Reflections on Trust, Sovereignty, and Africa’s Economic Destiny
When the language of numbers claims to replace the voice of the people—when trust becomes a score and sovereignty a chart—it is time to pause, breathe, and question the gaze that evaluates. The recent downgrade of Senegal by Moody’s revives an essential question: how can one believe in the neutrality of institutions that judge without ever being judged? And how can a country deemed “risky” manage to mobilize billions thanks to the confidence of its diaspora and foreign partners? This paradox, at the heart of global finance, calls for a deeper reflection on trust, sovereignty, and economic discourse.
I. When the Rating Becomes a Story
Sometimes, numbers make more noise than drums. In Dakar, Moody’s recent downgrade struck like a sharp clap in the warm air: one letter down, and suddenly an entire nation is reduced to a symbol—to a solvency assessment—as if the heartbeat of a country could be measured to the decimal point.
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These verdicts, presented as technical assessments, claim the language of neutrality and economic reason. Yet they are, above all, narratives—stories of the world—external gazes distributing credit and suspicion, trust and doubt. Beneath the accounting formulas lies a text, and behind every text, an ideology.
In Senegal’s case, most indicators cited refer to past cycles: public debt, budget deficits, external debt, current account imbalances—all legacies of previous governments. Yet Moody’s report projects forward—it extrapolates, anticipates, and imagines risk in continuity with the past. These figures measure less the choices of a new government than the delayed consequences of a closed political era. This double gaze—backward and forward—constructs an implicit message: before acting, the state must reassure; before governing, it must prove itself.
Thus, the rating becomes performative: it doesn’t just describe reality—it shapes it. It creates hierarchies of credibility, defining who inspires confidence and who must constantly earn it back. This is the invisible power of economic language—to turn collective belief into global norm.
II. The Power of Numbers and the Shadow of Suspicion
Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, Fitch: three names, three judges deciding the cost of debt for nearly 190 nations. All three American, they do not observe the world from some planetary neutrality—they embody a culture, a philosophy of debt, a moral faith in market discipline. They don’t simply measure risk; they define it, sometimes even create it. Their influence rests less on the rigor of their models than on a quasi-religious belief in their authority.
The “trust” they claim to assess is not that of the people, workers, or citizens—it is the trust of institutional investors, funds, and creditors. An abstract, disembodied trust based not on lived experience or solidarity, but on forecasts and graphs. Beneath the veneer of objectivity hides a cultural and moral prism inherited from Western tradition—one that confuses debt with guilt, solvency with virtue.
To assign a rating is to assign a place in the global economic order—to decide who deserves credit and who must atone for risk. In this theater, Africa appears as a pupil under constant surveillance—graded harshly, distrusted by default. Good marks are hard to earn; mistakes are costly. The rating becomes a moral frontier.
And yet history has often disproven these institutions’ supposed infallibility. In 2008, they awarded AAA ratings to toxic assets, precipitating the largest global crisis since 1929. A few years later, Greece was punished harshly, not for its real capacity to repay, but because it deviated from normative models. These “errors” revealed the political dimension of credit rating.
For Africa, this systemic bias is costly: between 2006 and 2022, the so-called “African premium”—the extra cost imposed by perceived risk—amounted to nearly five billion dollars (Olabisi & Stein, 2024). Five billion: schools, hospitals, infrastructure deferred. Every additional interest point becomes a social delay.
And yet, reality contradicts suspicion. We are told there is a “trust deficit,” but at the same time, Senegal’s diaspora bond raised 150% of its target, driven by popular enthusiasm. The country also secured investment pledges exceeding 13,200 billion CFA francs—several times its national budget.
Even without judging the wisdom of these initiatives, one must ask: how can a supposedly fragile country inspire such broad confidence, both at home and abroad? The paradox is glaring: the distrust measured in New York collides with the trust lived in Dakar.
Behind this contradiction lies a truth: credit ratings are not exact science—they are symbolic constructions, instruments of power. They measure not only risk, but conformity to an implicit norm—a world shaped by other histories, other standards, other times.
