Credit agency Standard and Poor says interests on debts owed by 11
African countries were at a crisis level, a new report says. FILE |
NATION MEDIA GROUP
Interest levels on debts owed by 11 African countries that were
part of the World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative
of the early 1990s are now back at pre-crisis levels.
A
new report from international credit agency Standard and Poor’s lists
Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia among the 11 countries where it says the
HIPC Initiative has failed.
It says that more than two
decades after HIPC, debt-servicing costs are back to pre-crisis levels
and have been increasing since 2011.
“Does this mean
that the World Bank’s aim to ensure that the world’s poorest countries
were not burdened by unmanageable or unsustainable debt has faltered?
Arguably, yes,” the report says.
Uganda’s national debt
has nearly trebled in the past three years to more than 50 per cent of
GDP creating a risk of default, since nearly two-thirds of that
borrowing is external, the central bank said recently.
The
Bank of Uganda said the rising costs of servicing the country’s $15.1
billion debt could hit economic growth because of reduced public
investment. Three years ago, Uganda’s debt was just $6 billion.
The debt is mostly a result of a ramping up of borrowing, mostly
from China, to fund infrastructure projects including roads, power
plants, fibre-optic cable networks and an airport expansion.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, government debt rose to 53 per cent of GDP last year, compared with just 11 per cent in 2011.
It
adds that while Africa’s debt is not at the same level as the 1990s,
debt servicing as a percentage of government revenues has returned to
the crisis levels of that time.
The HIPC was developed
by the World Bank, the IMF and other creditors from 1996 onwards to
reduce the debt of some poor countries as they were unlikely to repay in
full.
In total, 11 countries were relieved of
$99billion of debt, cutting their government debt from an average of 100
per cent of GDP to around 24 per cent by 2008.
As a
result, “fiscal accounts are burdened by the same or higher debt-service
costs relative to revenues as pre-[bailout],” S&P said.
Although
the debt forgiveness initiative succeeded in offering “respite for many
years”, it has “failed to permanently reduce debt service burdens”,
according to S&P.
The warnings come on the back of
a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development that the impact of tax evasion across sub-Saharan Africa has
become colossal.
It says that more than $50 billion
per year is being lost to African governments through illicit flows out
of the continent, a sum well in excess of all the funds received through
aid.
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