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Africa Will Be Free When the IMF Stops Colluding to Steal its Wealth
Vijay Prashad
In February 2025, Senegal’s Court of Auditors released a report that found ‘anomalies’ in the management of public finances between 2019 and 2024, during the presidency of Macky Sall (2012—2024). For instance, the court found that while Sall’s government had suggested that the budget deficit for 2023 was 4.9% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it was in fact 12.3%. The court went to work on this reconstruction of public finances because of a very significant accusation made by Senegal’s new prime minister, Ousmane Sonko, at a press conference in Dakar in September 2024. What the auditors found, and what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) validated, was that the actual debt ratio in 2023 was 99.7% of GDP—not 74.7%—and that the deficit had been underestimated by 5.6% of GDP (in August 2025, the debt ratio was revised to 111% of GDP).
The financial situation in Senegal, Prime Minister Sonko said, is ‘catastrophic’ because of three problems inherited from the decade of Sall’s rule:
- An ‘unbridled debt policy’ that increased the country’s public debt while erasing the possibility of any growth to pay off that debt.
- An administration that hid this indebtedness and the deep problems in the economy from the Senegalese people (who nonetheless rejected Sall’s chosen successor, Amadou Ba, in the March 2024 presidential elections and chose Bassirou Diomaye Faye instead).
- ‘Widespread corruption’, including the defrauding of the country’s COVID fund by four ministers.
The evidence that Sall’s government knowingly bankrupted their country and stole from its exchequer is slowly being amassed by President Faye and Prime Minister Sonko. Faye (born in 1980) and Sonko (born in 1974) are both former tax officials who went into politics frustrated by the levels of incompetence, fraud, and corruption in Senegal’s politics and bureaucracy. As young men with patriotic ideals, Faye and Sonko studied at the École nationale d’administration (National School of Administration) and then met in the Directorate General of Taxes and Estates (DGID), where Sonko had created the Autonomous Union of Tax and Estate Agents.
In 2011, the Canadian company SNC-Lavalin won a $50 million contract to build a mineral sands processing plant in Grande Côte. However, it was later revealed in the Paradise Papers that the Senegalese government had signed the contract with an entity known as SNC-Lavalin Mauritius. In other words, the Canadian company had become a Mauritian company (conveniently, there was a tax treaty between Senegal and Mauritius that exempted companies registered in Mauritius from paying taxes in Senegal). Due to this shift in jurisdiction, SNC-Lavalin was able to avoid paying at least $8.9 million in taxes to Senegal (SNC-Lavalin’s annual revenues are about $6 billion—a third the size of the GDP of Senegal, which has a population of 18 million).
Prime Minister Sonko was a vocal opponent of this project and, in January 2014, formed a political party called African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics, and Fraternity (PASTEF) to carry on the fight. In 2017, he won a seat in the National Assembly, where he raised the issue of tax havens and corporate theft. ‘A tax haven can be a paradise for multinationals that want to avoid paying taxes’, he said in 2018. ‘But for the country, it is hell’. In 2019, Sonko won nearly 16% of the vote in a contentious presidential election. In the 2022 municipal and parliamentary elections, there were major gains for a PASTEF-led coalition called Yewwi Askan Wi (Free the People), with the Socialist Party of Senegal’s candidate Barthélémy Dias elected mayor of Dakar. Then-President Sall was furious with these former tax officials and sought to ban their party and silence Sonko. This led to major demonstrations in 2023—2024 that culminated in the electoral victory of Faye and Sonko. It is no surprise that these former tax officials dug into the accountants’ ledgers and uncovered evidence of fraud.
But are Sall and his government the only ones guilty of fraud? After all, the entire bureaucracy in Senegal, including the Court of Auditors, did not seem to act on the complaints made by Sonko and others, nor on the revelations from the Paradise Papers.
Perhaps the most striking act of malfeasance is not by the Senegalese government but by the IMF. Since Sonko began to raise this issue in 2017, the IMF has published at least seven staff reports on Senegal, none of which indicated that there was any problem with the reporting arrangements on debt or on finances. The IMF’s 2019 staff report, for instance, noted that Senegal’s audit arrangements conformed to the International Financial Reporting Standards and that the country had subscribed to the IMF’s own Special Data Dissemination Standard in 2017. If the IMF signed off on the data being provided by Senegal, then it is just as liable for fraud as the Sall government and should be held to account.
In October 2024, following revelations of budgetary misreporting, the IMF suspended Senegal’s lending programme. In March 2025, the IMF’s staff report noted the ‘need for urgent reforms’ in Senegal’s bureaucracy and institutions (but not of the IMF itself). Around the same time, IMF spokesperson Juli Kozack said that Senegal might not need to return the fraudulent borrowings of the Sall government because of the good faith with which the Faye-Sonko government conducted an audit to unravel these irregularities. However, this waiver came with strings attached, as it was to be part of the negotiations between the IMF and Senegal.
