The IMF is perhaps most notorious for the imposition of ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ in the 1980s – which are widely considered to have stalled development, undermining progress on health, damaging education systems, failing to reduce poverty and deepening inequality. IMF loans were given to countries on the condition that they agreed to balance their deficits, squeeze public spending, open their markets and privatise key sectors of the economy.

And yet, little has changed since the 1990s. Although the IMF’s rhetoric has now moved to focus on poverty reduction and growth – in practice this is just a disguise and the same package of neoliberal policies is enforced, either through loan conditions or coercive policy advice.

After the 2008 financial crisis it seemed that the IMF would really shift, recognising that its tight ‘fiscal consolidation’ may have been part of the problem, but again almost nothing has shifted in practice. The IMF continues its default attachment to austerity, urging countries to cut public spending to balance their books. The single most widely recommended IMF policy is to cut or freeze public sector wage bills.

The impression given by the IMF is that this recommendation is about squeezing wasteful government bureaucracy, but the largest groups on the wage bill are teachers and health workers. Most low- and middle-income countries that are forced to accept the IMF’s advice have shortages of teachers and health workers, urgently needing to recruit more of them and sometimes also to pay them a living wage.

But of course, this becomes impossible if your overall wage bill spending is cut – and it creates the single biggest block to making progress on global health and education goals. Women are triply disadvantaged, losing opportunities for decent public sector jobs, lacking access to public services, and taking on a disproportionate share of the unpaid care work that rises when public services fail.

Some IMF staff have persistently raised concerns that neoliberalism has been oversold and when tasked with producing their own staff analysis on what it would take to properly finance the sustainable development goals, their conclusion was clear. Rather than cutting public spending, the IMF ought to support countries to increase their tax-to-GDP ratios by five percentage points in the medium term. This could allow a doubling of spending on education and health in many countries.

But, despite this being the IMF’s own staff analysis it has never systematically informed its country level advice in practice.

Sometimes the IMF will recommend increasing taxes, but almost invariably this is through value added taxes that pass the burden most onto those who are least able to pay, again disproportionately affecting women, and often triggering protests as we have seen most recently in Kenya.

The IMF still refuses to systematically call for progressive taxes on the income and wealth of the richest individuals and corporations – which is the only fair way to expand revenues for development.

Last year, the IMF held its first annual meetings in Africa for 50 years and it was surely no surprise that many participants condemned the previous decades as representing fifty years of failure in the continent.

Debt crisis fuels the IMF

By following the IMF’s prescriptions, often at significant cost to national development goals, one would at least expect countries to have stabilised and avoided debt crisis. But 54 countries are now in a debt crisis and many are spending more on servicing their debt than on financing education or health.

The IMF has actively failed to prevent the present debt crisis which is today more severe than it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Indeed, this hints at a basic problem. Debt is the source of power for the IMF. It is debt that forces countries to come to the IMF as the lender of last resort. It is debt that forces countries to accept the IMF’s harsh loan conditions and coercive advice on austerity, undermining their own development goals. Without debt, the IMF would be powerless!

There is now a growing move to establish a new debt workout mechanism under the United Nations, creating a transparent, binding, and multilateral framework for debt crisis resolution which would remove the IMF from the process.

Such an initiative would address unsustainable and illegitimate debt and provide systematic, timely, and fair restructuring of sovereign debt, including debt cancellation, in a process convening all creditors. It echoes recent successful moves to shift global tax policy setting away from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development club of rich nations to a more representative and inclusive body through a new UN Framework Convention on Tax.

Human rights activists, tax justice campaigners, public service advocates and many civil society organisations hope that the Financing for Development meeting in Spain in 2025 might accelerate progress towards such a fundamental overhaul of the global financial architecture. It is certainly long overdue.

Back in Kenya, the weekly protests haven’t abated, despite a harsh police crackdown using snipers and tear gas, leaving at least 39 people dead. President Ruto has made some concessions including firing his entire cabinet, but whether he’s willing, or indeed able, to part ways with the IMF is yet to be seen.

And Kenya isn’t the only country where the people have had enough of the way in which the IMF exploits debt. Thousands of Argentinians took to the streets this January against the new president’s cost-cutting measures recommended by the IMF. What’s more, the past two years alone have seen mass movements against the IMF in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana and Sri Lanka – and such protests are intensifying.

Meanwhile, the IMF’s annual meeting held in Marrakech last year was met with large demonstrations and a counter-summit.

“This global financial architecture was not established by us, it was not established for us, so it cannot be the financial architecture that will help us today. It’s neocolonial wealth extraction,” Tunisian-American economist Fadhel Kaboub said in an interview outside the IMF counter-summit in Marrakech.

People around the world are rising up and demanding decolonisation. After 80 years, the lumbering colonial institution must be retired or abolished – or at least to have its power over debt forcibly removed. Time’s up for the IMF. Let’s make this its last birthday.

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Arthur Larok is a Ugandan human rights activist and Secretary General of ActionAid International.

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