that process Crawford’s revenues are insufficient to dislodge a company this deeply embedded in state architecture. The UN Commission has issued 54 detailed recommendations to South Sudan’s government covering budget reorientation, single-treasury accounts, cancellation of illicit contracts, and genuine accountability for corruption.
Dismantling Crawford Capital’s grip would require cancelling the 2019 contract, subjecting all revenues collected through its platforms to immediate national treasury oversight, commissioning a full and independent audit of every transaction since 2019, prosecuting those who designed and enabled the arrangement, and compensating humanitarian agencies for unlawfully imposed levies. It would also require the UK government to investigate the company’s UK-registered entities, freeze assets where evidence of criminal conduct exists, and revoke corporate registrations where the companies were used as vehicles for state theft.
None of this will happen without political will. And political will, in South Sudan, has so far proved impossible to generate from within a system that has profited so comprehensively from its absence.
CONCLUSION: DIGITIZATION AS A NEW FORM OF COLONIALISM
The audacity of Crawford Capital’s operation lies not merely in its scale but in its framing. The company was sold to the South Sudanese public, to international observers, and to donors as a modernization project. E-Government. Digital transformation. Efficiency and transparency. The vocabulary of the twenty-first-century development agenda was deployed with precision to conceal what was, in practice, the privatization of a failed state’s last remaining revenue streams on behalf of the ruling family and its inner circle.
The UN Commission called it what it is: a new corruption mechanism in which digitization replaced earlier looting methods without reducing the looting. South Sudan’s oil revenues were stolen through the Oil for Roads scheme, through off-budget patronage, through pre-sold crude cargoes, and through transfers to Sudan that the government cannot fully account for. When the pipeline to oil revenue narrowed following the February 2024 pipeline damage through Sudan, the non-oil revenue streams became more important, and Crawford Capital’s hold on those streams became more consequential.
It is worth sitting with that reality. While 7.7 million South Sudanese faced acute food insecurity, while children died from preventable diseases in hospitals without medicine, while women died in childbirth in facilities without electricity, a company registered in London was legally entitled to take 75 percent of every dollar, pound, and South Sudanese currency unit that the government attempted to collect from its own people. And when a minister tried to stop it, the President’s office intervened to keep it running.
The people of South Sudan are not poor because they lack resources. They are poor because their resources are being stolen, systematically and with institutional precision, by people with the power to make stealing legal and the audacity to call it governance. Crawford Capital is the most technically sophisticated expression of that theft the country has yet produced. And the United States has named it. Now the world must act.
Senegal’s parliament speaker, El Malick Ndiaye, has announced his resignation, deepening political turmoil in the West African nation two days after the president dismissed the government.
Ndiaye, a senior figure in the ruling PASTEF party, said on Sunday his resignation was a personal decision, giving the “higher interest of the nation” as a reason for his departure.
President Bassirou Diomaye Faye dismissed Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko on Friday and dissolved the government after months of mounting tension between the two leaders.
Ties between Faye and Sonko, allies who swept to power together in 2024, soured against a backdrop of growing economic challenges linked to debt and domestic fallout from the Iran war.
Members of parliament are set to convene on Tuesday to vote on reinstating Sonko as a lawmaker and to elect a new speaker for the National Assembly to replace Ndiaye.
Some critics say reinstating Sonko would be illegal, as he has never been a member of parliament.
Move follows months of mounting strains between the allies-turned-rivals
Senegal facing a major debt crisis
Sonko had warned he could take his party into opposition
DAKAR, May 22 (Reuters) – Senegal President Bassirou Diomaye Faye on Friday dismissed Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko and dissolved the government, a move that risks deepening uncertainty in a country already grappling with a debt crisis and drawn-out talks with the International Monetary Fund.
A statement read on state media said all ministers were dismissed, with the outgoing government tasked with handling day-to-day affairs, according to Oumar Samba Ba, secretary-general of the presidency.
The decision follows months of growing tensions between the two allies-turned-rivals. Sonko, a charismatic figure with a strong youth following, had backed Faye in the 2024 election after being barred from running himself due to a defamation conviction.
In a post on social media after the announcement, Sonko said: “Tonight I will sleep with a light heart in the Keur Gorgui neighbourhood,” referring to his residence.
The split comes as Senegal faces mounting economic pressure. The International Monetary Fund froze its $1.8 billion lending program with Senegal following the discovery of misreported debt, pushing the country’s end-2024 debt level to 132% of its economic output.
Faye’s move raises the risk of further delays in reaching a new agreement with the IMF, seen as key to reviving the economy.
Earlier on Friday, before Sonko’s dismissal, Finance Minister Cheikh Diba told parliament Senegal expects to resume talks with the IMF in the week of June 8 and hopes to reach agreement on key points by June 30.
Diba also warned the country’s fuel subsidy bill could exceed its 2026 budget allocation by as much as 1.15 trillion CFA francs ($2 billion) if oil prices rise to $115 per barrel, adding that Sonko had rejected his request to raise fuel prices.
Sonko had opposed any restructuring of the debt, estimated at $13 billion, which he said the IMF was advocating, while Faye has been less vocal on the issue.
SPECULATION OVER SONKO’S POLITICAL FUTURE
Sonko was a popular opposition leader under the previous administration of President Macky Sall, whose decision to delay the 2024 election spurred unrest.
