Central bank governors, finance ministers beg again for Africa’s debt relief

THE 2022 meeting of the African Consultative Group of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the 54 African member states of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has ended in Marrakech, Morocco with a call on the two Bretton Woods Institutions to grant “rapid, comprehensive and substantial,” debt relief to Africa.

It should be noted that the call for debt relief for Africa did not start today as exemplified by the call last year made by the President of African Development Bank, Dr Akinwumi Adesina.

According to him, Africa needs debt relief, debt restructuring and debt sustainability.

At the UN meeting on International Debt Architecture and Liquidity in March 2021, he had said, “It is time to put in place an African financial stability mechanism to protect itself against external shocks.”

However, the latest demand, which was contained in what the African Finance Ministers and Central Bank governors packaged as the ‘Marrakech Declaration,’ was to help Africa mitigate the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine crisis and limit their fallout on economic growth.

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This year’s African Caucus held under the theme, ‘Towards a Resilient Africa’ and called for a rapid implementation of the commitment made at the G7 Summit in June 2022, including the urgent need to improve multilateral debt restructuring frameworks and address the challenges related to debt vulnerabilities.

Participants also called on the Bretton Woods Institutions to speed up deployment of a fresh global debt architecture and to support the African continent’s call for an extension of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI).

The opening of the 2022 African Caucus was marked by a message sent by King Mohammed VI of Morocco to participants wherein he called for more international support and cooperation to enable African countries to mitigate the impacts of the soaring inflation affecting the global economy and enhance their resilience in the face of external shocks.

Morocco is chair of the Caucus which meets once a year to coordinate stands and views of Governors of African Central Banks before the annual World Bank-IMF meetings.