Africa's debt yoke
“ The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. […] Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. ” * This endless punishment of Sisyphus in ancient Greek mythology reminds us of the development endeavor of African countries and, as part of it, the spiral of foreign debt they are in. African countries are now on the eve of a major debt crisis due to accumulating impact of the global pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, this is not the first time they faced an immense debt burden. It was first piled up in the 1960s and 1970s in the ensuing two decades of their independence. The borrowings in this period were due to the global abundance of liquidity, as well as the deliberate effort to make African countries financially...
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