By: Bek Dhuorjang Chol
The Central Bank of South Sudan’s recent notice on 18th July 2025 announced the acceptance of Mobile Money as legal tender, mandating digital salary payments for civil servants and promoting mobile money platforms such as MTN MoMo, Zain mGurush, and Digitel DigiCash. This marks a significant, albeit challenging, step towards modernizing the country’s financial system. While the aims to enhance transparency, efficiency, and economic diversification beyond oil are commendable, the current heavy reliance on telecom-led mobile money risks worsening existing issues rather than resolving them. A more robust, secure, and inclusive solution involves adopting Government Payment Cards (Swapping Cards), a proven bridging technology that addresses South Sudan’s unique constraints.
The Policy Ambition and Its Implementation Hurdles
The BoSS initiative, driven by national government directives, aims to integrate civil servants into the formal banking sector and promote a cashless economy. Collaboration with commercial banks offers tailored, affordable salary accounts. Integration with mobile money platforms seeks to extend digital payments to traders, motorists, and the broader population, supported by the recent national instant payment system. The vision aligns with global trends towards financial digitization, promising benefits such as reduced cash-handling risks, improved mobilization of capital, and greater economic inclusion.
Citizen Reactions: Hope Tempered by Harsh Reality
Initial enthusiasm for digital transformation is evident. Citizens see the potential for efficiency, inflation control, and integration into regional payment systems. The ability to send international remittances directly into mobile wallets (e.g., mGurush via MasterRemit) is a clear benefit. However, this optimism is significantly undermined by widespread frustration and distrust arising from the current state of mobile money in South Sudan.
- The Liquidity Crisis Bites Deepest: The core complaint is systemic. Agents consistently lack cash (“No liquidity”), making withdrawals impossible. Citizens’ report being stranded at fuel stations, pharmacies, and markets, unable to access their own money deposited in MoMo, mGurush, or DigiCash wallets. This creates a “digital prison”: easy deposits, impossible withdrawals. The perception grows that mobile money primarily serves telecom companies for airtime/data top-ups and receiving funds, failing as a reliable payment and access system. As one user starkly noted: “All along our mobile money was just in the form of data and airtime.”
- Network Fragility and Exclusion: South Sudan’s unreliable mobile networks, especially in rural areas, cripple SMS-based transactions. Payments fail, transfers stall, and trust diminishes. This digital divide risks leaving vast swathes of the population, particularly outside urban centres, excluded from the very financial inclusion that the policy promises.
- Security and Trust Deficits: Fears of fraud, unauthorized access, hidden fees, transfer to the wrong number, and a lack of transparency undermine mobile money platforms. The absence of strong accountability mechanisms and perceived weak oversight of telecom providers increases public skepticism. Soldiers and citizens alike question whether they can trust these systems with their salaries.
- Infrastructure Gap: Critics correctly argue that a true push towards a cashless economy requires foundational investments first: widespread and reliable internet access, electricity, a dense network of ATMs reaching down to the county and payam levels, and modernized bank systems. Without these, mandating digital payments becomes an exercise in frustration.
Despite the fact that telecom providers like MTN MoMo acknowledge the liquidity challenges and emphasize collaboration and the long-term nature of the cashless journey (“a journey which cannot be completed overnight”), these assurances ring hollow for citizens trapped in the daily reality of inaccessible funds.
Swapping Cards: A Pragmatic and Proven Alternative
In this context, the Government Payment Card (Swapping Card) system emerges not as a rejection of digital progress but as a pragmatic, secure, and inclusive bridge technology tailored to South Sudan’s immediate challenges. These cards are prepaid debit cards issued by the government/banks, loaded with salaries or benefits, usable for payments (online/offline) and cash withdrawals via ATMs or agents. Their advantages are compelling:
- Solving Liquidity & Access: Cards are directly linked to bank-held funds. Users can withdraw cash from ATMs, bypassing the mobile agent liquidity bottleneck. They provide actual dual functionality: seamless digital payments and guaranteed cash access when needed. This directly addresses the “deposit but can’t withdraw” crisis.
- Network Independence & Reliability: Importantly, card payments at Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals using EMV chip-and-PIN technology work offline, requiring no real-time internet or mobile signal. This is vital for markets with poor connectivity, ensuring transactions proceed reliably. Withdrawals at ATMs also function independently of telecom networks.
