Zambia, which became Africa’s first pandemic-era sovereign defaulter in 2020, has struggled to reach a deal with creditors.
The International Monetary Fund sees a deal between Zambia and its creditors as “imminent” and is hopeful it will come this week during the crisis lender’s gathering of policymakers, a top official for the institution said. “I’m very optimistic,” Abebe Aemro Selassie, director of the fund’s Africa department, said in an interview on Monday in Marrakech, Morocco, on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank annual meetings. “The ball is in the authorities’ court.
The agreement would see the interest rates cut to as low as 1% and the loans only repaid in 2043, with a 40% reduction in net-present value of the debt, Bloomberg News reported last week. Earlier this year, the IMF withheld a near-$190 million disbursement because of delays in the group agreeing to debt relief. China is by far Zambia’s biggest bilateral creditor. © 2023 Bloomberg
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