On January 26, 2022, news broke of a salary adjustment for the members of the South Sudan’s legislature. Accordingly, each legislator will receive SSP800,000, which is equivalent to about $2,000 per month. This news generated a mixed response within the South Sudanese citizenry. To some, this decision has long been overdue since the start of high inflation years ago. The inflation led to a loss of the purchasing power of the South Sudanese pound (SSP) which now stands at about 99.3 percent, consequently catapulting the country’s public sector employees deeper into poverty. Others find this decision unsettling, mainly because the MPs do not seem to play an important role in ensuring sustainable livelihoods for the South Sudanese citizenry who are bearing the brunt of civil conflict and associated mismanagement of the scarce public resources. This Weekly Review analyzes this new policy by looking at factors that necessitated it, budgetary implications, and more broadly, policy implications for the public sector employees, as well as macroeconomic stability. We conclude the Review with policy recommendations that are targeted at the imperative of conducting public sector wage review and eventual science-based indexation of these wages to ensure sustainable peace, economic growth, and poverty reduction.
