Our Governments Paid Creditors €145.5 Billion in 2024 While Schools Starved

Ask a nurse in a rural clinic in Malawi what €145.5 billion looks like. She will not talk about spreadsheets. She will talk about the drug shelves that stayed empty, the children who sat on the floor because there were no benches, and the teachers who went unpaid for months. That is what debt service looks like on the ground. In 2024, African countries sent €145.5 billion to their external creditors. In 2010 the figure was €54.48 billion. The bill more than doubled in a generation, and it was paid by the people who had no say in the borrowing.

So when the African Union announces the launch of the Africa Credit Rating Agency, AfCRA, in Port Louis, Mauritius, we should ask the obvious question. Who has been rating us, and who has been paying for their verdicts?

The AU says AfCRA will rate sovereign governments, banks and private companies, and that it will be funded through shareholder capital and its own operations. It is meant to end a long grievance. African leaders and finance ministers have spent years complaining that the three giants of global credit rating, S&P Global Ratings, Moody's and Fitch, assess African risk too harshly and downgrade too fast during wars and pandemics. The agencies reject this. They say they use the same methods everywhere. A 2024 Reuters investigation into Africa's debt crisis reportedly found no evidence of systemic bias in their sovereign ratings. That finding matters. It should force us to stop blaming the messenger and look at the message.

The AU also points to a real gap. Twenty-three African economies have no rating from any of the big three at all. Investors who cannot see a country cannot price its risk fairly, and when they cannot price it fairly, they charge a premium that the poorest citizens end up paying. A continental rating agency could help close that gap. Done properly, it would give African pension funds, insurers and diaspora investors a reliable, locally informed view of their own economies. That is a genuine good.

But here is the uncomfortable truth we must say out loud. A rating is not a conspiracy against Africa. It is a reflection of what a government does with its money, its courts and its borders. Ratings fall when governments hide debt, when budgets are not published, when central banks lose their independence and when state companies bleed cash with no audit. Ratings also fall when a country starts a war. Ask yourself what any sensible investor thinks when a neighbour sends its army across an international border to occupy a sovereign state's eastern provinces. The United Nations Group of Experts has documented for years, including in its report S/2025/446, the presence of Rwandan Defence Force units inside the Democratic Republic of Congo, operating alongside the M23 movement that they arm, command and resupply. That is a war of aggression. Its price is paid in displaced families, in mineral revenue that disappears into foreign hands, and in a risk premium that makes every honest business in the region more expensive to run.

Consider Senegal. In 2024, the country revealed that years of previous borrowing had been concealed from the public and from international partners, pushing its debt to levels that forced urgent renegotiation with the IMF. That is not a Western plot. That is a government lying to its own people. A rating agency located in Mauritius will be worth nothing if it simply repeats figures that a finance ministry hands it. Independence is not a branding exercise. It is the only reason anyone will believe the number.

This is the real test for AfCRA. An African rating agency that flatters African governments would be the same old lie wearing a new flag. We have seen this movie before. Our states have been rated highly by friendly institutions right up to the moment they defaulted. Zambia defaulted in 2020. Ethiopia defaulted in 2023. Both were rated by someone. Neither crisis was prevented because the people who should have spoken up were paid to stay quiet or simply lacked the courage to tell the truth.

The solution is not to choose between Western agencies and African ones. It is to demand that every rating, from anywhere, meets the same standard. Publish the methodology in full. Publish the data sources. Separate the agency's revenue from the governments it rates, or at minimum disclose every payment and every conflict of interest in plain language. Appoint a board with credible independent members, not former ministers rewarded for loyalty. Let the rating committees be transparent, and let the mistakes be recorded and public.

We also have success stories that prove what good institutions can achieve. Botswana built one of the most respected records on fiscal discipline in the world, using diamond revenue to fund schools and clinics rather than vanity projects. Mauritius, host of AfCRA, has built a reputation for stable institutions, a functioning judiciary and a financial centre that attracts serious capital. Senegal's democratic transfers of power in 2000 and 2024 showed that voters can hold leaders accountable at the ballot box. Africa does not lack examples. It lacks the political will to copy them everywhere.

Here is what must happen next. Parliaments across the continent should require that any sovereign borrowing be published, audited and debated before it is signed. The AU should give AfCRA an independent mandate backed by an oversight body that includes civil society and the private sector, not just finance ministries. Regional economic communities should refuse to let any member state hide debt from its own citizens. And the African Union Peace and Security Council must stop treating the invasion of a member state as a footnote in a communiqué. A continent that wants investors to trust its numbers must first show that its governments do not invade their neighbours, shut down their press or steal their elections.

So we ask the questions that the people paying the bill are too tired to shout. Why did our schools get less than our creditors? Why are our governments hiding debt and then blaming the rating agencies when the truth comes out? Why does a country that claims to be a development model send its soldiers across the border into the Congo while its tourism brochures sell gorillas and clean streets?

AfCRA can be a tool for African self-respect, but only if it is built on the same truth we demand from everyone else. Demand that the methodology be published. Demand that the board be independent. Demand that every government that borrows in your name explains where the money went. Write to your MP. Ask your finance minister why interest payments are eating the budget for clinics. Share the numbers until they cannot be ignored. The creditors will always send their invoices. Our job is to make sure our leaders read them, and then answer to us.

Based on reporting by RFI