Somebody in Senegal concealed billions of dollars in public debt for years; an International Monetary Fund (IMF) investigation found the underreporting was deliberate, and two years later the country is taking another $2.2 billion loan without anyone being publicly held responsible.
Development Diaries reports that the IMF and Senegal reached a staff-level agreement on the first day of September 2026 for the $2.2 billion, three-year loan to support economic and financial reforms through 2029, after the financial institution suspended a $1.8 billion programme in 2023 following the discovery of previously unreported debt.
Senegal’s Ministry of Economy and Finance said the new arrangement includes an enhanced framework for restoring debt sustainability and requires the country to seek creditors’ relief, while the IMF said the programme includes debt treatment and is subject to Executive Board approval.
The country’s fiscal deficit narrowed from 13.4 percent of GDP in 2024 to 6.4 percent in 2025, largely through spending rationalisation, but Senegal has not published which budget lines absorbed the cuts.
The West African country cut spending sharply in 2025 even as growth is expected to slow to around 2.2 percent in 2026, while the finance minister has warned that the fuel subsidy bill could exceed its budget allocation by as much as two billion dollars.
Senegal is also relying heavily on regional bond markets, where borrowing costs are higher than loans from international financial institutions or governments.
So while spending is being squeezed, debt servicing continues to take its share of the budget.
The concealed debt has an even more basic problem, as an IMF delegation led by Edward Gemayel visited the country in March 2025 and corroborated government audits that found a deliberate decision to underreport debt over several years.
Total public-sector debt was estimated at 132 percent of GDP at the end of 2024. Two audits reached the same conclusion about deliberate concealment, but no prosecution has followed.
There is no publicly completed process identifying who authorised or carried out the concealment, no full publication of the Cour des Comptes report and no parliamentary commission of inquiry with a reporting deadline.
A country can discover that billions were hidden and still leave the people who hid them outside the public record. That makes it difficult to know whether new financial controls have changed the incentives that allowed the concealment in the first place.
The political arrangement around the new programme adds another layer with respect to President Bassirou Faye’s dismissal of Ousmane Sonko as prime minister in May and Sonko’s subsequent appointment as president of the National Assembly.
Sonko has since said policymakers must respond pragmatically and that the National Assembly is not there to obstruct. But no public agreement between the executive and legislature on implementing the IMF reforms has been published.
The adjustment will be felt most sharply in places already furthest from Dakar, with rural health posts in Tambacounda, Kolda and Matam unable to absorb spending pressure through medicine shortages, staffing gaps, and reduced outreach, while poor roads make access to health facilities harder.
Female-headed households have less room to absorb higher transport and food costs when fuel subsidies are reformed. School feeding, cash transfers and scholarships are also vulnerable when budgets are squeezed, even though losing one of these supports can determine whether a child stays in school.
Young people face the consequences of slower growth in an economy struggling to absorb a young labour force, and GDP growth means little to a young person if it does not translate into work.
Article 36(1) of Senegal’s constitution directs the state to manage the economy to maximise the welfare of every person and provide adequate means of livelihood, while Article 36(2)(d) requires balanced development of every region.
Senegal has also ratified the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption, creating obligations around public resources, social rights, accountability and access to information.
The Cour des Comptes report could show how the debt was concealed and which offices were responsible. Its full publication would give citizens something more useful than another round of political statements.
Senegalese public finance organisations should demand the full IMF programme conditionality document and map its requirements against health, education and social protection spending. Civil society organisations should request the full Cour des Comptes report and publish any refusal.
Community organisations in Tambacounda, Kolda and Matam can also document health-post stockouts and staffing gaps, while women’s organisations can seek the timetable for fuel subsidy reform and the social transfers intended to cushion households.
Parliament, for its part, should establish a commission of inquiry into the concealed debt, with a reporting deadline before the first review of the IMF programme, while the Cour des Comptes should publish its audit in full.
As for the Ministry of Economy and Finance, it should publish the composition of the 2025 spending cuts and a social impact assessment of the 2026 to 2029 programme.
The public deserves to know where the adjustment is landing, who authorised the concealed borrowing and what safeguards will prevent it from happening again.
