The Debt You Don’t See: Senegal, Hidden Liabilities and Africa’s New Warning Signal

For years, Senegal was held up as one of West Africa’s “good news” macro stories: steady growth, big infrastructure, a reputation for political stability and reform.

Then the numbers changed.

In 2024–2025, the new administration revealed billions of dollars in previously undisclosed public borrowing. The IMF now estimates Senegal’s total public sector debt at around 132% of GDP at end-2024, versus roughly 80% just two years earlier – a jump driven largely by hidden liabilities, including state-owned enterprises.

The shock was big enough that the IMF froze a $1.8 billion programme, launched an internal review into how it missed the debts, and is now negotiating a new arrangement while scrutinising its own data and surveillance processes.

At the same time, the World Bank’s latest International Debt Report warns that the “debt gap” in developing countries has risen to a 50-year high, as the cost of servicing debt outstrips new financing by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Senegal has become the emblematic case of a deeper problem: the debt you don’t see.

How did so much debt go missing?

The story, as it is emerging, has several layers:

• Between 2019 and 2023, Senegal accumulated large amounts of public and publicly guaranteed external debtthat were not fully reported in official statistics.

• New data suggest that by 2023, actual external public debt was about $5.5 billion higher than previously disclosed, meaning more than a third of external obligations were effectively off the books.

• Much of this related to state-owned enterprises and special-purpose structures, where guarantees, arrears and other liabilities were not captured in headline figures.

When the new government ordered audits, the picture changed dramatically. Debt that had been presented as roughly 70–80% of GDP suddenly looked closer to 100–130%, depending on what you include.

The IMF’s mission chief publicly admitted he had “never seen a hidden debt of this magnitude” in Africa.

For investors, it was a brutal reminder that debt problems break slowly, then suddenly – especially when data are incomplete.

Squaring up to the IMF – and to the maths

Politically, the discovery of hidden debt has become a defining issue.

President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko have sharply criticised the previous administration for “masking” the true scale of the problem.

At the same time, they have publicly rejected an IMF-backed external debt restructuring, arguing that such a move would humiliate the country and damage its reputation.

Instead, the government has pledged to:

• Honour all obligations “with its own means”;

• Shrink the fiscal deficit from double digits toward around 5% of GDP in the near term; and

• Rely more heavily on domestic resources and regional markets to plug financing gaps.

Markets are understandably sceptical. Bank of America now sees an external debt restructuring as “increasingly likely” in the second half of 2026, arguing that the numbers simply don’t add up without some form of reprofiling or relief.

In the meantime, bond investors are demanding higher yields, and Senegal faces the familiar trade-off: fiscal consolidation versus social pressure.

Debt gap, African edition

Zooming out, Senegal’s crisis is part of a much bigger pattern.

The World Bank estimates that from 2022 to 2024, the gap between what developing countries owed in external debt service and what they actually received in new external financing ballooned to $741 billion, the widest in half a century.

A few key features stand out:

• Interest payments hit a record $415.4 billion in 2024, even as bond markets tentatively reopened.

• Over 50 countries saw domestic public debt grow faster than external debt, as governments turned inward when global markets became too expensive.

• Restructurings have already taken place in Ghana, Zambia and others – and more are likely.

Senegal is therefore not an outlier in having debt problems. What makes it different is the scale of the revision and the fact that hidden liabilities went undetected for so long by both domestic authorities and international institutions.

For other African countries, the message is clear: it’s not just your debt level that matters, it’s how honest and complete your numbers are.

Why this matters for African investors and regulators

For foreign bondholders, Senegal is a case study in documentation and due diligence.

For African banks, pension funds, insurers and asset managers, it is something more immediate: a warning about how quickly sovereign risk can change – and how easily it can be underestimated if exposures are scattered and opaque.

Consider three questions many institutions across the continent now have to ask:

1. How much exposure do we really have to Senegal – not only through Eurobonds, but also regional paper, syndicated loans, guarantees and funds?

2. How does Senegal risk sit alongside other sovereigns that have already restructured (Ghana, Zambia) or may need to in future?

3. If Senegal ultimately does restructure, where in our portfolios – and in our clients’ portfolios – will the pain show up?

Those are not questions you can answer with a simple spreadsheet.

They require systems that can see across assets, currencies, mandates, custodians and vehicles – and present that picture clearly enough for boards and regulators to act.

How Veri Platform helps make hidden risk visible

This is exactly the type of environment Verī Platform was built for.

Verī does not give investment advice or decide which sovereign is “safe”. Instead, it provides the plumbing that lets regulated institutions map, measure and monitor risk – including in situations where the data itself has been revised.

For banks, asset managers, pension funds and insurers with African sovereign exposure, Verī can:

• Aggregate all Senegal-related positions – Eurobonds, local debt held via regional markets, loans, structured notes, funds and ETFs – into a single, look-through view at client, portfolio and institution level.

• Map country, currency and issuer risk across the whole book, so Senegal is seen alongside Ghana, Zambia, Kenya and others – not in isolation.

• Track how rating changes, IMF decisions or restructuring scenarios would affect valuations, capital ratios and member outcomes.

• Produce regulator-friendly reports that help supervisors see where sovereign-risk concentrations are building, and how much depends on “hidden” or suddenly revised numbers.

In short, Verī helps turn unknown unknowns into known risks that can be managed.

A warning and an opportunity

Senegal’s hidden debt saga is a warning: in an era of tight financing conditions and rising domestic borrowing, opacity is itself a form of risk.

But it is also an opportunity.

If Senegal and its partners manage to reconstruct a transparent, credible debt picture and negotiate a sustainable path forward – whether or not that includes formal restructuring – the country could become a test case for a new standard of debt transparency in Africa.

For now, one lesson stands out for investors and policymakers across the continent:

The most dangerous debt is not always the highest.It’s the debt you don’t see – until it’s too late.

In that world, the platforms and processes that make risk visible may prove just as important as any single IMF deal or headline debt number.

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