Both Faye and Sonko are former tax officials who were jailed ahead of the 2024 election. They were released 10 days before the rescheduled contest, which Faye went on to win with 54% of the vote.
Faye then appointed Sonko as prime minister.
Now that Sonko is out of that job, it is unclear what his next steps will be.
In March, he said he would be willing to take his Pastef party out of the government and return to opposition if Faye departed from the party’s agenda, fuelling speculation that the two men’s power struggle was irresolvable.
Pastef dominates the National Assembly, meaning it could complicate governance and the passage of reforms needed to secure IMF support.
Last month lawmakers overwhelmingly approved electoral code changes that could pave the way for Sonko to run for president in 2029.
Among the anti-establishment, pan-Africanist prime minister’s signature initiatives was an audit of Senegal’s resource deals, including those governing its emerging oil and gas sector.
In March, Sonko declared a BP gas contract for the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim project unfair and revoked some 71 mining licenses.
He had argued that renegotiating oil and gas contracts would lower domestic energy prices and help rebuild Senegal’s battered finances.
NAIROBI, May 8 (Reuters) – Shorn of influence in its former colonies in West Africa, France will seek to deepen ties elsewhere on the continent next week at an Africa summit in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, its first in an English-speaking country.
With a year left in his presidency, French President Emmanuel Macron is hoping to showcase a “renewed partnership” with Africa, an aide at the Elysee Palace told reporters.
Monday and Tuesday’s summit, which will be attended by heads of state, business executives and heads of multilateral development banks, follows repeated setbacks for France in former colonies where it has for decades wielded influence.
A series of coups in the Sahel region since 2020 have brought to power military officers who have expelled French troops and invited in Russian mercenaries.
France also handed over control of its last major military facility in Senegal last July after Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye – who is expected to attend the Kenya summit – said French bases were incompatible with the country’s sovereignty.
“It does feel like a rebranding of how France is positioning itself on the continent,” said Beverly Ochieng, a senior analyst at the Control Risks consultancy who is based in Senegal.
“It is moving away from some of its former colonial partners, security partners, towards countries where it has more of a cultural, a different footprint.”
SUCCESS OF FRENCH PIVOT AN OPEN QUESTION
Macron came to power in 2017 vowing to end “Francafrique”, the murky links between France and its former colonies that at times saw Paris back autocratic regimes, and to broaden engagement across the continent.
The pivot has involved attempts to tackle historical tensions with countries like Rwanda and Algeria while more closely engaging African civil society and youth leaders, said Alain Antil, the head of the Sub-Saharan Africa programme at the French Institute for International Relations.
At the same time, Paris has looked to boost trading ties, growing its imports from Africa by a quarter between 2021 and 2024, according to data from the International Trade Centre.
In 2024, France and Nigeria signed a 300-million-euro investment agreement to support critical infrastructure, healthcare, transportation and renewable energy across Africa’s most populous country.
Investment deals, especially in areas like clean energy, artificial intelligence and education are expected to be at the centre of Macron’s trip to Africa for the summit, during which he will also visit Egypt and Ethiopia.
Macron’s government has also looked to strengthen security cooperation with non-traditional partners, including by signing a defence pact with Kenya last October to boost cooperation in intelligence sharing, maritime security and peacekeeping.
However, France has faced some high-profile setbacks in countries where foreign investors like China and Gulf states have leveraged deep pockets and longstanding relationships to build influence.
Kenyan President William Ruto’s government terminated a deal with a consortium led by France’s Vinci SA for a $1.5 billion highway expansion project last year and handed it to Chinese firms after Kenyan authorities said the contract saddled them with too much risk.
Ruto, who will co-host the summit, plans to focus on advancing talks on making the global financial system fairer to heavily indebted African countries. France has pledged to support his campaign.
On the morning of 27 March 2026, Dr. Chol Deng Thon Abel sat in the Undersecretary’s chair at South Sudan’s Ministry of Petroleum in Juba for what would prove to be his last hours in office.
A presidential decree signed by Minister of Presidential Affairs Africano Mande Gedima was already in motion, naming Dr. Santino Ayuel Longar as his replacement under Republican Decree No. 108/2026.
Before clearing his desk, Dr. Chol signed two of the most consequential letters of his turbulent tenure: allocation awards granting South Sudan’s sovereign crude oil to Chiang Wei LLC FZ and Euro American International Energy, the two trading companies that have quietly dominated Juba’s oil corridor for years.
What happened next, across a span of eight days and three conflicting allocation letters for the very same cargo, is one of the most brazen acts of resource capture ever documented against an African state.
Kenya Insights has reviewed internal South Sudanese Ministry of Petroleum documents, official allocation award letters, compliance reports, shipping schedules, United States Department of Justice civil forfeiture complaints and United Kingdom High Court judgments to piece together a story that goes far beyond oil trading corruption.
It reaches into the financial architecture of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, touches a sanctioned network dismantled by American prosecutors and implicates officials who have been recycled through the petroleum ministry with the regularity of a cargo loading window.
Within eight days, the same 600,000-barrel cargo was allocated three times to two different companies. South Sudan was paid at $70 a barrel while the oil was worth $100 on the open market.
THE LAST-MINUTE LETTERS
Reference number RSS/MoP/J/O/U/3/26/262, dated 27 March 2026, bears the official seal of the Republic of South Sudan and the signature of Dr. Chol Deng Thon Abel.