III. Invisible Trust, Constrained Sovereignty, and Symbolic Finance
What do these agencies really evaluate? Not the trust of citizens or communities, but that of global investors. Yet popular trust remains the foundation of any sustainable economy. African societies rely on solidarity networks, informal institutions, and mutual credit systems invisible to financial markets.
In many African cosmologies, value is not fixed—it is relational. It is woven through social ties, memory, and speech. It circulates like water through the earth. Where global finance freezes and standardizes, African economies breathe through cyclical rhythms—seasons, relationships, reciprocities. The trust measured by Moody’s is cold and external; lived trust is warm, organic, rooted in daily life.
This gap is ontological. Financial rating is a cultural artifact—a Western projection onto plural realities. Where solvency is virtue and debt is sin, many African societies view debt as a moral link, an act of mutual confidence. Ignoring this dimension is to confuse accounting with anthropology, numbers with symbols.
This cultural blindness is compounded by monetary dependency: the CFA franc, a colonial legacy. Pegged to the euro and managed under French oversight, it offers stability at the price of sovereignty. As Sylla (2023) argues, the CFA franc has turned trust into a matter of tutelage: to be credible, one must first please the outside world.
Add to that the weight of rating agencies, and you have double subjugation: economies under control, sovereignties under surveillance.
Creating an African rating agency, as currently envisioned by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the African Union (AU), makes sense only if it does not replicate Western paradigms. It must not merely adapt Anglo-Saxon models that reduce vitality to technical solvency ratios. A truly African agency must invent another evaluative language—rooted in the continent’s realities.
It should redefine value itself: social cohesion, cultural vitality, ecological sustainability, technological innovation, economic justice. Such an institution would embody epistemic sovereignty—a space for conceptual invention and methodological freedom.
To reclaim evaluation is to reclaim the narrative of one’s future. It is to refuse that value be dictated from outside, and to restore meaning to measurement—as an instrument of emancipation, not domination.
And since these agencies are largely American, why not evaluate them by the very academic principles of their own culture? In American universities, students evaluate professors; scholars review one another according to rigor, transparency, and intellectual integrity. Evaluation is dialogical, not unilateral. Why should nations be judged differently?
From our perspective as researchers, every evaluation must be justified, methodologically sound, and contextually grounded. This is the spirit behind our recent scientific publications—Sagna & Sylla—on colonial finance and Senegal’s “unpayable debt.” These works show that debt is not merely economic but historical and symbolic—embedded in memory and institutions.
The question, then, is not only whether rating agencies are wrong, but from where they speak, in whose name, and by what values.
IV. The Symbolic Reversal
History, at times, enjoys irony. In his essay “Ratings Agencies Downgrade the Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege,” L. Randall Wray of the Levy Institute reminded us that even the dollar—the totem of global capitalism—could be downgraded. Watching the self-proclaimed guardians of financial virtue doubt their own idol reveals a symbolic inversion of the global order. If even the dollar can tremble, what of African economies forever viewed with suspicion?
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This reversal teaches us something profound: trust is a collective fiction—fragile, shifting. The agencies that claim to measure it depend upon it. Their own credibility is a form of symbolic capital—and like all capital, it can erode.
That is why credit rating agencies must themselves be rated—for the sake of narrative and ethical sovereignty. Not out of revenge, but to restore symmetry in judgment. A true global democracy cannot tolerate unchecked powers. Evaluating them is to return them to critical reason—to remind them that the measure of risk must never be separated from the measure of meaning.
Sovereignty today is not only fiscal—it is narrative. It is the capacity to define what counts, what builds trust, what makes humanity. Africa, rich in imagination and living traditions, can transform rating into creation—into a polyphonic song where value is no longer reduced to solvency, but measured by the vitality of its peoples.
When Africa speaks its own language of value, numbers will cease to be instruments of silent domination. They will become signs of renewed confidence—of a chosen future, of a world being reinvented.
Because the true rating of a nation is not the one assigned to it—but the one it composes, patiently, with its people, its dreams, and its promises.
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Dr. Mahamadou Lamine Sagna is an accomplished professional with over 20 years of international experience bridging technology, innovation, and socio-economic development. Trained in both sociology (Ph.D.) and business (MBA), he combines analytical insight with strategic execution to help organizations design solutions that are innovative, inclusive, and globally competitive.
