Senegal Tries to Break Free—But the IMF Still Has the Keys

Part I – Budget Discipline in Chains: When Sovereignty Is Rewritten by the Creditors

By Weaponized Information | June 3, 2025

They say Senegal is cutting ties with the IMF. That it’s going its own way now—raising taxes at home instead of borrowing abroad. Sounds good, right? Sounds like sovereignty. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find the same script—just with new actors, a new accent, and a new PR team.

Reuters is the one writing the headline. That’s the first red flag. This is no grassroots media outlet. It’s a global pipeline of financial propaganda—owned by Thomson Reuters, plugged into Western finance, law, and intelligence. When they report on Africa, they’re not documenting struggle. They’re massaging markets. They’re not informing the people. They’re briefing investors.

The article gives us Senegal’s new Prime Minister, Ousmane Sonko—once a fierce critic of imperial control—speaking to his countrymen about the importance of “budgetary discipline.” And let’s be clear: Sonko speaks from a place of real legitimacy. He didn’t rise through the colonial backdoor. His base is the street, not the stock exchange. But the words quoted here—“everyone must pay their fair share,” “we can stand on our own”—are being reframed, packaged, and sold back to the world by the same institutions that looted Senegal in the first place. And the packaging matters.

There’s no mention in this article of the mining concessions handed to foreign companies, or the fact that Woodside Energy—an Australian fossil fuel giant—is suing Senegal for taxing them. No mention of the CFA franc, which still ties Senegal’s economy to France’s treasury like a colonial leash. No mention of how “tax compliance” often means squeezing market vendors, farmers, and informal workers—while the real money flies out through foreign banks and shell contracts.

Instead, what do we get? We get J.P. Morgan’s bond index, telling us Senegal is the worst-performing borrower in Africa. We get nods to the IMF’s suspended loan program, as if it were a life raft rather than a shackle. We get praise for new debt issuances in the regional bond market—as if borrowing from private investors with higher interest rates is some kind of emancipation. This isn’t reporting. This is ideological counterinsurgency.

Make no mistake: Sonko may want to move in a different direction. But Reuters is here to steer him back. To flatten contradictions. To tell the world: don’t worry, the fundamentals are still intact. The mines are still open. The bond market is still active. The budget is still under surveillance. The house may look different—but the landlord still holds the keys.

And so, the danger is this: that a real push for sovereignty gets turned into a spreadsheet exercise. That the popular will behind Sonko’s rise gets absorbed into the very logic it was meant to overthrow. Because fiscal discipline without structural change is just colonialism in a necktie. If you tax the poor to pay the creditors, you’re not breaking the chain—you’re reinforcing it.

But the story isn’t over. The people of Senegal have shown again and again that they know what time it is. This isn’t about Sonko alone. It’s about the social forces behind him—and whether they’ll settle for financial tweaks or demand a full rupture. Real sovereignty isn’t just about tax policy. It’s about power. And power never yields itself politely.

Part II – Beneath the Numbers: What the Article Tells Us—and What It Doesn’t

Let’s strip the headlines down to what they actually say. Prime Minister Sonko says Senegal will rely less on IMF loans and more on local tax revenue. A $1.8 billion IMF deal is on hold due to misreported debt figures under the last regime. Senegal hasn’t received a single IMF dollar in over a year. The government says it won’t raise taxes, but it will enforce compliance—meaning everyone’s supposed to pay. And meanwhile, Senegal’s bonds are underperforming. Investors are jittery. Woodside Energy is filing arbitration to challenge a tax bill. And the government is betting big on a “Regional Mining Hub” to boost its future growth.

That’s what the article tells you. But here’s what it doesn’t.

It doesn’t mention that the International Monetary Fund—this seemingly benevolent financial institution—isn’t some neutral helper. It’s an enforcer for hyper-imperialism, whose job is to trap Global South nations in cycles of debt, surveillance, and dependency. Every “reform” it pushes is about cutting public spending, weakening labor protections, privatizing resources, and making sure creditors get paid before teachers do. From Ghana to Tunisia, Zambia to Sri Lanka, the script is the same. Senegal was never an exception. It was just the next entry on the spreadsheet.

And while Sonko may have inherited that spreadsheet, the question is: does he tear it up—or balance it on the backs of the people?

What Reuters also forgets to mention is the real structure of Senegal’s economy. The CFA franc still pegs the country’s currency to the euro, its monetary policy set in Paris. Resource contracts are still signed with multinational firms who take the profits and leave behind polluted rivers and empty treasuries. Agriculture remains oriented toward exports—peanuts, fish, gold—not food sovereignty. And despite all the talk of regional solutions, most bondholders are still foreign. The terms may shift, but the grip doesn’t loosen.

Look closer at this new “self-reliant” model. Raise more taxes—but don’t raise them on the rich. Issue bonds—but don’t challenge who owns them. Promote mining—but leave the profits in foreign vaults. This isn’t economic independence. This is neocolonial extraction 2.0.

And all of this is happening in a wider geopolitical storm. Across the Sahel, countries are rising. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have kicked out French troops, rejected IMF recipes, and are forging new alliances rooted in sovereignty. Even within Senegal, the youth that carried Sonko to power were demanding more than fiscal tweaks. They want an end to imperialist plunder. They want control over land, minerals, and policy. That contradiction is now front and center: will Senegal rise with the region—or remain managed by spreadsheets and legal contracts drawn up in Washington and Sydney?