The letter is addressed to Mr. Choul Laam, Managing Director of Chiang Wei LLC FZ. Its subject line reads: Nile Blend Final Award Letter for April 2026 Cargo to Chiang Wei LLC FZ. The cargo: 600,000 barrels of Nile Blend crude, loading window 30 April to 2 May 2026.
The stated pricing basis: dated Brent average of the month of loading at a discount, described as the tender discount average of first two bids.
Buried in the body of the letter is the sentence that makes the allocation extraordinary: Chiang Wei LLC FZ has already advanced $60,000,000 (Sixty Million United States Dollars) against the estimated value of this April 2026 cargo.
On the same date, reference number RSS/MOP/J/O/U/3/26/251, Dr. Chol signed an equivalent award letter addressed to Mr. Taha, Managing Director of Euro American International Energy, Dubai, UAE.
Its subject: Dar Blend Final Award Letter for April 2026 Cargo to Euro American International Energy DMCC. Another 600,000 barrels, loading window 29 to 30 April 2026.
Two cargoes worth a combined $120 million at then-prevailing market prices, committed in the final hours of an outgoing official’s mandate to two companies that have been at the center of South Sudan’s most contested oil dealings for years.
This was not an isolated exercise of last-minute authority.
Internal shipping schedules reviewed by Kenya Insights show a pattern stretching back through 2025 in which RSS-designated cargoes consistently flowed to Cathay Petroleum, BGN, Wellbred and the Chiang Wei and Euro American network on dates that correspond to administrative transitions.
Officials cycle through the Petroleum Ministry’s undersecretary role with bewildering frequency: Dr. Chol himself has been appointed, dismissed, reassigned and reinstated more than ten times in twelve years, a churning that governance analysts in Juba describe as a system deliberately designed to prevent institutional memory while allowing connected intermediaries to operate continuously across every change of personnel.
THE CARGO THAT CHANGED HANDS THREE TIMES
The Dar Blend April 2026 cargo allocated to Euro American International Energy on 27 March became the site of an administrative collision that reveals the entire mechanism of capture.
Four days after Dr. Chol signed his award to Euro American’s managing director Idris Taha, his successor Dr. Santino Ayuel Longar issued his own letter. Reference RSS/MOP/J/O/U/31/03/101, dated 31 March 2026, is addressed to Mr. Ken Mugambi, Group CEO of Trinity Energy Limited, Juba, and copies in the African Export Import Bank, Afreximbank. Its subject: Dar Blend Final Award Letter for April 2026 Cargo to Trinity Energy Limited.
The cargo awarded to Trinity was identical: 600,000 barrels of Dar Blend, loading 29 to 30 April 2026.
The incoming Undersecretary directed that all proceeds from the cargo’s sale be retained by Afreximbank and applied to the Government of South Sudan’s financing obligations.
The legal basis for the reassignment was a Ministry of Finance and Planning letter, reference RSS/MOFP/J/VSF/03/2026-27 dated 31 March 2026, and an existing Petroleum Allocation letter reference RSS/MOP/J/U/O/12/25/086 dated 23 December 2025, suggesting the Trinity arrangement was rooted in a pre-existing commitment that pre-dated Dr. Chol’s tenure entirely.
Then, on 3 April 2026, a third document surfaced.
A further allocation letter, attributed the same 600,000-barrel loading window once more to Euro American International Energy DMCC, this time with authority for Euro American to retain the proceeds for application to government financing obligations.
Idris Taha’s company had vanished and reappeared across three documents in eight days, each claiming legal authority over the identical cargo.
Whether one cargo or multiple overlapping claims, the result was the same: competing entitlements, legal uncertainty and the opening for a connected intermediary to assert control regardless of which document a shipper chose to honour.
Idris Taha’s Euro American International Energy vanished and reappeared across three documents in eight days, each claiming legal authority over the identical cargo.
THE PRICE THAT ROBBED SOUTH SUDAN OF $24 MILLION
The allocation letters are silent on the most devastating detail.
Internal documents reviewed by Kenya Insights indicate that at least one cargo lifted in March 2026 was priced against February benchmark levels, when dated Brent crude traded in the range of $70 to $72 per barrel.
The timing was catastrophic for South Sudan’s treasury and enormously profitable for the intermediary that held the pricing option.
On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear programme.
The geopolitical shock that followed sent global oil prices into the sharpest single-month surge in recorded history, according to the International Energy Agency’s April 2026 Oil Market Report.
With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and more than 20 million barrels per day of regional crude disrupted, benchmark prices soared to between $100 and $110 per barrel through March and into April.
The IEA described the March price movement as oil’s largest-ever monthly gain.
For South Sudan, the arithmetic is brutal.
A cargo of 600,000 barrels priced at February’s $70 benchmark generates approximately $42 million in gross revenue.
The same cargo lifted in late March or April, priced at market, would have been worth between $60 million and $66 million.
The differential: $18 million at the low end, $24 million at the top.
That is the sum that did not reach South Sudan’s government on a single shipment, captured instead by whichever intermediary held the contractual right to apply the earlier, lower pricing formula.
On a state whose oil revenues represent 85 to 90 percent of government income, and whose civil servants face persistent delays in salary payments, $24 million is not an accounting rounding error. It is the monthly wages of tens of thousands of public workers.
CHIANG WEI, WELLBRED AND THE TEHRAN CONNECTION
The Chiang Wei LLC FZ that received the Nile Blend allocation letter on 27 March 2026 is not simply an obscure Dubai-registered free zone company.
