According to the IMF, one of its core responsibilities is “monitoring the economic and financial policies of member countries and providing them with policy advice, an activity known as surveillance.” It further says that “vigilant monitoring by the IMF is essential to identifying risks that may require remedial policy adjustments.”

Judging by observations in Kenya, Ghana, and elsewhere in the developing world, the IMF is horribly failing to carry out that critical mission. The recent violent protests in Kenya, during which about 40 people were killed and another 360 injured, were triggered by a bill that was introduced by the president to raise $2.7 billion in taxes to reduce the country’s debt burden of more than $80 billion. The proposed tax package was part of a pledge the country’s leadership made to secure a $3.6 billion IMF loan in 2021. Included in the tax proposal were a digital tax on mobile phone transactions that would have impacted 80 percent of average Kenyans, increased taxes on wages, social health services, bread, and fuel.

Because the IMF does active surveillance, it is most likely that its staff and senior leadership are well aware of the causes of the excessive debt burdens that countries like Kenya and Ghana carry today. Currently, an estimated 60 percent of Kenya’s tax revenue is devoted to servicing the national debt. The simple truth is that much of the funds from the borrowing spree that these countries have gone on recently have been stolen by corrupt officials, used to expand bureaucracies that were already bloated, and, in some cases, invested in vanity projects that have no hope of generating enough proceeds to pay back the loans.

Each member of Kenya’s parliament (MP) is currently paid a basic salary of $5,650 per month, in a country with annual per capita income of only $2,000. On top of that, MPs are paid extra money for sitting on committees, given cheap government loans for houses and extra vehicles, and are provided thousands of dollars per month in allowances for travel to constituencies. Topping it off, each of Kenya’s 290 MPs reportedly receives over $1 million every year under a program called Constituency Development Funds, set up to promote local development. Any casual observer of African politics knows where these funds go. That is the money the MPs steal to buy their gleaming luxury vehicles and private helicopters.

Questioned about his lavish lifestyle, one MP is said to have retorted: “Yes, I have a helicopter that I purchased. I am an inspiration [to] very many young people in this country.” He further claimed that he could afford the helicopter because “he chose to maintain only one wife and believed in God.”

Why did I work so hard and make so many sacrifices in my early years in Ghana, when all it takes to be rich in Africa is to be monogamous and profess faith in God? And what does it say about the culture on the continent today, when an MP thinks flaunting his wealth is the proper way to motivate young people there?

The absurdity is even greater in Ghana. There, obscene doesn’t adequately describe the opulent lifestyles of public officials. A substantial majority of average Ghanaians struggle to find jobs and food to eat. But the country’s president decided that one of his highest priorities is building a national cathedral that is estimated to cost in excess of $400 million. At the sod-cutting ceremony in 2020, President Nana Akufo-Addo said: “I made a pledge to Almighty God that He was gracious enough to grant my party, the NPP, and I victory in the 2016 elections after two unsuccessful attempts, so I will help build a cathedral to his glory and honor.”

When I first learned about the proposed construction of the cathedral, I thought it was a joke. Apart from my thinking that the president couldn’t make his personal pledge to God the nation’s business, Ghana has a substantial Muslim population, and a good number of citizens who are not religious. In any serious country, such a cockamamie idea wouldn’t even get out into the public domain. Shockingly, it became a subject of national conversation, and has consumed considerable amounts of oxygen at the expense of more urgent matters. The fierce debate that followed revealed that much of the country was against the project, but the president and his supporters insist that the promise to God cannot be left unfulfilled.

Fortunately, construction of the cathedral has stalled because the country is completely broke. In May 2023, the IMF approved a $3 billion bailout for Ghana. I followed press coverage of the negotiations between IMF staff and Ghanaian government officials quite closely. I was hoping that one of the conditions for the loan would be the scrapping of the cathedral project. Apparently, that issue was either not put on the table, or if it was, not in a serious way. The national debate about the cathedral has resumed in earnest after the government received the IMF funds.

The IMF is supposed to provide advice to governments and “discourage policies that would harm prosperity.” Judging by its actions in country after country in the developing world, it is unclear whose prosperity the IMF cares about. Its staff choose to ignore all the raucous, round-the-clock partying that the fat cats in these countries engage in, and then when the champagne taps run dry, they ask the same felines to impose austerity measures on the masses who were never near any of the revelries. No wonder the IMF is arguably the most hated institution in the Global South.

It is absurd, as I suspect is the case, for the IMF to think that it doesn’t have the power to pressure leaders of sovereign nations like Ghana and Kenya to do the things that would actually make a difference in average people’s lives. Sovereignty entails responsibility. The people at the helm in these beggar nations have not earned the right to dictate terms in any negotiations.

Fear that if the IMF doesn’t lend to them, China will is not an acceptable excuse either. China doesn’t do bailouts. It plays a different ballgame—project finance. Debtor nations pledge oilfields, mineral deposits and other natural resources as collateral for Chinese loans. If borrowed funds are used to build castles in Heaven and the inevitable defaults occur, China seizes ports and other assets that collateralized the loans. The IMF should worry about its own turf, and learn to impose the right type of discipline on borrowers, in the way that commercial banks do when they grant loans. It should never allow itself to be bullied into submission by a bunch of groggy akpeteshie drinkers who wake up from “general anesthesia.”

More of us need to speak up. The lack of IMF backbone causes grave harm to the suffering masses in poor countries. And it has deadly consequences, as the recent events in Kenya demonstrate. We shouldn’t wait for indigent, hungry citizens to be killed by security forces before we wake up to the despair that drives some of these people to make perilous journeys to Europe and elsewhere in search of better lives. Along the way, thousands of them have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, and died of hunger and thirst in the heat of the Sahara Desert.