Senegal’s ousted Prime Minister, Ousmane Sonko, softened \u200chis tone on debt restructuring in an interview broadcast this Monday, saying he does not hold “rigid positions” on the issue, a departure from his previous staunch opposition to such a move.<\/p>\n
While he was dismissed by \u200bPresident Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who dissolved the government last month, lawmakers then voted to make \u200bSonko speaker of the National Assembly, giving him a powerful position to \u2060influence government policy.<\/p>\n
In his new role, Sonko could have considerable ability to obstruct Faye’s agenda, \u200bincluding potentially resisting reforms required for a new International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme. An IMF team is expected to \u200bresume talks this week over a new lending programme.<\/p>\n
In the interview with French outlets RFI and France 24, Sonko said policymakers must respond pragmatically to the country\u2019s mounting debt crisis, the result of misreported debt under \u200bformer President Macky Sall’s government.
\n“We don’t hold rigid positions in the absolute sense. We are \u200bexamining the situation with clarity,” Sonko said, adding that any solution should “meet the requirements of the moment”.
\nThe comments mark \u200ca \u2060shift from his stance last November, when he said at a rally that the IMF was pushing for debt restructuring and that it would be a “disgrace”.
\nThe IMF suspended Senegal’s previous $1.8 billion lending programme after the misreported debt came to light.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":29974,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[44],"class_list":["post-37142","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-finance","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"The IMF suspended Senegal's previous $1.8 billion lending programme after the misreported debt came to light.","published_date":"","news_description":"The IMF suspended Senegal's previous $1.8 billion lending programme after the misreported debt came to light.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/37142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/37142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37143,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/37142\/revisions\/37143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=37142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}