Friday Reflections: "Unbridled Faith in the IMF is Bad Leadership"

AI-illustration: If scrutiny is an analytical discipline, it should scale with opacity.

Earlier this week, I read a long, politically charged article from one of Zambia’s most prominent historians and political commentators. I am not engaging the politics. One line, though, has stayed with me: that unbridled faith in the IMF represents bad leadership.

On the surface, it is difficult to disagree. No one should have unbridled faith in any institution. Unbridled faith belongs to God alone. Not to the church. Not to the church figureheads. Not to any denomination. Not to any structure built by human hands. If unbridled faith does not belong to the institution closest to God, it certainly does not belong to the International Monetary Fund, to Beijing, or to any creditor. On that much, the author is correct, though I suspect he did not intend to travel that far with the principle.

But is what Zambia has with the IMF actually unbridled faith? The Extended Credit Facility that ran from August 2022 to January 2026 disbursed approximately USD1.7bn across six reviews, including a 2024 augmentation to absorb the El Niño drought shock. It anchored a debt restructuring process under the G20 Common Framework, rebuilt reserves, and restored inflation toward target. The Finance Minister himself described the implementation as exceptionally good compared to Zambia’s own past performance, a record without any break or suspension. When the programme ended, the government chose not to extend it. That is not unbridled faith. That is a sovereign engaging a lender of last resort under terms that are publicly documented, independently evaluated, and testable against outcomes. Calling it unbridled is itself an assertion. What would bridled engagement look like, and how would it differ from what actually happened? The author does not say.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, longer than this week’s reflection. Much of the hostility toward the IMF that I encounter across the continent is not as analytical as it claims to be. Too often, when I trace the hostility back to its source, I find inheritance rather than investigation. The pattern is traceable. A generation of African economists and political scientists was taught by lecturers who directly experienced the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s. Those experiences were real. But the conclusions drawn from them were conclusions for their time. Students absorbed the verdict without using those same analytical tools to re-examine the institution as it currently operates. They graduated carrying a conclusion rather than a method. And that conclusion now governs public discourse across the continent, decades after the programmes it was based on ended.

There is a broader temptation in public life: not merely to trust institutions, but to outsource discernment to them. Rejection of the IMF hardens into doctrine when it should remain a testable analytical position. Beijing becomes an unquestioned alternative when it should be a creditor under audit. Once the conclusion is inherited, the analytical work has already stopped.

Structural adjustment caused real damage. Cash budgeting in the 1990s constrained government expenditure during rapid population growth, and some Zambian economists have traced a causal chain from that constraint to underinvestment in infrastructure to the aggressive borrowing that ended in default. That chain has merit as a contributing factor. But after the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve brought rates to near zero. Dollar borrowing became historically cheap. Zambia issued three Eurobonds between 2012 and 2015 into a yield-hungry market. The infrastructure backlog was the stated justification. Cheap money was the structural incentive. And whether all that spending even reached infrastructure is itself a governance question the critics have not sufficiently examined. The programme architecture has changed enough that inherited critiques are no longer sufficient, and it has not changed enough that criticism is obsolete. Both of those statements are testable against the documents.

The question beneath this debate is rarely asked. Does the current allocation of analytical attention across the creditor landscape reflect the transparency structure of the system? The IMF publishes its programme documents for Zambia’s ECF with the country’s consent. You can read them, challenge them, test them against outcomes. The rest of the ledger is different. A systematic study of 100 Chinese debt contracts across 24 developing countries found that every contract signed after 2014 contained confidentiality clauses barring borrowers from revealing the terms or even the existence of the debt. The same contracts contained clauses committing the borrower to exclude the debt from multilateral restructuring. Comparable confidentiality provisions are common across bilateral and regional development lenders, from BADEA and the Islamic Development Bank to the OPEC Fund, the Kuwait Fund, Afreximbank, and TDB. The IMF is the transparency outlier in sovereign finance, not the norm. Yet in African public discourse, it receives the most intense critique. The research documenting Chinese lending opacity exists and is available. The popular discourse has not absorbed it. If scrutiny is an analytical discipline rather than an emotional reflex, it should scale with opacity. The institutions that publish the least should face the hardest questions.

