President Salva Kiir has dismissed the undersecretary at the Ministry of Petroleum barely a week after appointing him, marking yet another dramatic twist in an already turbulent oil sector.
State broadcaster SSBC broke the news late Monday, revealing that Eng. Chol Thon Abel had been relieved of his duties barely a week after taking office and replaced by Eng. Deng Lual Wol, the same official President Kiir had dismissed just days earlier.
The sudden reversal played out almost like a loop, highlighting the uneasy churn within one of South Sudan’s most sensitive ministries.
In another decree, Chol Thon was quietly moved to the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation as a technical advisor.
No reasons were offered, and the silence only deepened the mystery around the reshuffle, sparking whispered questions in political circles.
The Ministry of Petroleum, held by Dr. Riek Machar’s SPLM-IO under the 2018 peace agreement, has long been a theater of internal battles political friction, factional disputes, and regional pressures repeatedly disrupting South Sudan’s oil flow.
For months, the undersecretary has effectively been the ministry’s highest authority, stepping into a leadership vacuum left when Petroleum Minister Puot Kang Chuol, a close Machar ally, was arrested in March and later charged with treason.
With Kang now facing trial before a special court in Juba, the leadership of the ministry sits on fragile ground. Kiir’s latest decision, instead of calming the waters, has stirred them further intensifying speculation that deeper political maneuvering may be steering the country’s oil sector from behind the scenes.
