On 25 June 2024, Kenyan protestors broke through the gates of the parliament building in Nairobi. Several died in the clashes that followed. President William Ruto withdrew the Finance Bill 2024 the following day. The bill had proposed a 16 per cent VAT on bread and cooking oil, new levies on vegetable cooking oil and financial transactions, and a tax on imported cooking gas. These were not random policy choices. They were written into Kenya's fiscal framework to satisfy the conditions of a $3 billion International Monetary Fund loan agreed in 2023. The IMF required revenue measures. The government delivered them. The street rejected them. Fourteen people were killed before the bill was withdrawn.

This sequence is not unique to Kenya. It is the template. Sri Lanka's 2022 uprising, which forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country, followed a period of acute fiscal austerity driven by the unsustainability of a debt stock the government could no longer service. The IMF programme that followed required VAT increases from 8 to 15 per cent, the removal of fuel subsidies, and energy price hikes. In Ghana, the 2023 IMF programme attached to a $3 billion loan included public sector wage freezes and subsidy cuts in an economy already experiencing 54 per cent food inflation. In Zambia, the first Sub-Saharan African country to default in the post-COVID period, the 2023 IMF programme required reductions in the public sector wage bill.

The pattern is consistent enough to be a model. A country accumulates debt. It cannot service that debt. It approaches the IMF. The IMF attaches conditions. The conditions remove subsidies, increase taxes on consumption goods, and reduce public employment. These measures fall disproportionately on the poorest. The poorest protest. The government calls the protests a security problem. The cycle continues.

How Conditionality Removes the Tools to Respond

The structural logic of IMF conditionality is internally coherent. A country that cannot pay its debts needs to reduce its fiscal deficit. Reducing a fiscal deficit requires either cutting spending or raising revenue. The IMF, drawing on decades of programme design, has standard tools for both. The problem is not the logic. The problem is what the tools remove.

A government facing civil unrest has a limited set of policy instruments available to it. It can increase social transfers to reduce immediate material hardship. It can subsidise essential goods to keep their price below the level that triggers further grievance. It can expand public employment to absorb some of the youth unemployment that, as this series has documented, provides the mobilisation base for sustained protest. None of these instruments are available to a government in an IMF programme that requires fiscal consolidation. The conditionality removes precisely the tools the government would need to respond to the conditions it has created.

This is not a critique of the IMF as an institution. It is a description of a structural contradiction that the Fund's own internal reviews have acknowledged. A 2023 IMF review noted that conditionality in some programmes had been "excessively front-loaded," meaning that fiscal adjustment was compressed into the early years of a programme rather than phased over a longer period. The review was technically accurate. It did not address the underlying question of whether the adjustment, front-loaded or otherwise, was compatible with maintaining social stability in economies already operating at the edge of their populations' tolerance.

Research by Axel Dreher and Martin Gassebner, published in the economics literature, has demonstrated that IMF programmes are statistically associated with an increased probability of government change through irregular means, including protest and coup, in programme countries. The mechanism is not difficult to identify: programmes impose concentrated costs on populations in the short term in exchange for diffuse macroeconomic benefits in the medium term. The people bearing the immediate costs are not always the same people who will receive the eventual benefits. When the gap between cost and benefit falls on the poorest, the political sustainability of the programme is compromised before the macroeconomic adjustment can complete.

The Debt Service Trap: How the Numbers Work

The mechanics of the debt service trap are straightforward. A government borrows in dollars or euros to finance infrastructure, subsidise imported goods, or cover a fiscal deficit. The debt is denominated in a currency the government cannot print. It is serviced from revenues collected in local currency. When the local currency depreciates, as it does under fiscal stress, the real burden of the debt increases without any new borrowing having occurred. The government then needs to generate more local currency revenue to service the same dollar debt. The way to generate more revenue is to tax more or spend less. Both options reduce domestic demand. Reduced domestic demand slows growth. Slower growth reduces revenue. The deficit widens again. Another programme is needed.

Argentina has been through this cycle twenty-two times since 1958. Each programme has achieved its stated short-term objectives, stabilising the exchange rate or reducing inflation, before the underlying conditions reassert themselves. The largest single loan in the IMF's history, $57 billion extended to Argentina in 2018, did not prevent a further default in 2020 or a new programme in 2022. The technical apparatus of adjustment is functioning. The political economy of adjustment is not.

Pakistan's relationship with the IMF tells a similar story. The country has been in IMF programmes for roughly half of its post-independence history. Each programme has required fuel subsidy removal and energy tariff increases that directly increase the cost of living for households at the lower end of the income distribution. Each programme has been followed by a period of renewed fiscal stress that eventually requires another programme. The populations who bear the adjustment costs in one programme are frequently the same populations bearing them in the next.

The Pretext of Fiscal Sustainability

The language of IMF conditionality is the language of fiscal sustainability. This framing performs important political work. It positions the adjustment as a technical necessity rather than a political choice. It locates the problem in the borrowing country's own fiscal behaviour rather than in the international financial architecture that structured the borrowing. And it insulates the conditions attached to the loan from democratic challenge, because the conditions are presented as the requirements of arithmetic rather than the preferences of creditors.

The framing is not entirely wrong. Countries that cannot service their debts do face a genuine fiscal constraint. The question is not whether adjustment is necessary. The question is who bears the cost of adjustment, how quickly, and with what protection for those least able to absorb it. These are political questions. They are answered within IMF programme design as if they were technical ones. The people standing in the streets of Nairobi in June 2024 were not making a technical objection to Kenya's debt sustainability arithmetic. They were making a political objection to who was being asked to pay for it.

The riot and the bailout are not, in this sense, separate events connected by a causal chain. They are the same event experienced at two different points in the same timeline. The austerity that generates the fiscal conditions for the bailout and the austerity required by the bailout are continuous. The people who pay are, systematically, those at the bottom. The people who lend are, systematically, made whole. This is not the result of malice. It is the result of how the architecture of international sovereign lending was designed, by whom, and in whose interest.