Pay Day Loans and Backroom Empires: South Sudan's Political Economy since 2018 - Craze (2023)

This Briefing Paper surveys the state of South Sudan’s political economy. It focuses on the diversion of revenues by the
political elite around South Sudanese president Salva Kiir in three key areas: oil production, humanitarianism, and loans
from international financial institutions. This paper finds Kiir’s regime has consistently employed strategies to render financial flows opaque, and it has used such flows to maintain its own military and political cadres at the expense of the South
Sudanese people. A predatory political economy, which enables capital accumulation by an elite class in Juba, has
become a structural condition for the survival of Kiir’s regime. This paper concludes by analysing likely future scenarios for
this political economy and offers policy observations to the international community.