Last June the International Monetary Fund approved $1.8 billion in loans to Senegal to stave off a debt crisis. Funds were conditioned among other measures on the government’s promise to strengthen the fight against corruption, a condition the government accepted wholeheartedly and without reservation. Indeed, IMF Deputy Director Kenji Okamura assured the IMF board before voting the loan that the Senegalese government was serious about anticorruption reform, that it recognized it was “critical to the restoration of growth and fiscal stability” (here).

The government’s promises and Okamura’s assurances are now in doubt. Forum Civil, the Senegal chapter of Transparency International, reported in late October that the government has done virtually nothing to keep its promises.  

The Fund is not helpless in the face of the government’s broken promises. The loan funds are being disbursed in tranches; each tranche requires board approval and a meeting to okay the first tranche set for December. Moreover, four of the anticorruption reforms – enforcing the asset declaration system, strengthening the anticorruption agency and the prosecution, and tightening the civil service ethics code — are “structural benchmarks. That is, IMF procedures require the Board to assay progress on each before okaying a tranche.

In its October report, reprinted below, the Forum Civil documents the government’s failure to live up to its promises, lays out immediate steps it should take to demonstrate it intends to keep them, and urges the IMF, for the sake of the citizens of Senegal and their future, to hold the government to its commitments

Forum Civil statement on the 166 billion FCFA from the IMF and the opacity of governance in Senegal.

On June 27, 2023, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued a Communiqué stating that “the IMF Executive Board has approved an Extended Credit Facility (ECF) in the amount of $1.51 billion, and a Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF) in the amount of $324 million with Senegal”. This facility has just been granted to the State of Senegal by the IMF.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had also informed that “Senegalese authorities are also committed to strengthening governance, transparency and anti-corruption frameworks”, in addition to noting that “urgent action is also needed to address the shortcomings of the AML/CFT framework in order to avoid potential negative macroeconomic and reputational repercussions and to move out of the FATF grey list”.

To date, Senegal has been slow in implementing serious, structural reforms to combat money laundering, promote transparency in the management of public affairs, and prevent and combat corruption. On the contrary, we are witnessing the persistence of poor governance and a chronic lack of accountability on the part of control and/or regulatory bodies.

Is the IMF turning a blind eye to the State’s commitments? Is the IMF complicit in Senegal’s propensity for bad governance, at a time when young people, a strategic resource, are increasingly disappearing at sea or in the desert on irregular emigration routes?

In the face of what could be seen as complicity on the part of the IMF, the Forum Civil recalls that access to information, an essential pillar in the prevention of corruption, is a huge problem in Senegal. The Senegalese authorities are refusing to allow transparency in the reform of the law on access to information. This situation could lead to Senegal’s withdrawal from the PGO initiative.

The draft texts on the declaration of assets and the draft texts on the reform of the National Anti-Fraud and Corruption Office (OFNAC) which have long been on the Government’s table, have not fared any better, with the State refusing to adopt them.

In addition to neutralizing control bodies, the State of Senegal refuses to promote transparency and the fight against corruption.

In terms of accountability, Senegal is a poor performer, as demonstrated by the lack of published reports from the Cour des Comptes (CC), the Inspection Général d’Etat (IGE), the Pulic Procurement Regulation Authority (ARCOP), the Public Procurement Central Directirate (DCMP), which no longer publishes statistics on public procurement on the www. marchéspublics.sn platform*.

Opacity is even more pronounced at the National Assembly, where the Accounting and Control Committee still refuses to publish reports on the use of resources allocated to parliament. Several judicial bodies that receive public funds never publish reports on the use of allocated resources. The list goes on. Accountability remains at half-mast in Senegal.

When it comes to resource mobilization, the Ministry of Finance is quick to communicate generalities but refuses to pursue a real policy of transparency and accountability, as evidenced in particular by:

• the absence of published accountability reports on resource mobilization, leading to restricted access to tax information (data on the number of registered taxpayers, tax authority staff, the number and nature of tax audits, the financial results of audits, the resources made available to tax authorities, etc.);
• the absence of a coherent policy to combat illicit financial flows;
• delays in the publication of the report on the evaluation of tax expenditure;
• the absence of an elaborate policy for rationalizing tax expenditure;
• the recurrence of direct recruitment, and the lack of transparency in the definition of career plans for managing the vertical mobility of Ministry of Finance staff, particularly in the Directorate General of Taxes and Domains (DGID) and the Directorate General of the Treasury and Public Accounting (DGCPT);
• the signing of financing agreements that encourage uncontrolled growth in public debt.

In light of these findings, Forum Civil, the Senegalese section of Transparency International, calls on :

• the IMF to clarify the conditions and indicators that led to the consent to the 166 billion FCFA facility, while the State’s commitments have not been respected to date;
• the President of the Republic to make operational the reforms on transparency and the fight against corruption, in particular with regard to the declaration of assets and the reform of the texts on the organization and functioning of OFNAC;
• the Minister of Finance to initiate structural reforms for optimal and transparent resource mobilization, in particular the accountability report, rather than simply communicating generalities;
• the Central Directorate for Public Procurement to publish statistics on public procurement;
• the Minister of Justice to give Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) access to the latest drafts of texts on access to information;
• MPs to use their constitutional and legislative powers to get the government to adopt the draft texts on access to information before Senegal is ejected from the Open Government Partnership (OGP) initiative.     

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Dakar, October 25, 2023.

Contact:
Birahime SECK,
General Coordinator of the Forum Civil

*We carried out a final check on Wednesday, October 25, 2023. For 2023, no statistics have been published in the ‘Statistics’ tab. For 2022, only first-quarter data is published. In short, the State, with the help of the DCMP, is hiding the public procurement data for the last three quarters of 2022 and the data for the first three quarters of 2023.