In the fourteen years since secession, Salva Kiir has wielded the power to appoint and dismiss with such zeal that one wonders whether the stool itself still has legs. From firing an entire cabinet in 2013, to rotating through eight finance ministers since 2020, to purging a vice president widely seen as his preferred successor in November 2025, Kiir presides over a government that looks less like a state and more like a revolving door.
This is not random chaos. It is a method, and a dangerous one. Kiir’s decree book is the central manual of governance in South Sudan. Through it, he runs a political marketplace in which offices are traded for loyalty and access to money, and he uses the politics of hiring and firing to humiliate one rival through another in a cycle of revenge within a ruling clique that was already fractured by design during the liberation war. The cost of this strategy is borne by citizens, by institutions and, increasingly, by the stability of the regime itself.
The pattern began early. In July 2013, less than two years after independence, Kiir dismissed his entire cabinet and Vice President Riek Machar, accusing them of obstructing his agenda. The move shattered the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and helped trigger a civil war that killed an estimated 400,000 people. A fragile peace agreement brought a transitional government of national unity in name. In practice, Kiir’s appetite for purges only grew.
Since 2020 alone, the finance ministry has changed hands eight times. Governors arrive in Juba to take their oaths and soon leave in silence. Security chiefs barely learn the layout of their offices before a late-night decree ends their tenure. In August 2022, Kiir abruptly dismissed both his finance minister and the central bank governor. In August 2023, he fired Finance Minister Dier Tong Ngor. In November 2025, he removed yet another finance minister, Athian Diing Athian, just over two months into the job, and brought back a predecessor.
The November 12 decree that removed Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel, widely seen as Kiir’s chosen successor, and simultaneously fired the central bank governor and the revenue authority chief, captured the entire pattern in a single stroke. No reasons were given. The firings came amid intensifying fighting and fevered speculation over Kiir’s health and succession plans. Only weeks before, he had reinstated an army chief he had sacked three months earlier. In October 2025, Chief of Defence Forces Dau Aturjong was dismissed after just three months, and his predecessor, Paul Nang Majok, whom Kiir had fired in July after a militia overran army positions, was brought back.
Viewed over time, the pattern is unmistakable. Key posts are no longer positions of responsibility. They are rotating tokens in a game of power, patronage and humiliation.
Political scientist Alex de Waal describes systems like this as political marketplaces. In such systems, institutions are thin and rules are elastic. What matters is control over money and force. In South Sudan, oil accounts for more than 90 per cent of public revenue. Whoever controls the finance ministry, the central bank and the revenue authority controls the taps.
In a political marketplace, offices are commodities. They are allocated to buy loyalty, pacify factions and punish dissent. The threat of removal is as important as the promise of appointment. Kiir’s relentless firing and rehiring of finance ministers, governors and generals sends a single message. Power does not flow from law, elections or agreements. It flows from the president’s pen.
No official is allowed to sit long enough to build an independent base or to feel secure enough to refuse a demand. Each appointment is a short-term contract. Each dismissal is a warning to those who remain. This is not a clean-up operation. It is the rotation of spoils. By redistributing lucrative posts, Kiir refreshes loyalty networks and shifts blame for economic collapse onto yesterday’s favourites.
There is more at work than the buying and selling of loyalty. The decree book doubles as a public stage for political humiliation.
Kiir has repeatedly used one political or military figure to weaken another. A governor from one faction is empowered to shame a rival, only to be disgraced in turn. A general is promoted to humiliate his former commander, then is himself stripped of rank on national television. Bol Mel, a ‘businessman’ and ‘politician’ under United States sanctions for alleged corruption, yet widely seen as Kiir’s chosen heir, was elevated to the vice presidency in part to cut other contenders down to size. His abrupt dismissal, without explanation, was a warning to all: even the presumed successor stands on sand.
This cycle of humiliation speaks to the way the ruling clique was formed. The SPLM and its armed wing were never a single, cohesive force. They were a coalition of factions, militias and ethnic networks bound together by the war against Khartoum and divided by rivalries that were never fully resolved. During the war, leaders used promotions, demotions and public shaming to manage these fractures. After independence, the same tactics migrated into state institutions.
In a country brutalised by decades of conflict, this has a corrosive effect on the political psyche. When public humiliation becomes the main instrument of discipline, politics becomes a permanent threat. People learn that survival depends not on performance, but on their ability to avoid becoming the next example. In a society already steeped in violence, this breeds a politics of vengeance that can easily spill back into an all-out, devastating armed confrontation.
Behind the dramatic headlines and the nightly decrees sit ordinary South Sudanese whose lives are shaped by decisions they cannot influence.
Every new finance minister arrives with fresh promises and priorities. Before any reform can take root, he is gone. Budgets are drafted, then quietly abandoned. Salaries for teachers, nurses and soldiers are delayed for months. Infrastructure contracts start, stall and disappear. When the currency is already weak, the rapid turnover of economic stewards feeds panic. Traders hoard dollars. Black markets flourish. Donors and investors tire of restarting negotiations with each new minister and begin to treat the system as inherently unreliable.
In this environment, officials know that their tenure will likely be brief. The rational strategy is not to implement long-term reforms, but to extract short-term gains. The United Nations’ accusations of “systematic looting” are the predictable result of a system that rewards speed of theft over depth of reform. Every reshuffle opens a new window to strip assets and close files.