A compliance report dated 9 March 2026, reviewed by Kenya Insights, identifies WellBred Trading DMCC as the financial backer of Chiang Wei LLC FZ’s oil cargo operations in South Sudan.
The report flags RMB-denominated transactions between Chiang Wei and Shandong Hi-Speed Group in connection with oil lifting operations, and identifies potential financial links to networks associated with sanctioned Iranian oil.
WellBred Trading DMCC is, at this moment, the subject of United States Department of Justice civil forfeiture proceedings.
Case number 1:26-cv-00802, filed in March 2026, seeks to seize $12,973,529 that US prosecutors allege was intended for WellBred Capital Pte Ltd and its subsidiary WellBred Trading DMCC.
The complaint names Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, son of Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader, as the operator of what investigators describe as the Shamkhani Network: a sprawling apparatus of front companies, shell entities and shipping firms designed to move sanctioned Iranian crude onto world markets in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Shamkhani was killed in the American-Israeli strikes on Tehran on 28 February 2026.
According to the DOJ complaint, Shamkhani maintained internal organisational charts showing WellBred’s precise position within the Shamkhani Network.
The companies’ nominal leadership served as a front while actual operational control rested with Shamkhani and his associates.
The Shamkhani Network, investigators allege, laundered billions of dollars from Iranian and Russian oil sales, primarily routing barrels to buyers in China.
The FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the IRS Criminal Investigation Global Illicit Finance Team are pursuing the case.
The compliance report reviewed by Kenya Insights recommends suspending all commercial relations with Chiang Wei LLC FZ pending a financial investigation into the company’s relationship with WellBred and any consequential exposure to Iranian oil networks under sanctions.
The report had been circulated internally within South Sudan’s Petroleum Ministry. On 27 March 2026, the day it was issued into wider circulation, Dr. Chol signed the allocation letter granting Chiang Wei a $60 million cargo.
The compliance report had been circulated within South Sudan’s Petroleum Ministry. On the very same day, Dr. Chol signed an allocation letter granting Chiang Wei a $60 million cargo.
THE ALLOCATION LEDGER: WHAT THE SHIPPING SCHEDULES REVEAL
Internal cargo scheduling tables covering South Sudan’s crude exports from January 2025 through May 2026, reviewed by Kenya Insights, show RSS-allocated cargoes flowing with remarkable consistency to the same cluster of offtakers: Cathay Petroleum International, BGN, WellBred and the chain of entities connected to Euro American International Energy.
The pattern is not incidental. Cargoes designated as RSS, the notation indicating government-discretionary allocation as distinct from commercial partner entitlements, appear in the schedules at regular monthly intervals and are consistently assigned to this network.
In January 2026, BGN received a DAR-RSS cargo loading 7 to 8 January. In December 2025, WellBred received a DAR-RSS allocation loading 27 to 28 December. BGN reappeared for an October 2025 allocation. Cathay Petroleum received RSS cargoes loading in September, July, May, March and February 2025.
The schedule reveals not a competitive tender system but a revolving allocation among a handful of entities that appear to have secured near-permanent access to South Sudan’s sovereign crude sales through mechanisms that are neither published nor subject to independent scrutiny.
THE CAPTURE THAT LEADERSHIP CHANGES CANNOT BREAK
The South Sudanese government has periodically attempted, or at least performed, accountability within the Petroleum Ministry.
The arrests of senior energy officials in February 2026 were presented as a response to financial malpractice.
The dismissal of Dr. Chol on 27 March 2026 and his replacement by Dr. Santino Ayuel Longar was framed as a further corrective step. Neither action changed the underlying allocation architecture.
Euro American International Energy, owned by Dubai-based Sudanese businessman Idris Taha, continued to appear across allocation records through the transition.
London’s High Court had already heard, in November 2025, that Euro American and Meridian Energy Pte Ltd had purchased a disputed Nile Blend cargo that BB Energy was attempting to recover against a $100 million pre-payment debt.
A UK High Court judge, Justice Christopher Butcher, noted in his November 2025 judgment that there were good grounds to believe South Sudan itself lacked the funds to satisfy any damages award, citing Transparency International’s classification of South Sudan as the world’s most corrupt country.
The court issued an injunction against the cargo’s transfer before the parties reached a settlement that allowed lifting to proceed.
The structure documented across the allocation letters is specifically designed to survive personnel changes. Incoming officials inherit commitments made in the final hours of their predecessors’ mandates.
Allocation letters create competing claims that require weeks or months to unwind, and in that window the connected intermediary has already lifted and sold the cargo.
The incoming Undersecretary Santino signed a reassignment to Trinity Energy on 31 March.
Before that letter could be operationalised, a further document on 3 April restored Euro American’s position.
The formal administrative chain was overridden by the practical reality of who controlled the contractual instruments.
WHAT STRUCTURAL REFORM WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE
Oil governance experts and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, whose September 2025 report titled Plundering a Nation documented the systematic looting of petroleum revenues by political elites, have identified specific reforms that would begin to break the capture cycle.
Publication of all allocation decisions in advance, with identified ultimate beneficiaries, would eliminate the opacity that enables last-minute awards to persist unchallenged.
Competitive tendering with independent oversight would prevent the revolving allocation to a closed network.
Escrow accounts holding proceeds until independently verified delivery of revenue to government accounts would end the practice of proceeds being recycled into subsequent transactions before reaching the treasury.
