Do we like them?

Do we like Salva Kiir?

Our score: 3 out of 10. A peace-deal signer who pardoned prisoners, but he threatened journalists and now presides over a state the UN says is looted.

Kiir was born in 1951 in the Bahr el-Ghazal region, joined the southern rebellion in the late 1960s and went on to help John Garang build the SPLA. When Garang died in 2005, Kiir took over the movement and, in 2011, became the first president of independent South Sudan. The cowboy hat is the trademark; the official biography calls him a teetotaller and non-smoker.

The fall-out with Riek Machar is the story of his presidency. In 2013 Kiir sacked his whole cabinet including Machar, then accused him of attempting a coup, and fighting broke out. Machar had accused Kiir of favouring his own Dinka people, and the five-year civil war that followed killed some 400,000 people.

A 2018 deal between the two ended that war, but it has been unravelling. In September 2025 the government charged Machar with murder, treason and crimes against humanity and stripped him of the first vice-presidency. Machar's camp denies the charges and says they are about sidelining the opposition; the government says he is answering for an attack on a military base.

On the harm test, we found nothing from Kiir on LGBTQ+ people or women, so we won't guess. What we did find: in 2015 he said “Freedom of the press does not mean you work against the country” and warned reporters the country had killed people before, and the Committee to Protect Journalists called it a threat to kill journalists. A UN commission report in 2025 said South Sudan was captured by a “predatory elite” looting its wealth, while nearly two-thirds of people face crisis-level hunger; the justice minister disputed the road-spending figures, and no response from Kiir himself was reported.

There is real good on the ledger too. He signed the peace deal that ended the war, and after receiving Pope Francis in 2023 he pardoned at least 71 inmates, 36 of them on death row. Against that, he keeps reshuffling top jobs, with the army chief and finance minister sacked in May 2026, and analysts read it as consolidating power amid succession uncertainty.

He tells the African Union South Sudan is committed to elections later this year and says security is stable enough for them. Yet the peace agreement's main reforms, including unifying the armed forces, still haven't been fully carried out, and the man who shared the deal sits on trial. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a state rebuilding or a president clearing the field.