How Pacific Petroleum Lost Juba’s Billion-Shilling Fuel Monopoly

For seven months, one Kenyan company controlled the tap that fed South Sudan’s petrol stations. Pacific Petroleum Limited, a mid-sized Nairobi trader with subsidiaries scattered across five countries, held sole rights to import every litre of petrol and diesel that Juba consumed under a government-to-government arrangement struck in November 2025. No competing tender. No public disclosure of terms. Just a company informing Kenyan authorities that it, and it alone, would move South Sudan’s fuel through the Kenya Pipeline Company system. That arrangement is now in ruins, and the paper trail shows exactly how it collapsed. THE SINGLE-SOURCE ORIGIN Court documents reviewed by this publication confirm what Pacific never advertised: the exclusive franchise was never competitively awarded. South Sudan’s Ministry of Petroleum simply informed Nairobi in November last year that Pacific would be the designated importer, and Kenya’s system accommodated it. Advocates Without Borders, the Juba-based petitioner that eventually unravelled the deal, built its entire case on this fact, arguing the arrangement was handed out through a single-source process with no competition and no public scrutiny. That is the part of this story Pacific’s public messaging never mentioned. The company describes a mission built around transparency and energy security across its Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, DRC and Mozambique operations. What the record shows instead is a company that inherited a captive market by ministerial letter, then treated it as a private fiefdom. THE CARGOES THAT BROKE IT The collapse began with money, not politics. When the US-Israel conflict with Iran disrupted global fuel supply chains, Pacific admitted it had imported cargoes outside the agreed G-to-G framework at premium prices. A memo circulating among oil marketers put one disputed diesel cargo at 1,350 dollars per cubic metre and petrol at 1,000 dollars, figures Kenyan marketers operating in South Sudan called uncompetitive against the original terms. Documents from the Juba side add texture Kenyan coverage has missed. In a June 4 letter, Pacific itself detailed three specific cargoes moving through the pipeline: RSS001, already discharged and trucked into South Sudan; RSS002, still sitting at the Gapco terminal awaiting evacuation; and RSS003, idling at the Port of Mombasa since May 28, awaiting berth space. A company meant to be guaranteeing supply security could not move its own product off the dock. Pacific then turned accuser. The company alleged that rival oil marketing companies were exporting fuel to South Sudan outside the approved framework and claimed some cargo manifests had been altered to disguise the practice, an allegation Eye Radio in Juba could not independently verify. Whether or not the manifest tampering claim holds up, the effect was the same on both sides of the border: cheaper diverted cargoes, originally bound for the Democratic Republic of Congo, undercut Pacific’s premium-priced fuel and starved it of buyers. THE BORDER CRACKS DOWN Juba responded with threats rather than patience. Santino Dau, Undersecretary in South Sudan’s Ministry of Petroleum, wrote to oil marketing companies on June 24 ordering them to lift only stocks nominated under signed supply agreements. Fuel not matching the official manifest would be impounded at the border, and the letter warned of legal action and licence revocation for what it called sabotage of the arrangement. Security agencies were instructed to man and regulate the frontier. Kenya’s own bureaucracy moved in parallel. The Kenya Revenue Authority froze all requests to amend South Sudan cargo quantities, according to an internal memo, effectively locking volumes in place while regulators tried to work out who was cheating whom. Petroleum Principal Secretary Kello Harsama convened an emergency meeting on June 22 with seven oil marketing companies, Pacific among them, alongside KPC and the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority, to fix the evacuation bottlenecks without wrecking Kenya’s own separate G-to-G framework with Gulf suppliers. THE COURTROOM RECKONING While the commercial fight played out in terminals and border posts, the legal challenge that would prove fatal was already moving through Juba’s courts. Advocates Without Borders had petitioned the Court of Appeal arguing that the exclusive arrangement created an unlawful monopoly, pushed up consumer prices, and threatened the survival of every fuel company frozen out of the deal. The court issued an interim injunction in late June suspending implementation, and when the Ministry of Petroleum tried to circumvent it with a fresh circular, the court ordered that circular revoked for violating its own order. On July 7, Court of Appeal Judge Malou Akook expanded the injunction to cover not just Pacific and the Ministry but the three new entrants South Sudan had just nominated to replace its exclusivity, a signal the court intended to freeze the entire question of concentrated fuel import rights, not just Pacific’s slice of it. The Ministry of Petroleum has since appealed to the Supreme Court, which has called up the case file. The interim injunction remains in force while that appeal is pending. THE QUIET DEMOTION Even as the court fight escalated, Juba was already moving on. On June 30, Undersecretary Dau wrote formally nominating three additional suppliers, Kenya’s Gulf Energy Limited, South Sudan-based Sovereign Energy Oil Trading LLC, and Skysoar Holding Company Limited, to operate alongside Pacific. The letter cited critical operational and commercial challenges creating inefficiencies at KPC’s loading terminals and along the Northern Corridor. It did not use the word failure. It did not need to. South Sudan has also confirmed that a new state-owned entity, South Sudan Energy, will eventually assume the importer role altogether, following the same trajectory Rwanda and Uganda have already taken with their own state-backed fuel companies. The direction of travel across the region is unmistakable: away from designated private importers and toward state control, precisely because concentrated private franchises like Pacific’s keep failing in the same way, through opacity, arbitrage and the temptation to exploit a captive market the moment global prices move. THE BIGGER PICTURE Kenya pioneered the government-to-government fuel import model in March 2023 with three Gulf state trading houses. Uganda followed in 2024 through Vitol Bahrain. South Sudan adopted its version in March this year with Pacific as sole gatekeeper. Rwanda joined last month with Oman’s OQ Trading. Each was sold on the same promise of price stability and supply security, insulated from spot-market chaos. Pacific’s unravelling is the first real stress test of that promise, and it failed within months. A single company was handed exclusive control over an entire nation’s fuel supply without competitive process, promptly exploited price disruption from a war on the other side of the world to import overpriced cargo, could not physically move its own product through Kenyan infrastructure, and stood accused by its own rivals of the same manifest games it accused them of playing. It took a public interest lawsuit filed by a civil society group, not any regulator in Nairobi or Juba, to force the question of monopoly into open court. For South Sudanese consumers, the immediate risk was shortages and higher pump prices while the arbitrage war played out above their heads. For Kenya, it was reduced utilisation of pipeline and terminal infrastructure and a string of emergency ministerial meetings to contain the fallout. For Pacific, the lucrative exclusive franchise that once looked like a regional coup has been diluted into a shared, contested and legally embattled role, one now sitting before South Sudan’s Supreme Court with the company’s name attached to allegations it has not managed to shake. The company did not respond to efforts by reporters in Juba to obtain comment on the monopoly petition. Nairobi has stayed just as quiet.