The IMF showed its hand in the August 2025 staff report—it wanted to use the possibility of a waiver to extract concessions from the new government, including structural changes to erode whatever remained of Senegalese sovereignty. The Faye-Sonko government won a popular mandate to strengthen sovereignty. The IMF is using the Faye-Sonko government’s honesty about the previous government’s fraud to undermine it. What the IMF seeks is greater access to ‘strategic sectors’ (such as energy and agriculture) via multinational corporations, tighter fiscal discipline by the government (i.e., less social spending for the working class and peasantry), and a continuation of Sall’s 2014 Plan Senegal Émergent, which uses technocratic buzzwords to mask the drain of wealth into the hands of foreign multinationals and the Senegalese elite. The waiver will hang over Faye-Sonko’s government to coerce them to exchange their agenda of sovereignty for the IMF’s agenda of subservience.
The case of Senegal is not unusual. In the 1980s, U.S.-backed military governments in Latin America conducted off-budget borrowings, which the IMF took seriously in word but not in action. In 2000, the IMF identified misreporting by Pakistan’s military government but again did nothing, particularly after Pakistan enthusiastically joined the U.S. War on Terror in 2001. Around the same time, the IMF forgave Ukraine for debt misreporting, once again acting under pressure from the U.S. government as it sought to maintain President Leonid Kuchma’s pro-Western orientation. Much the same happened to Congo-Brazzaville in 2002 and Gambia in 2003. In 2006, the IMF released a paper on how to make the misreporting policies ‘less onerous’ so as not to burden countries with heavy penalties. This attitude informed the IMF’s treatment of Mozambique in 2016, when the energy exporter faced challenges from hidden debts.
Governments favoured by Washington are slapped on the wrist while governments eager to develop a sovereign policy are punished.
In September, the great Senegalese musician Cheikh Lô (born 1955) released a new album called Maame (2025). The album features a reggae track called ‘African Development’ that starts with Cheikh Lô intoning the names of Cheikh Anta Diop, Thomas Sankara, and Nelson Mandela before he riffs on the words ‘Free, free, free Africa… Africa must go be free’. This song is a return to the source, to the hopes and aspirations when Senegal won its independence in 1960 and raised its flag under the leadership of its first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. ‘Health first’, sings Cheikh Lô, who goes on to list a number of demands:
Agriculture, livestock farming, fishing.
Education: temple of knowledge.
Vocational training.
Job creation for youth.
Public security.
Preserve natural resources.
Fight poverty.
Fight corruption.
Independent and fair justice.
Develop democracy.
Freedom for Africa is far from guaranteed by the fifty-four flags that fly in in the fifty-four capitals on the continent. Freedom can only come when the people of Africa assert sovereign control over their own resources and emancipate themselves from the indignities of capitalism and imperialism.
[Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books. Courtesy: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution focused on stimulating intellectual debate that serves people’s aspirations.]
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No African Development from Western Trade Policies
Jomo Kwame Sundaram and K Kuhaneetha Bai
The World Bank’s 1981 Berg Report provided the blueprint for structural adjustment, including economic liberalisation in Africa. Urging trade liberalisation, it promised growth from its supposed comparative advantage in agriculture.
Berg promises
Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Plan for Action by Professor Elliot Berg blamed government interventions for blocking post-colonial African economic progress.
Removing ‘distortions’ caused by marketing boards and other state interventions and institutions was supposed to unleash export-led growth for Sub-Saharan African (SSA) producers.
However, despite the supposed comparative advantage and trade preferences, African agricultural exports have not grown significantly due to protection by wealthy nations.
By the turn of the century, Africa’s share of worldwide non-oil exports had declined to less than half of what it was in the early 1980s.
African agricultural output and export capacities have been undermined by decades of low investment, economic stagnation and neglect.
Significant public spending cuts accelerated the deterioration of existing infrastructure (roads, water supply, etc.), undermining potential ‘supply responses’.
However, high growth in East and South Asian economies boosted SSA mineral exports, often mined by foreign firms from the most significant economies in Asia.
Even the primary commodity price collapse from 2014 did not prevent Africa’s share of world exports from increasing.
Promises, promises
The 1994 Marrakech declaration, concluding the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, created the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995.
The new Doha Development Round of trade negotiations began in 2001, following the dramatic walkout by African trade ministers at the WTO Seattle ministerial conference in 1999.
The Public Health Exception to the WTO’s onerous new intellectual property rules alleviated this concern but was ignored during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.
Developing countries were projected to gain US$16 billion in the most likely scenario, according to a 2005 World Bank study led by Kym Anderson, which estimated the likely effects of a Doha Round trade agreement.
However, various studies estimating the welfare effects of multilateral agricultural trade liberalisation—including Anderson et al.—suggest significant net losses, not gains, for SSA.
Gains from agricultural trade liberalisation would largely accrue to existing major agricultural exporters—mainly from the Cairns Group—not SSA.
Nevertheless, the World Bank and others continued to insist that trade liberalisation would benefit all developing countries, including SSA, although most studies indicated otherwise.
WTO trade rules have reduced the policy space for developing countries—especially in industrial, trade, or investment policy—although some claim that room for industrial policy remains.
