Macro-financial risk 2026-04-26 12 min read

Senegal under Faye and Sonko: the audit, the suspension, and the LNG window

Faye took the presidency on March 24, 2024, ten days after walking out of Cap Manuel prison. A Cour des Comptes audit has since rewritten Senegal's debt, the IMF Extended Credit Facility is suspended, and GTA LNG plus Sangomar oil are the only positive variables.

Bassirou Diomaye Faye won the March 24, 2024 first round with 54.28 percent per the Direction Generale des Elections, ten days after release from Cap Manuel prison alongside Pastef leader Ousmane Sonko, who became Prime Minister. Pastef then took 130 of 165 seats in the November 17, 2024 legislatives. The Cour des Comptes audit of September 26, 2024 revised end-2023 debt to GDP from 65.9 to 99.7 percent (wider perimeter near 105 percent) and the 2023 deficit from 4.9 to 12.3 percent. The IMF Extended Credit Facility (USD 1.8 billion, June 2023) is suspended, and Senegal Eurobond spreads blew out to roughly 1,300 basis points by November 2024. Sangomar first oil (Woodside, 100 kbd) arrived June 11, 2024, and Greater Tortue Ahmeyim LNG (BP-Kosmos JV, 2.3 mtpa Phase 1) shipped first cargo February 13, 2025.

Faye's first round and the Pastef supermajority #

On March 24, 2024, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a 44 year old tax inspector with no prior elected office, won the first round of the presidential election with 54.28 percent of valid votes per the Direction Generale des Elections, on a turnout of 61.3 percent. Faye had been released from Cap Manuel prison on March 14, under the amnesty law passed March 6 to defuse the crisis triggered by President Macky Sall's attempt to postpone the vote from February 25 to December 15, 2024. The Constitutional Council struck down that postponement on February 15, 2024. Former Prime Minister Amadou Ba, the Benno Bokk Yaakaar candidate, took 35.79 percent. The Faye victory was the first single-round transfer of power in Senegalese history.

Faye's first act after his April 2 inauguration was to name Ousmane Sonko, the Pastef party leader and the architect of the 2021 to 2024 protest cycle, as Prime Minister. Sonko had been disqualified from the presidential ballot in January 2024 by the Constitutional Council on a 2023 defamation conviction, which is why Faye, his deputy in Pastef Les Patriotes, ran in his place. After eight months of cohabitation with a Benno-controlled National Assembly that blocked the Faye program, the President dissolved parliament on September 12, 2024 under Article 87 of the Constitution.

The November 17, 2024 legislatives delivered a landslide. The Pastef list won 130 of 165 seats per the Direction Generale des Elections proclamation on November 24, 2024, on a turnout of 49.7 percent. The Takku Wallu coalition led by Macky Sall took 16 seats, the Sam Sa Kaddu coalition led by Dakar Mayor Barthelemy Dias took 3, and 16 seats split across smaller lists. The Pastef share of 78.8 percent of seats is the largest single-party majority since the 1960 founding parliament. Sonko was confirmed Prime Minister on December 6, 2024 with a 25 minister cabinet and a declared austerity mandate.

The Cour des Comptes audit: 65 to 105 percent debt revision #

The Faye government commissioned an audit of public finances 2019 to 2024 from the Cour des Comptes on August 12, 2024, supported by the Inspection Generale d'Etat. The report, transmitted to the President on September 26, 2024 and published by the Ministere des Finances et du Budget, revised end-2023 fiscal and debt figures upward. Central government debt-to-GDP was revised from 65.9 percent (the figure in the 2024 Loi de Finances Initiale) to 99.7 percent. The 2023 fiscal deficit was revised from 4.9 to 12.3 percent of GDP. Bank financing, off-balance-sheet borrowing through the Caisse de Depots et Consignations, and supplier arrears accounted for most.

The wider public sector perimeter, which includes guaranteed parastatal debt at SENELEC, Petrosen, and the autoroute concessions, lifts the audited 2023 stock to roughly 105 percent of GDP. The audit documented FCFA 2,517 billion (USD 4.1 billion) of previously unrecorded liabilities, roughly 60 percent contracted with domestic and BCEAO-zone banks, 25 percent with non-resident commercial creditors, and 15 percent with bilateral and multilateral lenders. The Cour des Comptes did not characterize the discrepancy as fraud, but its language on data integrity at the Direction Generale du Tresor was unusually direct.

