South Sudan

South Sudan’s state-media landscape in 2026 consists of a single outlet in the State Media Monitor dataset, classified as State-Controlled (SC): the South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation (SSBC), the country’s national public broadcaster. SSBC was established under the Broadcasting Corporation Act, 2013, and operates SSBC TV, broadcasting in English and Juba Arabic, and South Sudan Radio, with AM/FM operations centred on Juba and Wau and additional regional facilities reported in older public listings. Public satellite directories have listed SSBC/South Sudan TV carriage on Badr 4 and Galaxy 19, with older or secondary references also listing Intelsat 19.

The Act provides formal language on operational, administrative, and editorial independence, including provisions that the Board should neither seek nor accept instructions from any authority except as provided by law, and assigns a monitoring role to the Media Authority. In practice, however, the broadcaster remains structurally dependent on the executive: senior leadership changes have been effected through presidential decrees, even where formal procedures refer to board recommendation and government confirmation; presidential decrees and major government announcements are routinely read on SSBC as the channel of record; and no evidence was found that the Media Authority’s monitoring mechanism has operated as an effective, independent safeguard for SSBC’s editorial autonomy.

Without altering this structural picture, the 2024–2026 period brought a sequence of institutionally consequential developments. South Sudan’s first national elections, originally envisaged after independence and repeatedly postponed since the first planned post-independence poll in 2015, were pushed back again from December 2024 to 22 December 2026 following Reuters reporting of the September 2024 decision, with the transitional period extended by two years to February 2027. In March 2025, armed clashes in Nasir, Upper Nile State, between government forces and forces associated with the SPLA-IO and the allied White Army severely strained the implementation of the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS). First Vice President Dr. Riek Machar, chairman of the SPLM-IO, was placed under house arrest in March 2025 per Human Rights Watch, and later charged with offences 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 on South Sudan’s leaders to create conditions for credible December 2026 elections, including considering the release of political detainees such as Machar.

The SSBC leadership change of 14 August 2025, in which President Salva Kiir Mayardit removed Managing Director James Magok Chilimchok and appointed John Madol Panther through a presidential decree read on SSBC, illustrated the executive’s de facto control over senior broadcaster leadership, even where formal procedures refer to board recommendation and confirmation. The supervisory ministry also changed: on 17 November 2025, Kiir dismissed long-serving Information Minister Michael Makuei Lueth, who was under US and EU sanctions and had been cited by the EU for repression of the media, moving him to Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, and appointed Ateny Wek Ateny, Kiir’s former Press Secretary (2013–2022), as Minister of Information, Communication Technology and Postal Services. Ateny assumed office on 19 November 2025. The same reshuffle returned Dr. James Wani Igga to the Vice Presidency, replacing Benjamin Bol Mel. On 18 February 2026, Kiir signed the Cybercrimes and Computer Misuse Act, 2026, which the government framed as a response to digital harms but which CPJ, Radio Tamazuj, and rights groups warned could restrict legitimate digital expression.

South Sudan ranked 118th of 180 countries in RSF’s 2026 World Press Freedom Index, down from 109th in 2025. RSF describes the country’s media landscape as “extremely precarious” and notes that at least nine journalists have been killed since 2014, including British-American journalist Christopher Allen, killed on 26 August 2017 while covering fighting in the south of the country. SSBC itself has been the site of high-profile press-freedom incidents, most prominently the January 2023 detention by the National Security Service of 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; RSF reported that Jacob Benjamin and Garang John remained in NSS detention without formal charges into their third month. Alternative voices in South Sudan’s media environment continue to be carried by privately-owned, independent, UN-supported, and international outlets, including Eye Radio, Radio Tamazuj, The City Review, and Radio Miraya, but the structural pattern of executive control over the state broadcaster has remained unchanged across the SMM dataset’s 2022–2026 reporting cycles, leaving SSBC’s SC classification intact for 2026.

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