When will the International Monetary Fund (IMF) learn to think? Over its eighty-one year history, the IMF has published over fifteen thousand reports. Yet, if you download any one of the reports from its website, it is likely that you will know what is being said before you have even read it. The reports are so generic that you do not even need to ask ChatGPT to create a template: each document is a template for the next. They are that regurgitative.
On 8 July 2025, the IMF published a brief blog post called ‘How to Stabilise Africa’s Debt’. The blog is only three pages long (one page shorter than the report upon which it is based). But even in its brevity, it repeats axioms the IMF developed as far back as the founding of its African Department on 10 April 1961. Despite caveats claiming the evaluation in the report is based on ‘new data’, the report is essentially bad old wine in new bottles. Its axioms are as follows:
1. All fifty-four countries on the African continent can stabilise their debt by following the same recipe. There is no need to disaggregate the countries, despite the big data sets, and look at the differences between these countries to get a handle on the various factors that go into their development pathways. One Toyota Land Cruiser fits all African roads.
2. There is no reason for wealthy bondholders and other creditors to accept debt restructuring. ‘Contrary to perception’, they argue, ‘countries in the region have often been able to stabilise or reduce their debt without debt restructuring’. Therefore, there is no reason to make the case for debt forgiveness (jubilee), rescheduling, or conversions (prepayments or buybacks). What is owed must be paid.
3. Budget consolidation, or austerity by the State, is far better for debt reduction or stabilisation than increased economic growth, although having both processes at play is ideal.
4. Debt stabilisation is ‘more likely when an IMF-supported arrangement is present’, in other words, if the IMF imposes the austerity-debt cycle, debt rates can be stabilised.
5. Finally, debt stabilisation is the goal for the African states, and not development. They need to stabilise, not even erase, their debt.
These five axioms are presented as fact when they are fiction. For example, careful scholars of African development, from Samir Amin to Thandika Mkandawire, have cautioned against the type of broad generalisations the IMF is fond of doing. Second, the claim that achieving ‘debt stabilisation’ without restructuring is possible is based on the flawed argument that African countries can grow themselves out of debt – a near-impossibility given the voluminous literature on debt overhang (i.e., the obvious negative effects of debt on growth).
The third axiom, which prioritises austerity over growth, fails in the face of logic and empirical evidence. Growth, by definition, requires the opposite of austerity (i.e., expansionary fiscal policy) with empirical evidence showing that austerity has led to growth tragedies in Africa. This says nothing of the significant human toll that decades of IMF-inspired austerity has inflicted on the people of Africa and the global South more generally.
With regards to the fourth axiom, and as we demonstrate in a recent report from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘IMF-supported arrangements’ are the source of Africa’s permanent debt crisis. For instance, a recent study on Zambia shows that IMF conditionality from two decades ago sowed the seeds that led to Zambia’s current debt crisis. In other words, ‘the IMF does not fight financial fires but douses them with gasoline’.
The fifth and final axiom runs counter to decades of development planning in Africa and decades of development scholarship that clearly show the quest for development continues to be a primary preoccupation of African states.
The fact that the IMF blog gets so much wrong is unsurprising given its authors. The blog is written by three IMF staff economists, each of them trained in the West with no substantial experience on the African continent: Athene Laws (from New Zealand, PhD at Cambridge), Thibault Lemaire (from France, PhD at the Sorbonne), and Nikola Spatafora (Italian, PhD from Yale). Both Lemaire and Spatafora work in the IMF’s African Department located in Washington, DC. A voluminous literature now shows that the lack of rootedness in local contexts explains the dismal nature of Western social science about Africa. Unfortunately, the authors of the IMF blog yet again demonstrate the pitfalls of writing from afar.
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The problem is not only the IMF window for short-term credit, which of course comes with conditionalities; it is also with the IMF worldview, which suggests that nothing can be done about the debt except to pursue a futile growth strategy in the context of deep debt. IMF theory is limited to austerity and permanent debt– nothing more. But there is another theory, a few of whose points need to be seriously debated:1. We need to discuss the importance of debt cancellation, namely the punishing of wealthy bond holders who decide to invest but refuse to bear the outcome of a downside risk.
2. A serious conversation requires discussing sovereignty over raw materials and the proper regulation of multinational corporations.
3. Room must be made to discuss financial integration, the use of regional or local currencies to reconcile trade imbalances, and the need to build regional platforms for both trade and development finance.
4. We need to build sovereign development banks, anchored in the raw material riches of the continent, which are owned by public regional institutions rather than controlled by the US Treasury Department.
5. Building industrial capacity and high-quality infrastructure must be a priority for the African continent.These are a few rational and tangible points for a new development theory that seeks the genuine advancement of people’s well-being and not merely debt stabilisation. This is something that the IMF theory does not recognise, but it is what a development theory for Africa must put at its centre.
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This article was produced by Globetrotter. Grieve Chelwa is the Chair of the Department of Social Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Economy at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University. He is a member of the Papal Commission on the Debt and Development Crisis in the Global South, convened by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican. He was also recognised by The Africa Report as one of the ‘10 African Scholars to Watch in 2025’. He is a Senior Fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books
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