Metric, end-2023	Sall-era reported	Cour des Comptes audited	Revision (pp of GDP)
Central government debt to GDP, percent	65.9	99.7	33.8
Wider public sector debt to GDP, percent	73.5	105.7	32.2
Fiscal deficit, percent of GDP	4.9	12.3	7.4
Off-balance-sheet bank financing, FCFA billion	n.a.	1,506	n.a.
Supplier and contractor arrears, FCFA billion	n.a.	1,011	n.a.
Total previously unrecorded liabilities, USD billion	n.a.	4.1	n.a.

End-2023 Senegal fiscal and debt revision, Sall-era reporting versus Cour des Comptes audit (September 2024)

IMF Extended Credit Facility suspension and the 1,300 bps Eurobond reset #

The audit terminated the existing IMF program. The Extended Credit Facility and Extended Fund Facility blend (USD 1.8 billion approved June 26, 2023, with a Resilience and Sustainability Facility add-on of USD 324 million) had completed two reviews with disbursements totaling roughly USD 770 million. The September 2024 third review staff visit to Dakar was suspended after the Cour des Comptes findings became known to Fund staff. The IMF Article IV mission concluded October 4, 2024 confirmed that no further disbursements would proceed and that any successor program would require a misreporting determination under the IMF's Articles of Agreement.

The market reaction was brutal. The Senegal 2033 Eurobond traded at a Z-spread of roughly 480 basis points over US Treasuries on September 25, 2024. By October 7 the spread had widened to 1,021 bps, and by mid-November it touched 1,310 bps, the widest since 2020 COVID stress. Moody's downgraded Senegal from Ba3 to B1 on October 4, 2024, then to B3 on January 21, 2025. S&P moved from B+ to B on October 11, 2024. Fitch withdrew its rating in December 2024. By April 2026 the 2033 spread had compressed to roughly 720 bps on a tentative March 2026 staff-level understanding, but no Board approval has materialized.

Senegal faces FCFA 4,100 billion (USD 6.7 billion) of public debt service over 2025 and 2026 combined per the Ministere des Finances medium-term framework, of which roughly USD 2.1 billion is external commercial. The 2025 Eurobond maturity of USD 600 million was rolled with a USD 750 million Sukuk issued domestically and via the WAEMU regional market in February 2025 at 9.75 percent. The 2026 budget law passed December 28, 2025 targets a fiscal deficit of 7.8 percent of GDP, down from a 2024 outturn of 11.6 percent.

Indicator	Sep 25, 2024	Nov 15, 2024	Jan 31, 2025	Apr 1, 2026
Senegal 2033 Eurobond Z-spread, bps over UST	480	1,310	1,140	720
Moody's sovereign rating	Ba3	B1	B3	B3
S&P sovereign rating	B+	B	B	B
IMF ECF status	Active	Suspended	Suspended	Staff-level pending
FCFA per USD	601	618	624	611

Senegal sovereign credit dashboard, September 2024 to April 2026

GTA LNG first cargo and Sangomar first oil: the upstream offset #

The single positive macro variable is hydrocarbons. The Sangomar oil field, 100 kilometers offshore south of Dakar, achieved first oil on June 11, 2024 under operator Woodside Energy (82 percent) with Petrosen (18 percent), three months before the audit shock. Phase 1 nameplate is 100,000 barrels per day, with 23 development wells tied to the Leopold Sedar Senghor FPSO. Woodside reported average production of 76,000 bpd net in Q4 2025. At a Brent average of 78 dollars per barrel, gross revenue from Sangomar in 2025 reached USD 2.2 billion, of which Senegal captured roughly USD 480 million via royalties (10 percent), profit oil after cost recovery, and corporate income tax. This is the first significant non-tax export revenue in Senegalese fiscal history.

The Greater Tortue Ahmeyim LNG project shipped its first cargo on February 13, 2025, three years behind original FID schedule. The field straddles the Senegal-Mauritania maritime border, developed under the 2018 inter-governmental cooperation agreement with a 50-50 production split. Phase 1 (near-shore breakwater FLNG Gimi from Golar LNG, plus FPSO and subsea-to-shore pipeline) has nameplate capacity of 2.3 mtpa. The joint venture is BP (operator, 56 percent), Kosmos Energy (27 percent), Petrosen (10 percent), and Mauritania's SMHPM (7 percent). BP's Q1 2026 trading update reported 14 cargoes lifted between February 2025 and March 2026 at roughly 78 percent of nameplate. Phase 2, which would lift capacity to 2.5 to 3.0 mtpa, has been deferred pending fiscal terms renegotiation.