Market-based pricing with no contractual option to apply earlier benchmarks would have placed an additional $18 million to $24 million in South Sudan’s government accounts from the single March 2026 cargo alone.
Alignment of pricing to the date of lifting rather than any prior period would remove the mechanism through which intermediaries capture the upside of rising markets at the state’s expense.
Independent auditing of every allocation decision, every pricing formula and every payment flow would create a paper trail that could survive the personnel churn that currently resets accountability with every reshuffle.
South Sudan formally owns its oil. But the same companies capture its value, through mechanisms so embedded in the administrative structure that no single dismissal can dislodge them.
THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE SILENCE
South Sudan produces approximately 150,000 barrels of crude per day, split between Nile Blend and Dar Blend grades, piped north through Sudan to the terminal at Port Sudan’s Bashayer facility.
At $100 per barrel, that daily output represents $15 million in gross revenue.
Over a month, $450 million. Of that, oil-backed debt repayments to Afreximbank, QNB, Nasdec General Trading and other creditors consume a substantial share. The UN estimated South Sudan’s total outstanding oil-backed debt at approximately $2.3 billion as of mid-2025.
Against that backdrop, the pricing differential captured by intermediaries on government-allocated cargoes is not a marginal rounding error.
The compliance report reviewed by Kenya Insights describes a model in which Chiang Wei secures allocations, arranges lifting and resale, and retains part of the proceeds rather than transferring them fully to South Sudan.
The report characterises this as a closed-loop financing structure, in which oil value is recycled into subsequent transactions, limiting the proportion of revenue that reaches the state.
The WellBred connection, if confirmed, would add sanctions exposure to a system already burdened with debt, governance failure and institutional capture.
RIGHT OF RESPONSE
Kenya Insights sought comment from Euro American International Energy, Chiang Wei LLC FZ, the Republic of South Sudan’s Ministry of Petroleum and the Ministry of Presidential Affairs prior to publication.
No responses were received.
Idris Taha, managing director of Euro American International Energy, did not respond to questions submitted regarding his company’s role in the April 2026 cargo allocation sequence, the pricing mechanisms applied to March 2026 cargoes and the company’s relationship with other entities in the allocation network.
Choul Laam of Chiang Wei LLC FZ did not respond to questions regarding the $60 million advance payment, the compliance report recommending suspension of commercial relations and any relationship between Chiang Wei and WellBred Trading DMCC.
DOCUMENTS: This investigation is based on South Sudan Ministry of Petroleum allocation award letters RSS/MoP/J/O/U/3/26/262 and RSS/MOP/J/O/U/3/26/251 (both 27 March 2026); Dar Blend Award Letter RSS/MOP/J/O/U/31/03/101 to Trinity Energy Limited (31 March 2026); internal South Sudan crude cargo scheduling tables (January 2025 to May 2026); a compliance report dated 9 March 2026; US DOJ civil forfeiture complaints 1:26-cv-00802 and 1:26-cv-00807; UK High Court proceedings in November 2025 (Justice Christopher Butcher); IEA Oil Market Reports for March and April 2026; and reporting by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Radio Tamazuj and Global Trade Review.
Taiwan President Lai Ching-te has cancelled a presidential trip to the African nation of Eswatini, accusing Beijing of putting pressure on its neighbours to bar his aircraft from flying over their territories.
Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar revoked Lai’s overflight permits after “intense pressure” and economic coercion from China, said a Taiwan official. China denied coercion, while praising the three African countries saying it had “high appreciation” for them.
This is the first publicly known instance where a Taiwanese leader has had to cancel a foreign trip due to revoked flight permits.
Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is Taiwan’s only diplomatic ally in Africa.
It is one of only 12 nations – many of which are small countries in Latin America or the Pacific – to recognise Taiwan.
China adheres to the “one China” principle, in which Beijing asserts sovereignty over Taiwan though many in Taiwan consider themselves to be a sovereign nation.
Beijing sees the self-governed island as a breakaway province that will eventually be part of the country, and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this.
The Chinese government has been vocal in its dislike of Lai, whom it has previously described as a “troublemaker” and a “destroyer of cross-strait peace”.
In a statement on X, Lai criticised China’s “coercive actions”, saying that it “exposed the risks authoritarian regimes pose to the international order”.
“No amount of threats or coercion will shake Taiwan’s resolve to engage with the world.”
Eswatini’s government said it was regrettable that Lai was unable to visit, but that this would not “change the status of our longstanding bilateral relationship”, according to reports.
Lai was meant to attend a celebration marking the 40th anniversary of King Mswati III’s accession.
At a press briefing on Wednesday, a spokesperson of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council said Beijing “appreciated the position and actions of the relevant countries in upholding the one-China principle”.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also said that it was “clear…[that] the so-called ‘President of the Republic of China’ no longer exists in the world”, in a reference to Lai’s official title in Taiwan.
According to news agency Reuters, Seychelles and Madagascar said they took the decision because they do not recognise Taiwan.
Some in the US have criticised the three countries, with the House Foreign Affairs Committee Majority saying they “stood with Taiwan against this blatant coercion” in a post on X.
US Senator Ted Cruz also criticised Mauritius, saying it seemed “determined to ally with the Chinese Communist Party”.