African governments were told that a Doha Round deal would reduce agricultural subsidies, import tariffs and non-tariff barriers by rich nations, especially in Europe.
But the neglect of both physical and economic infrastructure over two decades of structural adjustment programmes left little effective capacity to respond to new export opportunities.
Worse still, trade liberalisation of manufactured goods also undermined nascent African industrialisation.
African market access to rich, mainly European, markets was secured through negotiated preferential agreements, rather than trade liberalisation. Hence, further multilateral trade liberalisation would erode these modest gains.
Additionally, most African governments—particularly those of poorer economies with limited government capacities—were unable to replace lost tariff revenues with new taxes.
African losses foretold
What was Africa expected to gain from a Doha Round deal?
Thandika Mkandawire warned the WTO trade regime would make Africa worse off, especially without preferential treatment from the European Union under the Lomé Convention.
Anderson et al. claimed SSA would gain substantially as “farm employment, the real value of agricultural output and exports, the real returns to farm land and unskilled labor, and real net farm incomes would all rise substantially in capital scarce SSA countries with a move to free merchandise trade”.
To be sure, the modest gains from trade liberalisation would be ‘one-time’ improvements projected by the models used.
Anderson et al. claimed that SSA, excluding South Africa, would gain US$3.5 billion, compared to roughly US$550 billion worldwide.
These projected gains of less than one per cent of its 2007 output were nonetheless much more than the tenth of one per cent for all developing countries!
World Bank structural adjustment programmes undermined the limited competitiveness of African smallholder agriculture. However, their projections ignored the reasons why African food agriculture declined after the 1970s.
Meanwhile, the agricultural exports of wealthy nations have benefited from higher production subsidies, which more than offset lower export subsidies. However, reducing agricultural subsidies would likely lead to higher prices of imported food.
Uneven effects
Uneven and partial trade liberalisation and subsidy reduction will have mixed implications. These effects vary with national conditions, including food imports and share of consumer spending.
Earlier estimates for all developing countries obscured the likely impacts of trade liberalisation on Africa. The one-time welfare improvement for SSA, excluding most of Southern Africa, would be three-fifths of one per cent by 2015!
With deindustrialisation accelerated by structural adjustment, Sandra Polaski estimated that SSA, excluding South Africa, would lose US$122 billion from Doha Round trade liberalisation.
Although former World Bank economists agreed the lost decades were due to Bank structural adjustment programmes, these were reimposed a decade ago.
SSA, excluding South Africa, would lose US$106 billion to agricultural trade liberalisation. Poor infrastructure, export capacities and competitiveness in both SSA industry and agriculture were responsible.
Most of the poorest and least developed SSA countries were likely to be worse off in all ‘realistic’ Doha Round outcome scenarios.
With more realistic model assumptions—e.g., allowing for unemployment—Lance Taylor and Rudiger von Arnim found SSA would not gain, on balance, from trade liberalisation.
Mainstream international trade theory cannot justify trade liberalisation for SSA. Worse, ‘new trade theories’ and evolutionary studies of technological development suggest trade liberalisation would permanently slow growth.
Export growth?
As economic growth typically precedes export expansion, trade can foster a virtuous circle but cannot trigger it.
Specifically, a weak investment-export nexus hinders export expansion and diversification, as rapid resource reallocation is unlikely without high investment and sustained growth.
Citing the World Bank, Mkandawire noted Africa’s export collapse in the 1980s and 1990s meant “a staggering annual income loss of US$68 billion—or 21 per cent of regional GDP”!
For Dani Rodrik, Africa’s ‘marginalisation’ was not due to its trade performance, although poor by international standards. Gerald Helleiner has emphasised, “Africa’s failures have been developmental, not export failure per se”.
With its geography and income, Africa probably trades as much as can be expected. Indeed, “Africa overtrades compared with other developing regions in the sense that its trade is higher than would be expected from the various determinants of bilateral trade”!
Vulnerable Africa
The Doha Round of WTO negotiations effectively ended over a decade ago as the backlash in wealthy nations—against globalisation and its consequences—gained momentum.
Meanwhile, trade liberalisation—as part of structural adjustment programmes—deepened SSA deindustrialisation and food insecurity.
With Africa unevenly integrated by economic globalisation, most of the continent exports little to the USA, making it less of a target of Trump’s tariffs.
Nevertheless, trade liberalisation has made developing economies more vulnerable to and unprotected from the recent weaponisation of tariffs and other economic measures.
Last month’s expiration of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) prompted some African leaders to scramble for an extension.
U.S. AGOA imports in 2023 totalled US$10 billion, accounting for high shares of some countries’ exports. Tariff imposition will exacerbate problems due to AGOA’s demise.
Meanwhile, there have been great expectations for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Still, regional trade integration may not be very beneficial, as SSA exports are more competitive than complementary.
[Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. K. Kuhaneetha Bai studied at the University of Malaya and does policy research at Khazanah Research Institute. Courtesy: Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s substack.]