The result is a kind of permanent emergency in which citizens pay the price for an elite bidding war. Inflation erodes wages. Public services wither. The state becomes visible to most people mainly as a salary arrears problem and as a security threat.
The security sector follows the same pattern. Army chiefs and intelligence bosses operate under constant threat of removal. Instead of investing in professionalising the forces, they focus on shoring up personal loyalty in key units. Promotions and postings become instruments of patronage rather than merit.
Rank-and-file soldiers quickly understand the lesson. The path to security lies in loyalties and in access to spoils, not in performance or adherence to law. In a country still awash with weapons, this is a recipe for further factionalisation. When chiefs fall, the units they cultivated do not simply vanish. They look for the next patron, or they turn to predation.
This churns guts the very idea of a transitional government of national unity. The peace agreement that ended the last civil war was built on power sharing between Kiir’s camp, Machar’s opposition and other factions. In practice, unilateral dismissals of governors, ministers, and now vice presidents from rival camps have hollowed out that bargain.
Machar, once the first vice president, now faces treason charges. Wani Igga, Kiir’s long-time ally, vice president and first vice chair of the party, was pushed aside to make way for Bol Mel. Bol Mel, the businessman presented as Kiir’s protégé and preferred heir, is now out as well. If neither the president’s old enemies nor his closest allies are safe, then power sharing has collapsed into power hoarding. The message to all factions is simple. The agreement on paper is subordinate to the decree book.
The pattern of dismissals raises a basic question. Who actually governs South Sudan?
On paper, the answer is straightforward. Kiir is head of state and government, commander-in-chief and chair of the ruling party. Yet each unexplained dismissal sets off a storm of rumours. Was this governor pushed by security chiefs? Was the finance minister sacrificed to satisfy a foreign ally? Did family members lobby for this general or that banker?
When decision-making is opaque and reversible, the line between presidential authority and factional bargaining blurs. If Kiir alone decides, his judgment is in question. Why appoint officials only to discard them months later? Why repeatedly sacrifice continuity for loyalty? If others decide, the country is even more unstable than it appears, governed by overlapping, unaccountable networks that operate behind the facade of presidential power.
De Waal’s concept of the political marketplace captures part of this ambiguity. Uncertainty over who decides what keeps elites bidding for access, which enriches the ruler and his circle. Yet the same uncertainty undermines any hope of institutionalising power beyond one man.
From one angle, Kiir’s behaviour looks like textbook Machiavelli. The Italian thinker advised princes to keep rivals dependent and to prevent potential successors from growing too strong. Kiir has clearly absorbed the first lesson. Few around him feel secure.
Yet Machiavelli also warned that cruelty should be used decisively and then halted. Relentless purges, he argued, create a growing circle of embittered insiders who know the system’s secrets and have little left to lose. Kiir’s revolving door risks exactly that outcome. With each dismissal, he manufactures a new group of humiliated former insiders who will shape any future confrontation with the regime.
Kiir’s revolving door has sped up since 2023. With every purge, the circle of trusted allies narrows. At some point, the system that has kept him in power can become the mechanism of his downfall.
As the pool of credible successors shrinks, the incentives for a violent transition grow. When a leader refuses to groom a successor, elites begin to imagine post-Kiir futures that involve tanks rather than ballots. The charges against Machar, the dismissal of Bol Mel, the closure of foreign embassies, and the spread of fighting across several states are not isolated events. They are warning lights on a dashboard that has been flashing for years.
Regionally, neighbours worry more about another refugee crisis than about democratic practice in Juba. They have mostly chosen quiet diplomacy. International partners have protested each new sacking in careful language, then returned to business as usual. Sanctions on individual figures, including Bol Mel, have not changed the logic of the political marketplace. In a world distracted by other wars, South Sudan’s slow unravelling rarely captures sustained attention.
If the current trajectory continues, several risks converge. A brittle regime built on personalised loyalty may crack suddenly under the strain of economic collapse, elite rebellion or a security crisis. A politics built around humiliation may end in a politics of revenge. A liberation movement that never allowed itself to become a normal party may leave behind a vacuum rather than a legacy.
Inside South Sudan, the question is no longer whether Kiir will use his decree book to manage the elite. That pattern is set. The question is whether political actors across the spectrum, from former warlords to civic leaders, can imagine a settlement that loosens the presidency’s grip on every lever of power and creates predictable rules for succession and accountability.
South Sudan is approaching a fork in the road. One path leads deeper into the political marketplace. More sackings. More opaque deals. More personalised rule funded by oil and enforced by security services. The other path leads toward institutions that can survive their founders and a politics that no longer treats humiliation as governance.
For now, Kiir is choosing the first path. The more he pulls stools away from those around him, the more he risks discovering that the entire edifice of the state is standing on air. For millions of South Sudanese living with hunger, displacement and fear, the question is brutally simple. Will there ever be a government that stays long enough and is stable enough to deliver?
The world’s youngest state does not need another late-night decree. It needs a political settlement that stops the revolving door before it tears the country apart.
The writer, Dr. Remember Miamingi, is a South Sudanese expert in governance and human rights, as well as a political commentator. He can be contacted via email at remember.miamingi@gmail.com
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.