Felix Atchadé : "Pr Amath Ndiaye, la « neutralité » que vous invoquez est un choix idéologique"
It has become almost commonplace in certain academic and technocratic circles to invoke "economic discipline" as one would invoke a law of gravitation: indisputable, universal, apolitical. Professor Amath Ndiaye fully subscribes to this tradition when he calls for "moving beyond the ideological debate" to rediscover budgetary rigor in the face of the Senegalese debt crisis. But this stance, which purports to be reasonable, is in reality based on an intellectual fiction: that of an economy free from power relations, of a debt without history, of an IMF without memory.
Because claiming to break free from ideology often means adopting the dominant ideology without naming it.
Debt is not an equation, it's a relationship
Yes, the figures are alarming. Yes, the interest burden is stifling the budget. But reducing the debt issue to a problem of "discipline" is to confuse the thermometer with the fever. Senegal's debt is embedded in an asymmetrical international financial architecture, where African states borrow at high prices, in hard currency, on markets they do not control.
In this configuration, the required "discipline" resembles less a virtue than a permanent penance. African states are asked to be frugal in a world that has taught them dependence; to be virtuous in a system that rewards rent-seeking; to be responsible without being given the levers of monetary, fiscal, and industrial sovereignty.
It's not ideology to say that. It's history.
The IMF is not an arbiter, it is a player
The discourse that presents the IMF as a mere technical tool is a convenient reductionist approach. The IMF is not a macroeconomic stability software; it is a political institution, born at Bretton Woods, shaped by specific power dynamics, and driven by an identifiable economic doctrine: priority to balanced budgets, compression of public spending, and the primacy of market confidence over social needs.
Africa experienced this painfully in the 1980s and 1990s. Structural adjustment programs dismantled states, weakened health and education systems, and entrenched a dependency economy. To pretend to ignore this collective memory in the name of a "non-ideological" debate is to ask people to forget what they paid for with their lives.
Discipline without sovereignty is austerity without a horizon
The crucial question, therefore, is not whether public finances should be managed responsibly—no emancipatory project can be exempt from this—but rather in whose service and for whom is this discipline exercised. A discipline imposed from the outside, validated by institutions whose guiding principle is solvency over dignity, inevitably produces social austerity: less public investment, fewer public services, and greater insecurity.
However, a country does not recover by weakening its population. It recovers by investing in its productive capacity, its healthcare, its education system, and its industry. True discipline is not about accounting; it is strategic. It consists of undertaking a structural transformation of the economy.
Sovereignty does not lie in restructuring; it lies in breaking with the debt cycle.
Where technocratic discourse fosters ambiguity, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko's position has the merit of clarity: debt restructuring is not a solution, it is a prolongation of the problem. For restructuring is not about breaking the cycle; it is about rearranging the dependency, shifting deadlines, renegotiating the terms, all while accepting the framework that produced the financial strangulation.
Yet global economic history consistently shows that countries that have truly regained control of their trajectory have not done so by multiplying technical adjustments, but by changing their logic.
This is the trap that the Economic and Social Recovery Plan (PRES) wants to avoid: refusing restructuring not for ideological reasons, but for strategic reasons — removing debt from the heart of public action, breaking with market blackmail and finally rebuilding the country's fiscal, productive, industrial and social capacities.
Making restructuring the horizon of budgetary responsibility means submitting the political agenda to creditors and calling neutrality what is merely a financial ideology opposed to sovereignty and social justice.
Felix Atchadé
Commentaires (8)
Tellement évident et c'est le seul message que nos autorités doivent faire comprendre aux sénégalais et les inviter à se dresser contre tous ces faux économistes de pacotille qui n'ont que le mot restructuration de la dette dans leur gueule et bien sûr contre le satan FMI qui veut nous étouffer !
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