JUBA – Residents of Aweil East County in South Sudan’s Northern Bahr el Ghazal State are expressing growing frustration as mobile money agents fail to provide cash withdrawals, leaving many unable to access funds sent by relatives and friends.
The problem has been most visible in Wanyjok Town, where remittances sent through MTN’s MoMo service are piling up in accounts but cannot be converted into physical cash.
Agents say they lack liquidity, while customers accuse them of abandoning a system that had been promoted as a reliable alternative to banks.
On Thursday, Deng Garang, a resident of Wanyjok, walked across the town in search of an agent to withdraw money sent by a family member. He returned home empty-handed.
“People are being turned away. Agents say the service is no longer useful to them because they don’t get any benefit, and they already have too much money stuck in their MoMo accounts,” Garang explained.
Mobile money services such as MoMo have been hailed as a breakthrough in South Sudan’s underdeveloped financial sector. Many organizations and businesses use them to pay employees, while families rely on remittances to cover basic needs. But residents in Aweil East say the system is collapsing at the point where it matters most: cash access.
A Wanyjok-based agent, Luol Deng, attributed the problem to a severe shortage of banknotes. “There is not enough money in circulation. The banks are running dry because the Central Bank lacks sufficient cash,” he said. “That makes us cautious. How can we give out the little we have when people don’t want to use electronic payments?”
In July this year, the Central Bank of South Sudan declared mobile money a fully recognised and legal form of payment to ease business transactions as the country battles a protracted cash crisis.
But the struggles to transition have been visible. According to Luol, most customers still insist on withdrawing physical cash rather than making payments electronically, undermining the cashless model.
“Unless people begin using electronic payments in large numbers, mobile money cannot work here,” he noted.
He added that agents had experimented with giving partial withdrawals, but this triggered complaints from customers and eventually forced many agents to stop transactions altogether, risking irrelevance.
