South Sudan's English Daily Newspaper
"We Dare where others fear"

By Awan Achiek
The Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Awow Daniel Chuang has been asked to seek funding for the 2024/25 fiscal year budget.
This was revealed by the First Deputy Speaker of the Transitional National Legislative Assembly (TNLA), Oyet Nathaniel Pierino on Monday, during parliamentary session in Juba.
“We have a task and good enough this is May, the budget is going to come and before we pass the budget which will just be a literature according to the minister of finance, we must look for money whether in South Sudan or elsewhere in the word,” Nathaniel said.
Nathaniel said he was disappointed last week when the minister of finance declared that the government had run out of cash to pay salaries for civil servants.
“Whether the resources are there now or not, as a government we can’t declare now that we are bankrupt because we must look for possible means to bail ourselves out and our citizens,” he disclosed.
Nathaniel said that having declared the country bankrupt makes people hopeless.
“It is very shameful to hear from the minister of finance who declared publicly that there are no resources, I don’t want to hear it in this house because it makes our people hopeless,” he said.
Chuang told lawmakers during the scrutiny of President Salva Kiir’s speech that the government doesn’t have money to pay salaries due to poor revenue generation from oil and non-oil sectors.
The statement dismayed civil servants who have been waiting for their dalaries since October 2023.
Government employees are finding it more and more difficult to feed their families as their savings dwindle and commodity prices skyrocket.