African finance officials will counter that the real IMF programme conditions are never written down: staff mission conversations, informal signals about what will pass a Board review, institutional weight in the room. I take that seriously. But the formal documents still provide more transparency than any alternative creditor offers at any level. If your concern is what happens behind closed doors, that concern should be greatest where even the formal terms are hidden. The harder version of this argument is anticipatory compliance: governments self-censor their policy options to avoid friction before a mission arrives, so the documents and outcomes align perfectly and the pressure is invisible. That mechanism is real and I do not claim to resolve it here. But it does not disturb the first-order distinction. A documented framework can be challenged, renegotiated, and improved. A hidden framework can only be submitted to. Anticipatory compliance is a reason to deepen transparency, not to prefer opacity.

The Fund warrants criticism. Governance weighting favours advanced economies. Programme conditionality can be too standardised. The procyclical bias is real: the Fund’s own Independent Evaluation Office found in December 2025 that earlier advice had been broadly procyclical and that fiscal multipliers had been systematically underestimated. A January 2026 working paper estimates SSA-specific multipliers, finding that timing and composition of fiscal consolidation matter critically. The distributional unease that drives much of the criticism is not entirely wrong, but that confirmation came through primary research, not inherited sentiment. One area where the research needs to go further is climate conditionality. The IMF required Kenya to integrate climate risk into its public financial management frameworks to unlock a USD551 million Resilience and Sustainability Facility. Kenya did undertake substantive institutional work, including a climate module for public investment management. But the most visible government response was a public holiday dedicated to planting trees. The Fund demanded green institutional architecture. The state’s headline delivery was optical compliance. As the Misaligned Transition series argues, the continent’s binding constraint is firm power for industrialisation, and the case for time-bound gas as transition fuel is clear. Climate conditionality must account for where African economies are in their industrialisation sequence rather than importing the timelines of international climate finance.

The claim that programme conditionality weakens the state meets a prior question: from what position did the state arrive? Zambia came from sovereign default with no market access and an unsustainable debt stock. During the programme years, growth averaged 4.3 per cent: 5.4 per cent in 2023, 3.8 per cent in 2024 under a historic drought per ZamStats, and a preliminary 3.8 per cent in 2025. That trajectory occurred within the programme framework. Copper prices, post-COVID rebound, and restructuring progress all contributed. The programme did not cause the growth single-handedly but it provided the anchor without which none of those tailwinds had a framework to operate through.

Growth has not diffused. The binding constraint is domestic: banks lend to the sovereign rather than to the private sector. The legislation that would set the foundation for redirecting bank lending toward the private sector was ready for parliament but was not brought forward. In an election year, with the government needing those same banks to absorb domestic debt rollover, it will not be until after the elections. In March 2026, two months after the programme ended, the IMF’s own staff visit was already warning that fiscal slippage had emerged: spending pressures from the wage bill, agricultural support, and election expenditure were projected to reduce the primary surplus by a full percentage point of GDP. In April, the government reversed fuel subsidy removal for electoral reasons, reinstating a regressive transfer the programme had corrected. The programme delivered its stated objectives. The political system began unwinding those gains within weeks of graduation. Whether programme architecture should include post-graduation sustainability mechanisms is a design question the pattern now makes visible. What is not in question is the source of the unwinding. It is domestic. It is political.

