South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation (SSBC)

South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation (SSBC) is the national public service broadcaster of South Sudan, operating SSBC TV and South Sudan Radio. Established as a statutory corporation under the South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation Act, 2013, SSBC was envisioned as a public broadcaster with legal provisions for operational, administrative, and editorial independence, including statutory language that board decisions should be transparent and independent, free from political or other influence, and that the Board should neither seek nor accept instructions from any authority except as provided by law. In practice, however, the broadcaster remains structurally dependent on the state and politically vulnerable, with the 14 August 2025 leadership change, the November 2025 cabinet reshuffle that brought a new Information Minister and Vice President, and the run-up to the long-delayed December 2026 general elections together defining the institutional context for SSBC’s 2026 environment, while structural constraints have continued unchanged.

Media assets

Television: SSBC TV

Radio: South Sudan Radio

Ownership and governance

SSBC was established under the Broadcasting Corporation Act, 2013 as a statutory corporation mandated to serve the South Sudanese public and accountable to the public through the Transitional National Legislative Assembly. Governance of the broadcaster lies in the hands of a nine-member Board of Directors, with members appointed by the President after National Legislative Assembly approval. The law mandates that at least 25% of board members be women; consistent enforcement of this quota has not been independently verified.

Under the Broadcasting Corporation Act, the Managing Director is appointed by the Board by a two-thirds majority vote, then recommended to the Minister for referral to the Council of Ministers for confirmation; the role carries a five-year term, renewable once. In practice, the executive has retained de facto authority over appointments and dismissals.

On 14 August 2025, President Salva Kiir Mayardit issued a presidential decree, read on SSBC, removing Managing Director James Magok Chilimchok after nearly a decade in the role and appointing John Madol Panther as his replacement. Panther, who joined SSBC as a veteran journalist before serving as Director of Press and Publicity at the Ministry of Information, Communication Technology and Postal Services, took office at a critical juncture as the country prepares for the December 2026 general elections. Magok was reassigned as Secretary to the SSBC Board of Directors; he had previously been suspended in April 2020 by then-Information Minister Michael Makuei Lueth over allegations of “intransigence, disobedience, and incompetence” before being reinstated in January 2021. Independent verification against the formal presidency text of the decree would strengthen this finding for final publication.

The supervisory ministry also experienced major change in late 2025. Michael Makuei Lueth had served as Minister of Information, Communication Technology and Postal Services since 2013 and was on the United States and European Union sanctions lists for his role in undermining the peace process and the systematic curtailment of political and democratic space, including through threats against journalists and support to media censorship. On 17 November 2025, President Kiir issued a major cabinet reshuffle dismissing Makuei from the Information portfolio (moving him to Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs) and appointing Ateny Wek Ateny, Kiir’s former Press Secretary (2013–2022), as the new Minister of Information, Communication Technology and Postal Services. Ateny assumed office on 19 November 2025. The same reshuffle appointed Dr. James Wani Igga as Vice President and Chair of the Economic Cluster, succeeding Benjamin Bol Mel, who had been dismissed days earlier.

Source of funding and budget

Under the Broadcasting Corporation Act, 2013, the government was to fund SSBC for an initial five-year period from the Act’s commencement, after which revenue sources were to diversify to include public broadcasting fees, direct public subsidies, advertisements, sponsorships, commercial activities, and donations. Despite this provision, the broadcaster remains overwhelmingly reliant on government financing.

The latest figure identified in earlier monitoring was a reported 2019–20 government allocation of SSP 74 million (approximately US$ 570,000) covering the bulk of operating costs, but no updated budget figures were found in publicly accessible sources for the current review. Additional financial and technical support has occasionally been secured from foreign development partners, notably the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) (a six-year, $6 million deal signed in 2012) and the Chinese government (a $15 million 2018 pledge to modernise SSBC, with the Chinese embassy in Juba handing over a new TV production building in 2023, a two-storey, ~2,400 square-metre facility featuring TV studio, virtual studio, recording studio, master control room, launch room, and supporting facilities). South Africa, China, and Japan have also provided equipment and training for SSBC TV staff.