Uganda’s Chief of Defense Forces Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba expressed his support for Israel amid the ongoing war with Iran in a series of posts on X/Twitter Thursday.“We want the war in the Middle East to end now. The world is tired of it,” he wrote, adding that any talk of destroying or defeating Israel will bring Uganda into the war. “On the side of Israel!” he concluded.In another deleted post, he claimed that Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), the country’s armed forces, will begin participating in the war “on the side of Israel” if it doesn’t end soon.“Israel has a right to exist and attacks against her must stop,” he stated.Later on Thursday, Kainerugaba said in another post that he offered the help of Ugandan defense forces to both the US and Israel.
“We could have captured Tehran in 72 hours without any bombing,” he claimed, “but of course they never listen to a black man. Why bomb people who support you?”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) walks with Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni (R) after arriving to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Operation Entebbe at the Entebbe airport in Uganda, July 4, 2016. (credit: REUTERS/Presidential Press Unit/Handout via REUTERS)
Uganda-Israel ties warming
Last month, Kainerugaba announced in a post on X that Uganda will soon build a statue honoring Lt.-Col. Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu at Entebbe International Airport.He said the statue would be placed in the exact spot where Netanyahu was killed following the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight that led to the abduction of about 100 Jews and Israelis.Kainerugaba said the monument is a symbol of the ties between the two countries, although no formal government announcement was made regarding the creation of the statue.Prime Minister Netanyahu attended a memorial ceremony held at Entebbe Airport in 2016, marking the fortieth anniversary of Operation Jonathan.“Forty years ago, they landed in the dead of night in a country led by a brutal dictator who gave refuge to terrorists. Today we landed in broad daylight in a friendly country led by a president who fights terrorists,” he said during his public remarks.
When security forces in Juba swept through the Ministry of Finance and the state oil company in a dramatic wave of arrests in late February, the government of President Salva Kiir framed the crackdown as a routine investigation into what a spokesman called “financial malpractices.”
The euphemism barely scratches the surface.
What investigators have since begun to piece together is something far more alarming: for the better part of three years, a network of shell companies and complicit officials routed South Sudan’s sovereign oil revenues into private bank accounts stretching from Nairobi to Dubai, with at least one channel flowing directly into the coffers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The story that emerges from court filings in Washington, intelligence cooperation between Nairobi and Juba, and a cascade of arrests reaching the highest levels of the South Sudanese state is, at its core, a story of a country being systematically looted through its own oil tap while nearly two-thirds of its twelve million citizens teeter on the edge of famine.
“The hyena was in charge of the goats. There was no one left to count.”
The Shamkhani Connection
On March 6, 2026, the United States Department of Justice filed two civil forfeiture complaints in the District of Columbia against more than $15.3 million in funds linked to an illicit Iranian oil distribution network.
At the centre of those complaints was Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, son of Ali Shamkhani, who had served as secretary of Iran’s Defence Council and for a decade as chief of the Supreme National Security Council, the body that coordinates the country’s most sensitive intelligence and military decisions.
Both father and son were killed in the American-Israeli strikes that began on February 28.
The younger Shamkhani, according to the complaint filed under case number 1:26-cv-00802, had acquired and quietly operated two Singapore-registered companies: Wellbred Capital Pte Ltd and its subsidiary Wellbred Trading DMCC, registered in Dubai.
The companies were maintained as a clean-faced brand, their nominal leadership serving as a front for what US prosecutors describe as the Shamkhani Network, a sprawling apparatus of vessels, trading firms and shipping companies designed to move sanctioned Iranian crude onto world markets in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Investigators allege that Shamkhani maintained internal organisational charts that showed Wellbred’s precise position within that network, documents that prosecutors obtained and cited in both complaints.
What those complaints did not fully spell out, but what well-placed security sources and investigators with knowledge of proceedings in multiple jurisdictions now confirm, is the specific geography of Wellbred’s oil supply.
Wellbred was not only trading Iranian barrels. It had, through contacts cultivated at the highest levels of South Sudan’s Ministry of Petroleum and the state company Nile Petroleum Corporation, secured preferential allocations of South Sudanese crude at prices investigators say were set substantially below market value.
In a country where oil accounts for more than ninety per cent of government revenue, every barrel sold below market price is a dollar taken directly from a population that cannot afford to lose it.
KEY FIGURES
Benjamin Bol Mel | Former Vice President, arrested November 12, 2025
Bak Barnaba Chol | Former Finance Minister, arrested February 28, 2026 at Uganda border
Deng Lual Wol | Former Petroleum Undersecretary, detained February 2026
Ayuel Ngor Kacgor | Former Nilepet Director General, believed to have fled to Netherlands
Maj. Gen. Manasseh Machar Bol | Former Petroleum Ministry security director, detained
Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani | Wellbred operator, killed in US-Israeli strikes, Feb. 28
The Architecture of the Scheme
South Sudan exports approximately 150,000 barrels of oil per day, most of it Nile Blend or Dar Blend crude shipped through a pipeline running north through Sudan to the terminal at Port Sudan. The Ministry of Petroleum controls cargo allocation, deciding which trading companies receive the right to lift barrels at the Bashayer terminal.
Those allocation decisions, on paper bureaucratic and technical, are in practice among the most lucrative exercises of state power in the country. A single cargo of South Sudanese crude, at pre-conflict prices, was worth tens of millions of dollars.
A two-year investigation by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, whose findings were published in September 2025 in a report titled “Plundering a Nation,” found that political elites had engaged in the systematic looting of national wealth.
