Visiting the Zambian capital, Lusaka, on January 23, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva may have walked past the new airport terminal and shopping mall. of brand new conferences: two emblematic infrastructures of the projects launched in all directions under the previous presidency (2015-2021), and which led this southern African country to over-indebtedness. Submerged, Zambia defaulted on its external debt (17 billion dollars, or 15.6 billion euros, in total) in November 2020.
Even before his trip, Mme Yellen, who came to push the restructuring discussions, set the tone. “Many African countries are now plagued by unsustainable debt, which is accumulating, she pointed out. It is an undeniable problem. » After Zambia, Ghana has just become, in December 2022, the second African state to default since the start of the Covid-19 era in 2020. A crushing blow for this country, whose president, Nana Akufo-Addo , promised to put an end to international aid.
Ghana had enjoyed solid growth in recent years and had managed, even during the pandemic, to borrow on international markets. A very different case from that of Zambia, whose over-indebtedness was known from 2018, underlines Razia Khan, chief economist for Africa of the Standard Chartered bank. « The situation in Ghana is much more a matter of political errors”, specifies the Botswanan economist, citing in particular the management of the money supply and expenditure linked to Covid-19.
Slowdown in world trade
South of the Sahara Desert, only two states have so far defaulted. But many others have seen their financial ratings deteriorate, including some heavyweights such as Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya. In October, the IMF’s Africa director, Abebe Aemro Selassie, also noted that nineteen of the region’s thirty-five low-income countries are now over-indebted or at risk of being so.
He also pointed out that the public debt reached nearly 60% of gross domestic product on a sub-Saharan scale, a level comparable to that of the early 2000s, when certain countries drowned in borrowings had obtained cancellation. “For governments, this is the most difficult political context in years,” Mr. Selassie wondered.
The continent’s economies, some of which have taken on heavy debt to develop their infrastructure, have been hit hard by the pandemic and then the war in Ukraine, which occurred on February 24, 2022. First, the slowdown in world trade has affected their exports , especially raw materials, a crucial source of inflow of dollars.
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