WHEN will the International Monetary Fund (IMF) learn to think? Over its 81-year history, the IMF has published over 15,000 reports. Yet, if you download any one of the reports from its website, it is likely that you will know what is being said before you have even read it. The reports are so generic that you do not even need to ask ChatGPT to create a template: each document is a template for the next. They are that regurgitative.
On July 8, 2025, the IMF published a brief blog post called 'How to Stabilise Africa's Debt'. The blog is only three pages long (one page shorter than the report upon which it is based). But even in its brevity, it repeats axioms the IMF developed as far back as the founding of its African Department on April 10, 1961. Despite caveats claiming the evaluation in the report is based on 'new data', the report is essentially bad old wine in new bottles. Its axioms are as follows:
These five axioms are presented as fact when they are fiction. For example, careful scholars of African development, from Samir Amin to Thandika Mkandawire, have cautioned against the type of broad generalizations the IMF is fond of doing. Second, the claim that achieving 'debt stabilization' without restructuring is possible is based on the flawed argument that African countries can grow themselves out of debt-a near-impossibility given the voluminous literature on debt overhang (i.e., the obvious negative effects of debt on growth).
The third axiom, which prioritises austerity over growth, fails in the face of logic and empirical evidence. Growth, by definition, requires the opposite of austerity (i.e., expansionary fiscal policy) with empirical evidence showing that austerity has led to growth tragedies in Africa. This says nothing of the significant human toll that decades of IMF-inspired austerityhas inflicted on the people of Africa and the global south more generally.
With regards to the fourth axiom, and as we demonstrate in a recent report from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 'IMF-supported arrangements' are the source of Africa's permanent debt crisis. For instance, a recent study on Zambia shows that IMF conditionality from two decades ago sowed the seeds that led to Zambia's current debt crisis. In other words, 'the IMF does not fight financial fires but douses them with gasoline'.
The fifth and final axiom runs counter to decades of development planning in Africa and decades of development scholarship that clearly show the quest for development continues to be a primary preoccupation of African states.
The fact that the IMF blog gets so much wrong is unsurprising given its authors. The blog is written by three IMF staff economists, each of them trained in the west with no substantial experience on the African continent: Athene Laws (from New Zealand, PhD at Cambridge), Thibault Lemaire (from France, PhD at the Sorbonne), and Nikola Spatafora (Italian, PhD from Yale). Both Lemaire and Spatafora work in the IMF's African Department located in Washington, DC. A voluminous literature now shows that the lack of rootedness in local contexts explains the dismal nature of western social science about Africa. Unfortunately, the authors of the IMF blog yet again demonstrate the pitfalls of writing from afar.
The problem is not only the IMF window for short-term credit, which of course comes with conditionalities; it is also with the IMF worldview, which suggests that nothing can be done about the debt except to pursue a futile growth strategy in the context of deep debt. IMF theory is limited to austerity and permanent debt-nothing more. But there is another theory, a few of whose points need to be seriously debated:
These are a few rational and tangible points for a new development theory that seeks the genuine advancement of people's well-being and not merely debt stabilisation. This is something that the IMF theory does not recognise, but it is what a development theory for Africa must put at its centre.