Conditionality follows the logic of any competent creditor: revenue capacity, liability restructuring, buffers against downside risk, and conditions on use of funds all have sovereign equivalents that Zambia’s ECF followed. The analogy holds for repayment capacity, macro stability, leakage control, and institutional repair. It breaks on the domestic credit transmission channel, which is distorted by Zambia’s sovereign-bank nexus. That distortion is a domestic governance failure. Take electricity tariff adjustments. Painful, yes. But trace the sequence. Industrialisation requires energy. Energy requires investment. Investment requires sustainability. Sustainability requires cost-reflective pricing. That chain is not IMF ideology. It is an observable sequence. The order exists. The work is faithful observation.

Chinese bilateral financing delivered real value: speed of disbursement, infrastructure that closed genuine gaps where multilateral and Western creditors were slower to fund, and terms that bypassed documented multilateral programme conditions. Zambia runs a bilateral trade surplus with China driven by copper exports. Those benefits are real and should not be dismissed. They are one side of a ledger that sits behind confidentiality clauses the public has never been permitted to examine. And when loan terms are shielded by those clauses, conditionality does not vanish. It shifts from economic benchmarks to diplomatic subordination.

In late April, a global digital rights conference scheduled for May in Lusaka was cancelled after Chinese diplomatic pressure forced the exclusion of Taiwanese delegates. The conference was to be held at the Mulungushi Conference Centre, a venue refurbished in 2020 with approximately USD60 million in Chinese funding. A conference killed at a creditor-funded venue to satisfy the creditor. That is the transparency thesis made physical. Earlier this month in Mombasa, Taiwanese delegates were detained and deported from the Our Ocean Conference under the same pressure. The pattern is continental.

The subordination is not only diplomatic. In February 2025, a tailings dam at Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, a subsidiary of state-run China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group, collapsed and released 50 million litres of toxic waste into the Kafue River. Fish were killed at least 100 kilometres downstream. More than half of Zambia’s population relies on the Kafue for drinking water or to irrigate crops. An independent environmental investigation found that 1.5 million tons of toxic material were released, 30 times more than the company admitted. The effluent contained cyanide, arsenic, copper, zinc, lead, chromium, and cadmium at levels posing long-term health risks including organ damage, birth defects, and cancer. The company terminated the independent investigator’s contract before the final report was due. The government fined Sino-Metals approximately USD50,000. Farmers initially received compensation of approximately USD84 each for the loss of their crops and livestock. Nine hundred thousand cubic metres of toxic waste remains in the environment. The US Embassy ordered its personnel to leave the affected area. Extractive industry environmental failures are not unique to Chinese companies. Western mining operations have comparable records across the continent. The issue is not the nationality of the company. The issue is the sovereign response. A USD50,000 fine for a disaster of this scale reflects a bilateral relationship the government will not jeopardise. The critics who say the IMF destroys the lives of ordinary Zambians through structural benchmarks should consider which institution has done more measurable damage to the communities along the Kafue: IMF programme conditions, or a state-owned mining company that poisoned their water, covered up the scale, and faced a USD50,000 fine from a government unwilling to risk the bilateral relationship.

When Zambia cancels a conference at a Chinese-funded venue to preserve a bilateral creditor relationship whose loan terms it cannot even publish, and when a Chinese state-owned company poisons the water supply of 12 million people and the sovereign response is a USD50,000 fine, that is unbridled faith in Beijing. That is the definition the opening of this piece established. The IMF engagement was tested against the standard and found to be documented, evaluable, and testable. The Beijing engagement has been tested against the same standard and found to be opaque, unaudited, and maintained through diplomatic and environmental subordination.

Read the reports. All of them. From every creditor. Demand that every contract be published. The ordinary, tedious, unglamorous work of reading a Technical Memorandum of Understanding or demanding access to a confidential bilateral loan agreement is where the real analytical vocation lives. You do not offer a sloppy sacrifice. The critics who skip the documents and go straight to the verdict have skipped the liturgy and gone straight to the sermon. Purpose precedes the analyst. The obligation to examine honestly is not a preference. It is prior.

The movement is from grievance to design. Unbridled faith in Beijing is no less dangerous than unbridled faith in Washington or unbridled faith in the IMF.

Structure before sentiment.