A Sankarian Perspective on the IMF Loans to South Africa – ‘Debt as a Cleverly Organised Reconquest of Africa’

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic that continues to ravish the world economies and snatch lives of millions of people across the world has without a doubt exacerbated the already fragile over-indebtedness of many countries globally, more especially in Africa. South Africa was used as a case study to better understand the International Financial Institutions and debtor countries nexus through the prisms of Sankarian Thought and philosophy concerning debt and loans. This was because South Africa had not borrowed money from the twin IFIs, IMF and the World Bank, for many years until recently when the pandemic struck the world. It is useful to understand why the multilateral financial institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and others had to be the last resort in the fight against this pandemic by the South African government. The role of these two main predators that have since flag independence of Africa been the engineers and custodians of debt neo-enslavement of African countries is the common thread in this article. As Sankara argued and was eventually assassinated for, in part, lobbying African States to form a united front in repudiating illegitimate debt, the solution to the African development challenge does not lie in acquiring more aid and loans. It lies in harnessing their own resources and optimally using them to uplift the lives of their people ethically, and that is the only way Africa would eventually be able to call its soul its own. Amongst others, the paper found that a strong case can be made by many African countries for repudiation of odious debt, however, the same cannot be argued for South Africa.