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