The broader macroeconomic context, South Sudan’s GDP per capita of approximately US$488 (2026 estimate), an economy with persistent fiscal stress driven by oil-revenue volatility, and the spillover of the Sudan civil war, has constrained the broader funding environment for state media. Heglig, located in Sudan but central to South Sudanese oil processing and export flows, was reported by Reuters to have been seized by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces on 8 December 2025; South Sudan subsequently deployed troops to guard the oilfield, and on 11 December 2025 Minister Ateny announced a tripartite arrangement between SSPDF, SAF, and RSF to secure the site.

Editorial independence

Despite official commitments to nurture SSBC as a politically independent public broadcaster, its editorial line remains closely aligned with government narratives. The legal provision in the Broadcasting Corporation Act calling for editorial operations to be “independent from political or economic control by the government” is routinely ignored in practice. Editorial decisions are widely perceived to be influenced, if not dictated, by political authorities, primarily due to the government’s direct role in appointing (and dismissing) SSBC’s leadership. Presidential decrees and major government announcements are routinely read on SSBC as the channel of record. Although the Act assigns a monitoring role to the Media Authority, no evidence was found in this review that this mechanism has operated as an effective, independent safeguard for SSBC’s editorial autonomy in practice.

The 2024–26 period has been particularly defining for South Sudan’s political environment. General elections originally scheduled for December 2024 were postponed to 22 December 2026,the fifth such postponement since independence in 2011, with the transitional period extended to February 2027 following Reuters reporting of the September 2024 decision. In March 2025, armed clashes erupted in Nasir, Upper Nile State, between the South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-in-Opposition (SPLA-IO) and allied White Army forces, bringing the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) to a standstill. First Vice President Dr. Riek Machar, Chairman of the SPLM-IO, was placed under house arrest on 26 March 2025 per Human Rights Watch and now faces trial on charges including murder, treason, and crimes against humanity (per Reuters/AP). In February 2026, the African Union’s High-Level Ad Hoc Committee for South Sudan (the C5, chaired by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa) called for the release of political detainees including Machar as a precondition for credible December 2026 elections.

The press freedom environment for journalists working in South Sudan remains highly constrained. SSBC itself has been the site of high-profile press-freedom incidents: in January 2023, the National Security Service detained seven SSBC journalists and technicians, Joval Tombe, Victor Ladu, Mustafa Osman, Jacob Benjamin, Cherbek Ruben, Joseph Oliver, and Garang John, in connection with footage from a 12 December 2022 highway inauguration that showed President Kiir apparently losing bladder control. Jacob Benjamin and Garang John remained in NSS detention without formal charges into their third month before eventual release, per RSF reporting. CPJ has also documented broader patterns of arbitrary detention of journalists.

Reporters Without Borders ranked South Sudan 118th of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, a drop of 9 places from 109/180 in 2025. RSF described the media landscape as “extremely precarious,” noting that journalists face persistent intimidation, censorship, and insecurity linked to political instability and weak rule of law, and that at least nine journalists have been killed in South Sudan since 2014, including British-American war reporter Christopher Allen (killed 26 August 2017 while covering civil-war clashes in the south of the country). The Union of Journalists of South Sudan (UJOSS), led by Patrick Oyet, has linked the 2026 decline to ongoing violence in parts of the country and documented detentions of journalists in Unity State (Leer and Bentiu) early in 2026.

The new Information Minister, Ateny Wek Ateny, used his swearing-in on 19 November 2025 to pledge a “zero-tolerance policy” against the harassment of journalists, describing the Ministry of Information as “a den meant to protect them.” On 16 December 2025, he reaffirmed this commitment at a “Dinner with the Media Fraternity” in Juba. Independent observers have noted the gap between such commitments and the documented pattern of NSS detentions and the EU’s July 2025 amendment of its sanctions designation of the former Information Minister.

AI and digital policy

SSBC maintains a digital presence including a YouTube channel and a Facebook page (SSBC News), as well as the corporation’s satellite distribution noted above. No public SSBC-specific policy on AI-generated content, synthetic-media disclosure, or content provenance (such as C2PA) was identified in this review.

May 2026