- Improved Security & Trust: EMV chip-and-PIN is a globally trusted standard, much more secure than SMS-based codes, which are vulnerable to SIM-swap fraud. Transactions are encrypted and easily traceable, offering transparency and accountability often lacking in mobile money. Connecting swapping cards to national IDs (or passports for aliens) further strengthens security and prevents fraud/corruption.
- Accelerating Financial Inclusion: Cards can be issued to unbanked individuals without requiring a traditional bank account. They empower SMEs by allowing them to accept electronic payments via affordable micro-POS devices, integrating the informal economy. They provide a tangible and reliable tool for financial management, and encourage savings and planning.
- Economic Stabilization & Control: Government disbursements (salaries, benefits, subsidies) via cards ensure funds reach recipients directly and transparently, reducing leakage and corruption. Moving towards cashless transactions increases traceability, combating money laundering and illicit flows. Significantly, it centralizes remittance control: Mandating international remittances flow through licensed banks (partnering with telcos if needed) ensures adherence to Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/Countering Terrorist Financing (CFT) standards (e.g., FATF), provides real-time forex data for monetary policy, controls established correspondent banking for lower fees, and maintains data integrity for national planning. Telecom-led remittances lack this rigorous oversight, posing systemic risks.
- Building on Global Precedents: This is not untested technology. Countries like Brazil (Bolsa Família welfare cards), India (Rupay cards for financial inclusion), South Africa (SASSA grants cards), Argentina, and even developed nations like Germany (prepaid “Geldkarte”) utilized similar card systems as foundational steps in their digital payment journeys. Rwanda’s smart-card rollout is a particularly relevant African success story, significantly reducing cash reliance despite rural internet gaps.
A Phased Roadmap for Implementation: Transitioning requires a strategic, phased approach:
Phase 1: National Card Rollout & Core Infrastructure:
- Issue fee-exempt Government Payment Cards to all civil servants and organized forces receiving digital salaries.
- Prioritize deploying strong, solar-powered POS machines to key locations (major markets, hospitals, fuel stations, government offices) and ATMs in all state capitals.
iii. Mandate commercial banks to rapidly expand ATM networks down to the county level by 2026.
Phase 2: Merchant Empowerment & Hybrid Systems:
1) Subsidize simple, affordable micro-POS devices for small traders; cap transaction fees (e.g., at 1%) to encourage adoption.
2) Launch massive awareness campaigns using radio, TV, and social media, training “Digital Champions” at the local level.
3) Begin integrating card systems with mobile apps (e.g., a “South Sudan Pay” app for scan-to-pay functionality), creating a hybrid model.
Phase 3: Deepening Integration & Financial Services:
- Fully integrate the card system with the National ID database and key public services (e.g., land registry, passport issuance).
- Enable card-linked micro-loans through institutions like the South Sudan Agriculture Bank, particularly targeting farmers and SMEs.
- Maintain strict Central Bank oversight of remittances, mandating bank partnerships for telcos and capping fees.
Conclusion: South Sudan’s ambition for a modern, inclusive, cash-light economy is correct and necessary. However, the current path, overly reliant on mobile money platforms struggling under liquidity constraints, network fragility, and trust deficits, risks failure and more profound public disillusionment. Government Payment Cards offer a pragmatic, secure, and proven alternative. They provide the immediate reliability and accessibility citizens desperately need, bridge the urban-rural and digital divides, offer superior security, and lay the vital foundation, including regulated remittance flows, for sustainable financial inclusion and economic stability.
The experiences of Brazil, India, China, Rwanda, and others demonstrate the efficacy of cards as a bridge technology in developing economies. As the BoSS itself acknowledged, creating a cashless society is a journey. Swapping cards provides South Sudan with the reliable vehicle needed for that journey, ensuring that the promise of digital finance serves all citizens, empowers businesses, and builds a genuinely inclusive and resilient economy, rather than becoming a source of further exclusion and frustration. The foundation is laid with the digital salary directive; now is the time to build its strongest pillars with Government Payment Cards.
The writer can be reach through the below contacts
Telegram / WhatsApp /Skype +211919449146
Mobile +211929449146
WeChat: 15623701180
Twitter #BekDhuorjang
Email: bekchol082017@yahoo.com