The commission documented that $1.7 billion was channelled through the “Oil for Roads” programme between 2021 and 2024 to companies linked to then-Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel for road construction contracts that were never fulfilled.
In total, the UN estimated that $2.2 billion was siphoned off-budget during that period, while over ninety per cent of the promised roads remained unbuilt.
Bol Mel, already under US sanctions since 2017 and again in 2025, was dismissed by President Kiir on November 12 last year, stripped of his rank, demoted from general to private and placed under house arrest at his residence in the Jebel neighbourhood of Juba.
Security forces seized documents, laptops and an undisclosed sum of cash. His lawyers filed a petition in March noting that after 120 days of incommunicado detention, their client had not been formally charged and that his health was deteriorating. The government has offered no public explanation for the arrest.
The men who carried out the mechanics of the scheme operated beneath Bol Mel. Eng. Deng Lual Wol, the Petroleum Ministry’s undersecretary, signed the documents.
Two letters he dispatched in October 2025, one to ONGC Nile Ganga B.V. seeking an advance of one billion dollars against future crude entitlements, another to CNPC requesting one and a half billion dollars against production held under the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, effectively mortgaged the majority of South Sudan’s core oil output through opaque bilateral arrangements.
Both letters promised repayment through oil shipments, with unnamed nominated lifters to take the volumes.
Sources inside the government told this newspaper that the letters were prepared on behalf of Bol Mel, with the intent to divert the requested funds for personal use. Deng Lual Wol was detained in late February after presenting himself for questioning at the National Security Service headquarters.
Ayuel Ngor Kacgor, appointed Managing Director of Nilepet in October 2024, is alleged to have served as the operational hub within the state company.
Whistleblower testimony collected before his dismissal describes a Nilepet in free fall: salaries unpaid since April 2025, medical insurance suspended, workers dying of treatable illnesses, children withdrawn from school, food rations halted. Multiple employees described an absentee chief executive who would arrive for an hour and disappear. Kacgor is believed to have fled to the Netherlands, of which he also holds nationality, prior to the February crackdown.
Kenyan security cooperation has reportedly been essential in identifying assets held in his name: a mansion in Nairobi’s exclusive Karen suburb, registered in the name of his wife, valued at approximately two million dollars.
Investigators say the true magnitude of the Kenya and Uganda banking trail dwarfs anything previously reported in relation to the UAE or Turkey.
The Nairobi Trail
In the months following the Bol Mel arrest, intelligence services in Kenya moved quietly to assist their South Sudanese counterparts. The cooperation produced results that have since shocked even experienced investigators.
Bank assets worth several tens of millions of dollars have been identified in Kenya and Uganda as belonging to Deng Lual Wol and Ayuel Ngor Kacgor.
The discovery upended a central assumption embedded in most prior investigations: that the primary offshore repositories for looted South Sudanese oil money were in Dubai or Istanbul. The real repositories, it turns out, were closer to home.
The pattern is not without precedent in the region. As far back as 2021, UN investigators documented how South Sudanese officials had channelled payments through Nairobi accounts held at Equity Bank, noting with forensic precision the deposits and cash withdrawals made at the Lavington branch.
The Sentry, a Washington-based investigative organisation, had separately called on Kenyan and Ugandan authorities to investigate trade-based money laundering flows from South Sudan as early as 2023. Those calls went largely unheeded. The February crackdown may have finally changed the calculus.
Judicial cooperation between Juba, Nairobi and Kampala will now determine whether these assets can be repatriated to the Central Bank of South Sudan, where they should, according to government regulations, have been deposited in the first place.
Investigators familiar with the proceedings acknowledge that the process is likely to be protracted, contested and complicated by the dual nationality of at least one suspect.
The Finance Minister Who Kept the Wrong Friends
Against this backdrop, the brief three-month tenure of Bak Barnaba Chol as Finance Minister is particularly instructive.
Appointed in late November 2025 in the immediate aftermath of the Bol Mel scandal to replace Athian Diing Athian, Chol was, by nearly universal assessment among political observers and private sector actors in Juba, a capable and professionally grounded administrator.
He moved quickly to sever the ministry’s relationships with the cluster of outsider trading firms that investigators had already identified as problematic: Wellbred, Cathay Petroleum International, and Euroamerican Energy were cut off despite what sources describe as intensive lobbying by each company.
What Chol did not do was cut ties with BGN. The Dubai-based firm, whose controlling shareholder Ruya Bayegan has been linked to Turkish intelligence networks close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had operated at the margins of South Sudan’s oil allocation system for years and had cultivated relationships with precisely the officials now at the centre of the corruption investigation.
Rather than declare BGN unwelcome, Chol moved closer to the company, awarding new cargo allocations under conditions that multiple sources describe as improbably favourable.
Days before his removal from the ministry on February 23, Chol was in Doha, Qatar, for a working meeting with senior BGN officials. Investigators have since established that he had committed to allocating one final cargo to BGN in March under terms that, in retrospect, appear grotesque: BGN holds an option to purchase the cargo at February’s price.
The conflict in Iran, which erupted on February 28, pushed Brent crude from below sixty-three dollars a barrel in February to a historic intraday high of $119.50 on March 9.
The spread between the price BGN locked in and the market price at which the cargo will actually be lifted represents, by the calculations of investigators who have reviewed the terms, a loss to the South Sudanese state budget of between ten million and twenty million dollars on a single shipment.
