To reclaim its sovereignty, Senegal must approach debt differently

Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund and Senegal announced a new loan programme worth $2.2bn. This came after a previous deal was suspended following the discovery in July 2024 of concealed debt equivalent to approximately 25 percent of the country’s GDP, which brought public debt to over 130 percent of GDP, one of the highest ratios in Africa.

This is what might be called a democratic betrayal of debt: The Senegalese people, who had been assured that their country was a model of macroeconomic stability, were presented with a bill that had been accumulating in secret for years.

The discovery caused outrage and much public debate about how Senegal has been managing its debt. The idea of economic independence gained momentum and helped the governing Pastef party secure 80 percent of seats in the parliamentary elections in November that year.

Today, almost two years later, the sovereignty agenda that animated the Senegalese voters is in jeopardy, not through formal renunciation, but through a gradual shift of framework, vocabulary and objective. The government is treating the international financial institutions as the only viable recourse for managing foreign debt instead of seeking a less painful alternative approach.

Senegal has been one of the IMF’s most continuous programme countries. It has repeatedly sought its assistance since 1979.

The structural adjustment introduced by the fund and the World Bank produced stagnation, rising poverty and no economic transformation. It systematically dismantled the institutional infrastructure through which economic change could have been achieved.

In 2004, the country was approved for debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) and got $488m of its debt cancelled, but had to accept adjustment conditionalities, including privatisation of state companies and deregulation, which impacted access to essential services, decent employment, small businesses, and the poor. The relief was real; the structural transformation it was supposed to enable remained elusive.

The question today is who failed whom first. Recalculations put Senegal’s real public debt at the end of 2023 at 99 percent of GDP, compared to the 74 percent initially reported. A divergence of 25 percentage points of GDP, maintained over several consecutive years, is not an accidental omission. The IMF attributed the error to the Senegalese government

This was, at minimum, a systemic failure in the exercise of a conventional responsibility. The institution’s aim, on this reading, is not the development of debtor countries, but their maintenance in a disciplined poverty.

The continental record confirms Senegal is no exception. African countries in IMF programmes have struggled with debt management. Zambia started borrowing from the IMF in the 1980s. The conditions the fund imposed – trade liberalisation, public spending cuts and privatisation – caused its economy to shrink.

Zambia was then forced to seek HIPC relief as well. It was approved but implementation was repeatedly delayed over the painful adjustment policies requested.

Ethiopia also faced delays of several years after it requested debt treatment in February 2021 under the G20 Common Framework. It was not until March 2025 that terms were agreed with creditors – more than a year after it defaulted on debt. Meanwhile, austerity measures imposed as part of a $3.4bn agreement with the IMF led to rising poverty and inequality.

The position advanced here is not a wholesale rejection of external financing, but a call for a different sequence: debt treatment rather than restructuring; audit and accountability before new conditionality; fiscal space for productive investment rather than catch-up taxation; ownership and control over natural resources, rather than ceding them to foreign powers; sustaining social protection rather than curtailing essential services; and the grounding of any borrowing negotiation in a regional and continental balance of power rather than in a structurally unequal bilateral exchange.

Concretely, the Senegalese parliament, jointly with civil society, must without delay create the institutional conditions for a citizens’ debt audit, structured around three democratic minimums: was the debt legal, was it legitimate, did it serve the people?

This should lead to an independent examination of all debt contracted between 2019 and 2024, including the responsibility of arrangers, creditors and the IMF’s own surveillance failure, as a prerequisite for any new debt conditionality, alongside a suspension clause on the service of disputed debt for the duration of the audit.

On fiscal policy, the country needs a differentiated approach. When seeking to expand its tax-to-GDP ratio, it should not raise taxes across the board and cut social spending. Instead, it should focus on taxing extractive industries and wealthy individuals.

A minimum share of state investment in infrastructure, agro-industrial transformation and energy should be protected. The terms of derivative instruments linked to domestic debt, notably the Total Return Swaps, should be capped and made public.

When seeking debt restructuring under the G20 Common Framework, it should aim for a binding timetable and a less asymmetric arbitration mechanism. Any new conditionality accepted should carry a reversibility clause, triggered by pre-defined thresholds, in the event of a major economic shock, to avoid self-defeating austerity.

Hydrocarbon revenue should have its own safeguards, resting on four pillars: a transparent stabilisation fund that accumulates revenue surpluses during boom periods; a dedicated investment envelope for productive and social sectors, including energy transition, agricultural transformation, education, health, water, sanitation and digital infrastructure; an active liability management strategy prioritising the reduction of the costliest components of the external debt; and robust citizen participation and parliamentary oversight over hydrocarbon revenue allocation.

Finally, Senegal should enshrine in national legislation the requirement of prior parliamentary authorisation and full disclosure of any public borrowing.

Senegal cannot do all of this alone. It needs to build a South-South coalition with other African countries struggling with debt to collectively weigh on debt restructuring terms. This is precisely the argument Burkinabe President Thomas Sankara made to the Organisation of African Unity in July 1987: creditors coordinate, borrowers should too.

The Borrowers’ Platform, established in April, is the first institutional answer to that call. It must fulfil three functions: close the information and capacity asymmetry between creditors and debtors; develop common positions on conditionality provisions incompatible with developmental sovereignty; and give collective expression to the principle affirmed in UN General Assembly Resolution 1803 of 1962, that peoples retain inalienable authority over their natural wealth.

In coordination with the African Union, Senegal can help set up a framework enabling African governments to demand a binding 20-to-30-year moratorium on debt service, resting on four provisions: the immediate suspension of all payments without accumulation of arrears; the mandatory allocation of freed resources to sovereign development expenditures, according to priorities set by national parliaments rather than creditors; a multilateral legal framework under UN auspices, shielding the mechanism from the regressive conditionalities of the Paris Club and the IMF; and a mid-term review clause based on human development indicators.

Senegal should also champion a regional mutualisation of liquidity risk on sovereign issues within the West Africa Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The country should also set up a strategic and sovereign process to establish its own currency in collaboration with other countries that currently use the West African CFA franc. The government needs to understand that borrowing in foreign currencies is skyrocketing its debt payments.

In all of these efforts, Senegal’s parliament should play a key role. As the institution which was given a broad mandate in the 2024 elections, it needs to lead the way on establishing a new approach to foreign debt anchored in transparency, legality and sovereignty.

The alternative – accepting the restructuring on current terms and deferring the sovereignty agenda to a later phase – would not be pragmatism. It would be replication of a model that has failed Africa for 40 years.

The Senegalese people deserve better than a better-managed version of structural adjustment. They voted for a rupture. Parliament must hold to that mandate.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.