Wednesday, September 16, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
FINANCE: ‘We’re Still Here’, Africans Remind IMF, World Bank
Emad Mekay
- A group of African finance ministers has appealed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to acknowledge their countries’ sacrifices and not forsake them as the global economic slowdown hits larger and higher- profile nations.
“We are here to let them (the IMF and Bank) know that we are shouldering our share of the burden and that we carried out our reforms,” Gerald Ssendualla, Ugandan finance minister, said as he headed this week’s African team visit to the Washington-based lending institutions. “We are also here to say please do not drop us off your radar screens. This is not the time to drop us.”
The delegates, including finance ministers and senior officials from Burkina Faso, Madagascar and Niger, said they were here to lobby the lenders ahead of their trimmed-down annual meetings in Ottawa starting Nov. 17.
Ministers said they were alarmed by signs the Bank and Fund would cut back on programmes in Africa in order to put out larger economic fires elsewhere. There also have been suggestions the lenders are under mounting pressure to accommodate borrowing- country allies in the U.S.-led “war against terrorism”.
Adding to Africans’ fears of being sidelined, the Bank and IMF have said that the main issues at the Ottawa talks would be global recession and the economic fallout from the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. landmarks. Washington has said it wants participants to focus on its anti-terrorism agenda.
African ministers have never enjoyed particular prominence nor held special sway at the annual meetings of the international lenders’ boards of governors. This year, however, their very presence has been curtailed: the Ottawa talks are being modeled on the agencies’ executive boards, each of which has only 24 members.
This means African and other small shareholders in the institutions will have to share representatives while the United States and other major shareholders will have their own, exclusive, representatives.
Yet, according to the World Bank, September’s attacks and the sluggish world economy will take a costly toll on poor countries, mostly in Africa.
Global slowdown already has derailed the gradual recovery under way in the region since the late 1990s, the Bank said earlier this month. It described Africa’s near-term outlook as “pessimistic”.
“We do not want a new business or partnership,” Ali Badjo Gamatie, Niger’s finance and economy minister said following talks with IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler. “We are saying do not drop Africa out of your attention because we will then lose the success we made over the past few years.”
The ministers urged the Bank and Fund not only to press on with ongoing programmes but also to start work on new loans, lobby Western governments to open their markets to the region’s exports, raise official aid levels, and help promote investment in their impoverished nations.
“We noticed there’s a decline in aid coming to Africa,” Ssendualla said. “All the aid went to Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War. But what about us?”
To make matters worse, he added, rich nations had yet to open their markets to critical hard currency earners like coffee, Uganda’s major export crop.
“So now for you to come and say that I am being lazy,” Ssendualla said, addressing himself to these countries’ governments, “I’ll say open up your market and don’t subsidise your commodities so that ours cannot compete in the market.”
Turning to the balanced-budget hawks among creditor governments and at the Bank and Fund, he added pointedly that they should bear in mind that countries such as his have been robbed by soft commodity prices.
“Last time I presented a budget for my country, coffee prices were 1,100 dollars a ton. Now the prices are 430 dollars a ton. Do you expect me at the end of the day to be able to balance the budget?” Ssendualla asked.
Ministers also complained that despite earlier assurances of support from international financial institutions and their own diligence in keeping up a fast pace of economic liberalisation, their countries have yet to draw a fair share of worldwide investments.
“Our countries are almost fully liberalised,” said Burkina Faso Finance Minister Jean Baptiste Compaore. “In most countries, currencies are competitive. We created a conducive environment for investment and that’s why we came to Washington, to ask to be supported, to see more investment flowing.”
Niger’s Gamatie also pressed the Bank and IMF to improve the terms of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt-relief scheme. His country – ranked last in the U.N. Human Development Index – was told last year it qualified for treatment under the HIPC initiative. Actual relief is contingent on continued compliance with Bank and Fund strictures, however, and Gamatie assailed the additional lag as too long.
“The IMF and the World Bank have been telling us to help ourselves, and that if we get to this or that point, ‘we’ll help you’. Well, there’s nothing wrong with countries that help themselves. But we tell them, ‘OK, once we are there we want you to deliver’,” Gamatie said. “We want you to help us cross the bottlenecks. With no water supply, no infrastructure, we’ll not be able to cross those bottlenecks.”
Gamatie proposed that debt relief be accompanied by aid and concessional loans so that the countries would not have to get further into debt simply to qualify for some relief.
“We know what we want and where we want to go, but we’ll get there quicker with the help of the donor community,” he said. “Now, it’s like your house is on fire, and you are calling for the fire- fighters to come extinguish the fire.”
Print
|
FINANCE: ‘We’re Still Here’, Africans Remind IMF, World Bank
Emad Mekay
- A group of African finance ministers has appealed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to acknowledge their countries’ sacrifices and not forsake them as the global economic slowdown hits larger and higher- profile nations.
(more…)
Print
|
