By James Woods*
On February 10, 2026, Abdoulaye Ba, a second-year dental surgery student at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, died during protests over unpaid financial aid. The Senegalese government had cut student bursaries by 11 percent in its 2026 budget, and students were receiving less than half of what they were owed. The campus closed. Reuters confirmed his death. The Washington Post reported it. The government said circumstances remained under investigation.
Ba did not die because Senegal is poor. He died because Senegal’s previous government borrowed $13 billion it did not declare, pushed the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio from a reported 74 percent to 132 percent overnight, triggered an IMF programme suspension, and left a generation of young Senegalese paying for liabilities they never knew existed and never benefited from. His name is worth knowing. He is what the debt numbers actually cost.
This year, African economies face external debt service obligations approaching $96 billion, a figure S&P Global Ratings confirmed in February represents repayments now more than three times larger than they were in 2012. Africa’s gross government debt has tripled since 2008. The average share of government expenditure devoted to interest payments doubled between 2012 and 2023, reaching 12.7 percent. Twenty-eight African countries spend more on debt service than on health. Ten spend more on debt than on education. The African Union Commission has confirmed that 57 percent of Africa’s population lives in countries where debt servicing costs exceed essential social spending. These are not projections. They are the documented present.
The question nobody in the architecture of international debt is asking is the one that matters most. What did the borrowing build.
Debt sustainability analysis, the framework that governs every IMF programme, every World Bank engagement, every sovereign rating assessment applied to African countries, asks a single question: can the sovereign repay. It measures liabilities. It stress-tests repayment capacity. It models rollover risk. What it does not do, what no widely used framework does, is track what the borrowed capital actually produced. Whether it financed a hospital or a presidential fleet. Whether it built a road that opened a market or a conference centre that hosted a summit. Whether the investment raised output, employment and tax revenue, or whether it serviced a patronage network and left a debt behind. The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum noted in March 2026 that there is no asset sustainability analysis to complement the liability toolkit. Growth appears in debt sustainability models as an assumption. Deployment quality does not appear as a variable at all. This is not an oversight. It is a structural design choice that serves creditors rather than citizens.
Senegal is the most extreme current case but not an isolated one. What Macky Sall’s government did, concealing $13.3 billion in liabilities from its own population and from the international institutions nominally overseeing its fiscal management, is ten times the scale of Mozambique’s Tuna Bonds scandal, which defined African governance conversations for years. The incoming government of President Faye discovered the liability, published the audit, and inherited the consequences. Debt service running at $9.7 billion this year. Teachers on strike. Construction losing more than 17,000 formal sector jobs since the government paused projects for review. A student dead on a university campus over unpaid stipends. The IMF suspended its programme. Talks to restore it remain sluggish. And Senegal must service its debts regardless, because the creditors who lent to the previous government are not responsible for what that government reported to them.
The structural pattern that produced this outcome runs continent-wide. Nine African countries are formally in debt distress, including Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Twenty-one low-income African countries are either in distress or at high risk, confirmed by the World Bank. Public debt across sub-Saharan Africa doubled as a share of GDP between 2012 and 2022, from 28.8 percent to 59.1 percent. None of this was accidental. It was the cumulative consequence of governments borrowing at each crisis moment for whatever was politically necessary, with no institutional requirement to account for what was built.
The cost of this borrowing is itself a structural injustice. African nations pay interest rates exceeding 10 percent on sovereign debt, while G7 governments borrow at 2 to 3 percent. That gap is routinely attributed to risk. Moody’s data shows that Africa’s infrastructure default rate is 5.5 percent, against 8.5 percent in Asia and 13 percent in Latin America. Africa is not riskier. It is perceived as riskier, priced as riskier, and charged accordingly by rating methodologies designed for market structures that bear no resemblance to African economic realities. The African Development Bank has called this the Africa premium, the unjustified surcharge Africa pays to access capital, costing the continent billions every year in unnecessary debt service before a single school is built or a single clinic is staffed.
Three things need to change.
Every new African government must publish a comprehensive public debt audit within 90 days of taking office. Not an inherited narrative. A full liability disclosure, covering hidden, contingent and off-balance-sheet obligations, published before the first budget is set. Senegal’s new government did this under duress. It should be a constitutional requirement, not a crisis response.
Debt sustainability analysis, as applied to African sovereigns, must be supplemented by an asset sustainability framework that measures what public borrowing actually produces. The IMF and World Bank have the institutional capacity to build this. What has been missing is the political will to make deployment quality a condition of programme eligibility rather than an afterthought in the programme review.
The African Credit Rating Agency, announced and underfunded, must be made operational, credible, and institutionally independent within two years. The case that African sovereign risk is systematically mispriced is not contested by serious analysts. An institutional alternative to the existing ratings duopoly is the only mechanism through which that mispricing gets corrected at scale.
Abdoulaye Ba did not die in a natural disaster. He did not die in a war. He died in a debt crisis his government inherited from a predecessor that borrowed without accountability, in a system that never asked what the money built, in a continent where hundreds of millions of people live under governments spending more on interest than on the services those people actually need.
His name is in this piece because the numbers are not enough. The numbers have been available for years. They have not been sufficient to change the architecture. Perhaps a name will do what the numbers have not.
*James Woods is a geopolitical intelligence and strategic communications professional. He served as a Senior Diplomat at the Mission of Malawi to the European Union and is a former senior staffer at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. He holds an Executive MBA from the University of Oxford and a Master’s from the London School of Economics. He is a