Faye and Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani held bilateral summits in Nouakchott (May 2024) and Dakar (November 2024) confirming the GTA framework. Both governments are demanding a revision of the 2018 inter-governmental agreement to capture upside above a Henry Hub netback threshold. Combined cash flow from Sangomar plus GTA, gross to Senegal, is roughly USD 750 million in 2026 rising to USD 1.4 billion by 2028 (2.4 to 4.0 percent of GDP). Material, but it does not close the financing gap on its own.

Pastef pan-Africanism, French withdrawal, and the Saint-Louis pact #

The Faye-Sonko foreign policy is the most consequential ideological reset since Diouf to Wade in 2000. The administration has reframed Senegal's external posture along three axes: monetary sovereignty within WAEMU, renegotiation of fishing and military access agreements with European partners, and active engagement on coup-affected states. Sonko's December 2024 policy address reiterated the Pastef position that the existing FCFA peg to the euro is incompatible with monetary sovereignty, while stopping short of an exit timeline. Senegal remains in WAEMU and BCEAO, but has joined Cote d'Ivoire and Togo in pushing the ECO regional currency project toward 2027.

The most operational realignment is military and fishing. On November 28, 2024 Faye announced that French military bases in Senegal would close by end-2025. The handover of Camp Geille and the Ouakam airbase was completed March 14, 2025, ending 65 years of permanent French military presence and reducing the French Africa footprint to Djibouti alone. Separately, the Saint-Louis (Ndar) fishing accord with the European Union, last renewed in 2019 at EUR 8.5 million per year for tuna and hake quotas, was not renewed at its November 17, 2024 expiry. The non-renewal answers overfishing and youth unemployment in the Ndar pirogue fleet, where artisanal landings declined 38 percent from 2018 to 2023 per the Ministere des Peches.

On the African Union, Faye has positioned Senegal as a bridge between ECOWAS and the Alliance of Sahel States (Mali, Burkina, Niger). Senegal supported the AU Peace and Security Council's January 2025 communique that opened a path for the three juntas back into the AU framework while keeping ECOWAS sanctions in place. Sonko hosted Burkinabe leader Ibrahim Traore in Dakar in February 2025, breaking the isolation imposed by the Sall government.

2026 outlook: the IMF gate, the audit reckoning, the LNG ramp #

The 2026 Senegal file resolves on three sequenced gates. The first is the IMF gate. The March 2026 staff-level understanding requires Board approval for a successor Extended Credit Facility, which in turn requires a misreporting determination on the 2019 to 2023 data, a prior-actions package on revenue mobilization (VAT base broadening and the digital services tax), and a debt management strategy that addresses the FCFA 4,100 billion service stack. Without an IMF anchor, the June 2026 Eurobond refinancing of USD 500 million and the regional Sukuk maturities are likely to clear at coupons above 10 percent, locking in interest costs near 24 percent of revenue.

The second gate is the audit reckoning. The Sonko government has filed criminal complaints against eight former senior Sall-era officials on charges of embezzlement and false reporting, with the first indictments handed down by the Pole Judiciaire Financier in January 2026. The judicial process is intertwined with the IMF misreporting determination, which means the speed of the prosecutions effectively gates the macro program. A drawn-out judicial cycle that runs into 2027 risks pushing IMF Board approval past the 2026 refinancing wall.

The third gate is the upstream ramp. Sangomar Phase 1 is producing at design capacity, but Sangomar Phase 2 requires a Woodside FID that has slipped to 2027 on capex discipline grounds. GTA Phase 1 has not reached 90 percent utilization. GTA Phase 2 is contingent on the fiscal terms renegotiation. A successful FID on both by end-2026 would lift combined gross export revenue by 60 percent into 2028. The Strategos and Argus platforms in the deluair monorepo monitor the Eurobond curve, BCEAO regional auctions, and GTA cargo liftings, with the next decision point at the IMF Executive Board window in June 2026.

Sources #

Cite this brief

@misc{hossen2026senegalfayesonko2026,
  author = {Hossen, Md Deluair},
  title  = {Senegal under Faye and Sonko: the audit, the suspension, and the LNG window},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://deluair.com/consultancy/insights/senegal-faye-sonko-2026},
  note   = {Deluair Consultancy briefs}
}

Hossen, M. D. (2026). Senegal under Faye and Sonko: the audit, the suspension, and the LNG window. Deluair Consultancy briefs. https://deluair.com/consultancy/insights/senegal-faye-sonko-2026

Hossen, Md Deluair. "Senegal under Faye and Sonko: the audit, the suspension, and the LNG window." Deluair Consultancy briefs, 2026-04-26. https://deluair.com/consultancy/insights/senegal-faye-sonko-2026.

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