Whether that loss is realised will depend on whether the new finance minister, Salvatore Garang Mabiordit, honours the commitment or repudiates it. The government has not confirmed whether the BGN cargo arrangement remains in force. BGN did not respond to requests for comment.
Chol himself did not reach Uganda. Security forces intercepted him at approximately eight in the evening on February 28 near the Elegu-Nimule border crossing, travelling on a commercial motorcycle taxi.
He was carrying $30,000 in US dollars and 27 million South Sudanese pounds concealed in a travel bag. Video footage that circulated on social media showed the former minister with apparent bloodstains on his clothing following the pursuit. He has been held since without formal charge.
His arrest came on the same day as the American-Israeli strikes on Tehran that killed, among many others, the man whose company had been buying South Sudan’s oil.
The timing is not merely coincidental. It is structurally revealing. What the Shamkhani Network’s presence in South Sudan’s oil allocation system illuminates is the specific economics of sanctioned-country oil trading.
An actor that cannot access legitimate financial markets, that must move funds through webs of front companies and correspondent bank accounts, and that faces a constant threat of exposure and seizure, has a powerful incentive to secure barrels at the deepest possible discount.
The gap between the price paid and the market price is not merely profit. It is the cost of doing business in the shadow economy, the premium extracted in exchange for absorbing legal and reputational risk that a conventional trader would not bear.
For the South Sudanese officials allocating those barrels, that same premium was the mechanism of personal enrichment.
A cargo sold to Wellbred at twenty or thirty dollars below market did not generate a loss that landed visibly in government accounts. It generated a private transfer, untraceable in the formal ledger, from the public treasury to the private pockets of those who controlled the allocation.
The UN estimates that $2.2 billion was diverted through off-budget schemes in a three-year window. South Sudan’s total population is twelve million people. More than nine million of them require humanitarian assistance.
The arithmetic of what has been stolen, set against the arithmetic of need, is not one that the government of President Kiir has shown any inclination to dwell on in public.
What is clear is that the current crackdown, whatever its political motivations, has exposed the machinery of the scheme in a degree of detail not previously available to investigators.
The US Justice Department has its forfeiture complaints. Kenya has its bank records.
The Netherlands has, if it chooses to act, a fugitive with European nationality and alleged stolen assets scattered across East Africa.
The question now is whether the architecture of accountability is adequate to the scale of what has been stolen, or whether this, like so many previous episodes in South Sudan’s short and violent history, ends not in justice but in the renegotiation of impunity.
The Sudanese government has urged the United States to designate the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a terrorist organisation. Sudan’s foreign ministry, in a statement issued on Tuesday, said all groups that violate international humanitarian law and commit terrorism, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the country should be designated as terrorist groups.
“The US should therefore designate the RSF militia as a terrorist group, given its proven crimes and documented violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and terrorism,” the statement read in part.
The government’s demand comes a day after the US designated the Sudanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, labelling it a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) and planning to formalise it as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) starting March 16, 2026. The United States accused the group of widespread violence and links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
RSF members. Credit: Al Jazeera
The RSF was formed around 2013, evolving from the Janjaweed militias, which were infamous for committing atrocities during the Darfur conflict.
Initially, they were government-backed militias used to fight rebel groups in Darfur and maintain control in conflict regions, but they have now grown into a powerful political and economic actor, controlling resources such as gold mining in Sudan.
The group has also been accused of war crimes and human rights abuses, especially during the Darfur conflict and crackdowns on protests in Khartoum.
A United Nations inquiry found the RSF to have committed acts of genocide in Darfur.
Madagascar’s military ruler Col Michael Randrianirina has dissolved the government unexpectedly, dismissing the prime minister and the entire cabinet, according to a statement from his spokesperson.
“The government has ceased its functions” it said, adding that Randrianirina will appoint a new prime minister “in line with the provisions stipulated by the constitution”.
No reason was given for the move.
Randrianirina seized power last October from Andry Rajoelina, following weeks of youth-led protests on the Indian Ocean island. Rajoelina had been elected president for a third term in a disputed poll in 2023.
The demonstrations were over persistent power and water shortages, culminating in the army siding with the demonstrators.
Randrianirina has pledged to call new elections within two years.
Last December, the regional bloc, the Southern African Development Community (Sadc), directed Madagascar’s military authorities to submit a roadmap for restoring democracy including plans for fresh elections by the end of February.
But in a surprise on Monday, Randrianirina sacked his entire government and assigned permanent secretaries to run ministries’ day-to-day operations until a new cabinet is formed.
Randrianirina has not explained the motivation for the mass sackings, but leaders of the Gen Z movement, whose grassroots mobilisation helped bring the military leader to power, have called for more inclusiveness in the transition process and greater representation in decision-making structures.
Activist groups, calling themselves Gen Z and Gen Y movements, had recently issued a 72-hour ultimatum for Randrianirina’s resignation, citing frustration with his performance, local media reported.
Businessman Herintsalama Rajaonarivelo had been appointed prime minister in October in an effort to bridge the divide between military leadership and civilian government.
The the Gen Z movement leaders rejected his appointment at the time, saying it was made in a “non-transparent” manner and “without consultation”.
The group demanded to know how Rajaonarivelo was selected given what it said were his connection to the previous government.
They then said that the decision “runs contrary to the desired structural change” the movement was seeking.
Monday’s dissolution of the government could mark a significant shift in the country’s political landscape with the military leader seeking to establish a new administration.
