Tag: IMF
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As Angola Gets Debt Relief From Its Creditors, Kenya Hopes For the Same From China
Yesterday marked the first major development we've seen on the debt story in Africa in quite some time. The fact that Angola was the beneficiary was significant, given its outsized position in China's loan portfolio on the continent. Angola alone makes ...
Angola Gets Some Badly-Needed “Breathing Space” From China on Debt Repayments
Chinese creditors have reportedly agreed to grant Angola a three-year debt repayment moratorium, according to the West African country's finance minister Vera Daves de Sousa. Angola is by far China's largest borrower in Africa with an estimated $20 billion of outstanding loans from the ...
Kenya’s President Doesn’t Want to Hear Any Lectures From U.S., EU-Led Donors As Country Restructures Its Debt
President Uhuru Kenyatta warned international development agencies, and the U.S. and Europe on Friday against using Kenya's current debt crisis as a pretext to lecture the country and interfere in its affairs. "Please, I ask you to refrain from interfering, telling ...
How Long Can African Leaders Keep Repeating Themselves on Debt?
This week saw yet another African leader (this time my own president, Cyril Ramaphosa,) calling for international measures to soften the current debt crisis confronting poor countries in Africa and beyond. None of these measures are outrageous. Considering that seven out of the top 10 fastest-growing economies ...
Forget About Repayment Holidays, Kenya Wants Its Creditors (Ahem… China) To Cancel Some of Its Debts
The Kenyan Treasury is reportedly considering a new plan to approach its creditors to ask for outright cancellation of some of its debt, according to a report in Business Daily. Although a final decision has yet to be made, the Treasury is apparently considering ...
Kenya’s Spiraling Debt Crisis Worsens as the Cost of Chinese Loans Mount, Currency Weakens and Exports Soften
Kenya is rapidly becoming the next flashpoint in the Africa debt crisis amid a dramatic increase in borrowing that threatens to submerge the economy. The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) warned on Friday that the country's ballooning debt is ...
Kenyan Newspaper Pleads With Government to Stop Borrowing Money
The influential financial newspaper Business Daily published a sharply-worded editorial on Wednesday that blasted the government for taking on more debt amid the country's worsening economic crisis. "The implications of the rapid accumulation of debt are stark. The rising repayments are ...
G20 Agrees to Give Poorest Nations Just the Bare Minimum for Debt Relief
Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 wealthy nations agreed to a bare-bones debt relief package on Wednesday that will extend the G20's Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) by six months until June 2021. The group ...
G20 Finance Ministers Expected to Approve Multi-Billion Dollar Debt Freeze Extension For the World’s Poorest Countries
Finance ministers and central bankers from China, the United States, and other G20 countries are expected to release a communiqué on Wednesday, according to Reuters, which will extend the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) beyond the end of this year. It's not clear, though, ...
The Collectivity Question
Is unrelenting grimness more palatable if it is also instructive? Africa's current debt crisis will soon provide an answer. The continent's slide into debt distress due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been very revealing of Africa's position in the world. Despite ...
Ghana’s Finance Minister: “Africa Is Not Asking for Charity. It Is Asking for Equity.”
Ghana's Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta issued an urgent call for action on African debt relief in a column published in the Financial Times on Monday that also included stinging rebukes of the United States, China, and the financial services industry for their perceived failures.
African Debt: At Some Point, the Hole Becomes Just Too Big to Fill
The rapidly deteriorating financial crisis in Lebanon provides a grim preview to other developing countries of what happens when the bottom falls out of an economy. After the government defaulted on its debt last spring, conditions spiraled downwards to the point where