What’s at stake is not just who collects taxes. It’s who the economy is built to serve. The numbers don’t lie—but they don’t tell the whole truth either. That’s our job.

Part III – Reframing the Story: From Tax Reform to Revolutionary Sovereignty

Let’s step back and look at the bigger picture—not the one drawn by bond ratings or IMF press releases, but the one seen from the vantage point of the African working class, the landless peasantry, and the youth who have been resisting neocolonialism since before independence was even declared.

What Sonko said—about Senegal standing on its own two feet, about not being held by the hand—resonates for a reason. There’s a real hunger for sovereignty in Senegal. And that hunger didn’t come from think tanks or finance ministries—it came from the street, from the communities that fought for Sonko’s rise, from the long legacy of anti-colonial resistance that lives on in the blood memory of the people.

But the problem isn’t rhetoric. The problem is structure. You can’t build sovereignty inside the walls of a colonial economy. You can’t win independence while pegged to the CFA franc. You can’t claim “budgetary discipline” while foreign companies sue you in arbitration courts for trying to collect taxes on your own resources. You can’t redistribute wealth if you’re not willing to confront the people who control it—and they don’t live in Pikine or Ziguinchor. They live in boardrooms in Paris, London, New York, and Perth.

The alternative being offered—more efficient taxation, bond market rebalancing, a mining-led development plan—might sound different from the IMF’s usual prescriptions. But without structural rupture, it’s the same wine in a new bottle. The profits from Senegal’s oil, gas, and gold can’t keep leaving the country while people pay for basic services with taxes scraped from street vendors and small farmers. That’s not justice. That’s a neocolonial balancing act.

Meanwhile, just across the border, Burkina Faso is rewriting the rules. They’ve cut ties with France, refused IMF debt, nationalized key industries, and are redistributing land directly to peasants. They’ve shown that breaking from imperialism isn’t a dream—it’s a strategy. And it’s being built from the bottom up, not dictated by technocrats or lenders.

Senegal has a choice. It can continue managing its crisis through accounting tricks and investor-friendly reforms. Or it can step fully into the struggle already unfolding across West Africa—a struggle for anti-imperialist sovereignty, not austerity in nationalist packaging.

This moment calls for boldness, not compliance. Real sovereignty means repudiating illegitimate debts. It means renegotiating or revoking parasitic contracts. It means nationalizing key sectors and putting the wealth of the land back into the hands of the people. And most of all, it means building the infrastructure of resistance—not just in budgets, but in communities, in organization, and in consciousness.

We don’t need better debt management. We need revolutionary rupture. And the people of Senegal know that. The question now is whether the state will follow their lead—or fall back into the trap.

Part IV – The Struggle Ahead: From Fiscal Rhetoric to Revolutionary Mobilization

We don’t write these analyses just to critique the system—we write them to help end it. Because imperialism doesn’t just manage our economies. It manages our imaginations. It tells us what’s realistic, what’s responsible, what’s mature. And when we start talking about breaking free, it repackages our struggle in the language of market reform. It turns liberation into budget efficiency. And before you know it, the revolution is being tallied in tax receipts.

But the Senegalese people have never been fooled for long. From the strikes of the railway workers under French rule to the student uprisings of 1968, from the resistance to SAPs in the 1980s to the youth-led uprisings that brought Sonko into power, the people have always led. And they will have to lead again.

That means building power outside the structures of debt and dependency. It means refusing the IMF’s terms—whether they come in the form of loans or regional bond contracts. It means standing with the people of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, who are carving a new path, one rooted not in compliance but in rupture. It means rejecting the idea that sovereignty can be measured in investor sentiment, and asserting that it must be built through collective control over land, labor, and resources.

Our tasks are clear:

• Support debt refusal and audit campaigns that expose how much of Senegal’s “public debt” is illegitimate, imposed by imperial institutions for imperial gain.
• Expose and resist lawfare attacks by corporations like Woodside Energy, whose lawsuits are nothing more than financial warfare against the right of a sovereign people to tax their own resources.
• Forge alliances across the Sahel and beyond, linking the youth, peasants, and workers of Senegal with anti-austerity forces in Ghana, Tunisia, Argentina, and beyond. Hyper-imperialism is global—our resistance must be too.
• Organize strikes, mass actions, and people’s assemblies to reject austerity and assert a popular mandate for resource control and redistribution.
• Build dual and contending power through revolutionary cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and political education projects rooted in the needs of the people—not the demands of the market.

The headlines may say Senegal is standing on its own. But until the land belongs to the people, until the mines are no longer looted by multinationals, until the budget serves the poor instead of the bondholders—that stand will be shaky. Real independence is not a soundbite. It’s a struggle.

We stand with the people of Senegal. With the youth who have fought and bled for a better future. With the workers who keep the country running. With the peasants who feed the nation. And with every revolutionary force across the continent that understands: the debt trap is a weapon. The IMF is a thief. And sovereignty will not be negotiated—it must be seized.

As the fires of rebellion spread across the Sahel, let us fan those flames in every zone of neocolonial plunder. From the halls of finance to the streets of Dakar, let us break the chains—before the creditors tighten them once more.