Author: Honour Itepu

The Money Problem Comes Before The Money Senegal’s infrastructure financing problem is no longer simply about finding money. It is about deciding which risk should be carried by the state, which should be carried by private investors, and at what point a project becomes safe enough for the two to meet. That is where the Strategic Investment Fund of Senegal, FONSIS, is becoming more interesting. Created in 2012 and operational since 2014, FONSIS was not designed merely to park surplus state cash. Its mandate is to invest in strategic projects alongside private-sector partners, manage strategic state assets and use public…

For Mali, financial sovereignty is becoming less a slogan than a question of plumbing: who holds the money, who decides where it goes, and who can still interrupt the flow? That is the logic behind the Alliance of Sahel States’ (AES) push to build its own financial institutions after Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger broke with ECOWAS. The most consequential piece is no longer the political declaration. It is the attempt to create a regional balance sheet that can collect public resources and recycle them into roads, power, irrigation, industry and security-linked infrastructure. The centrepiece is the Banque Confédérale pour…

In Libreville, the most consequential financing decision of Gabon’s post-transition period is not sitting in an IMF programme document. It is spread across a revised budget, a $1 billion oil prepayment from commodity trader Trafigura, a planned international borrowing programme of up to $1.5 billion, and an audit designed to answer a more basic question: how much does the Gabonese state actually owe? That combination makes Gabon’s 2026 financing strategy less a clean break with the IMF than a parallel bet on market access. The government formally requested an IMF programme in March, after months of fiscal pressure and concerns…

Equatorial Guinea built its infrastructure boom on an assumption that looked safe while oil money was flowing: the state would commission the roads, public buildings and other projects; contractors would borrow to build them; and government payments would eventually close the loop. When the oil cycle turned and public payments slowed, that loop broke. The contractors were left owing banks, and the banks were left holding loans whose repayment depended on a government that had not paid its own bills. That is the part of Equatorial Guinea’s debt story that matters to capital. The problem was not confined to the…