President Salva Kiir after the swearing-in ceremony of Hon Martin Gama Abucha as the Minister of Mining in the Revitalized Transitional Government of National Unity and Major General Gregory Deng Kuac as the Deputy Director General of General Intelligence Bureau ( GIB), National Security Service - credit | Office of the President | Monday 6th December 2021

President Salva Kiir has tasked new Mining Minister, Martin Gama Abucha to address the illegal mining in the country.

The President says the country has not been able to gain from its mineral resources due to lack of technology and illicit trafficking.

According to Kiir, the country has earned nothing from the vast minerals it has.

South Sudan is well endowed with underground resources such as zinc, manganese, lead, nickel and cobalt.

The country also has gold, marble, limestone and dolomite but no active cement plants.

Kiir noted that despite a lot of mineral resources in South Sudan, the sector has continued to face illegal exploitation by smugglers.

The president did not mention those involved in the illegal dealings in the minerals sector.

Speaking at the swearing-in ceremony of the new Mining Minister, Martin Gama Abucha, and the Deputy Director General of General Intelligence Bureau Major General Gregory Deng Kuac, President Kiir said.

“We have a lot of mineral but because we have not been able to manage the technology of how to mine the mineral we have not been using even a penny from the minerals,”

“There are smugglers who are taking our minerals outside the country and they are selling them as their own product.

“This is the task of Gama Martin Abucha, he will help to do these things, and leave behind whatever is dividing us, let’s work towards what will take us forward.”

However, the Sentry in 2019 revealed that dirty deals involving South Sudan elites were threatening the mining sector.

In the past three years, the watchdog group published reports that implicated the country’s top leaders of being illicitly dealing in the gold business.

The Sentry said although South Sudan took welcome steps to reform the mining sector in 2012, some government officials, their relatives, and their close associates have fostered a weak regulatory environment susceptible to exploitation.

The Sentry revealed that President Salva Kiir’s daughter partly owns a company with three active licenses, while another company with three licenses lists Vice President James Wani Igga’s son as a shareholder.

Ashraf Seed Ahmed Hussein Ali, a businessman commonly known as Al-Cardinal who was placed under Global Magnitsky sanctions in October 2019, reportedly owns the company currently holding the greatest number of licenses.

In 2020 a report by The Sentry office accused Eastern Equatoria State Governor, Louis Lobong along with other state and non-state actors for allegedly smuggling gold from Kapoeta across the border into Kenya, with the active complicity of local and national governments.

But Kiir and Lobong denied any wrongdoing.