Mereja.Forum

[Zmeselo]

FINANCE
Tunisia rejects IMF loans and wants to join BRICS

Published 21 hours ago

By Newsroom

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/04/15/t ... oin-brics/



Mahmoud bin Mabrouk, spokesman for the pro-president ‘July 25 Movement’ in Tunisia, said that his country wants to join BRICS, a group of leading emerging economies comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, that is often seen as an alternative to the Western hegemony.

In November, neighboring Algeria filed an official application to join BRICS, and bin Mabrouk said Tunisia would follow in its North African neighbor’s footsteps. Egypt has also announced its intention to join the bloc.

Sharan Grewal, a nonresident fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, told Al-Monitor, https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/20 ... utm_medium

It’s not clear how official this bid is. It didn’t come from President Kais Saied or any governmental official, it came from one of the many small, new political movements that have emerged in support of the president since 2021.

Tunisia has been at an impasse in securing a $2 billion bailout package from the International Monetary Fund.

He [Saied] has railed against the proposed IMF program https://www.al-monitor.com/pro/memos/tu ... t-imf-deal — that his own government negotiated — as a foreign diktat, and so he could in theory be viewing the BRICS as an alternative mechanism for foreign aid and support,

Grewal added.

The 14th BRICS summit’s Beijing Declaration made clear the organization supports membership expansion; China upholds the BRICS spirit of openness, win-win cooperation to accelerate the process,

Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tunisia’s reported bid to join BRICS.

Dr. Sabina Henneberg, Soref Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy pointed out that Tunisia needs important structural economic reforms https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/20 ... onomic-aid in order to resume pre-2011 levels of GDP growth and avoid long-term debt.

Beyond that, Tunisia would probably need to acquire more of a reputation as an international powerhouse — recently it has been trying to assert an anti-Western position but not necessarily with strong contributions to the global economy to offer,

she added.

Hennenberg said that Tunisia’s historical ties with Western countries like the US will also mean that it will need to demonstrate stronger anti-West credentials.

Alexandra Blackman, assistant professor of government at Cornell University, said that one of the guiding principles of Tunisian politics, especially under President Saied, is the rejection of foreign interference, and this mantra has been repeated throughout the IMF negotiations.

She said BRICS may seem more appealing as it is perceived at coming with less foreign interference than the IMF, which some critics say is too aligned to US policy.

[Fiyameta]

Tunisia rejecting the loans shows that the IMF has been using diabolical methods to force developing countries go into debt traps that ruins their economies and make them dependent on foreign aid. Ethiopia's refusal to accept IMF loans resulted in TPLF's terrorist attacks against the Ethiopian Northern command forces at the order of the international loan sharks. The tragic deaths of 1.5 million Tegaru in order to force Ethiopia accept IMF loans was the most notorious scheme in world's history.

Poor Abiy was faced with a moral dilemma. On the one hand, he wanted to keep Ethiopia debt free. On the other hand, his refusal to accept IMF loans means that millions of Tigray's child soldiers will perish in mercenary wars instigated by the loan sharks.

Here's excerpt from John Perkins's book "The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"

I’m haunted every day by what I did as an economic hit man. I’m haunted by the lies I told back then about the World Bank. I’m haunted by the ways in which that bank, its sister organizations, and I empowered US corporations to spread their cancerous tentacles across the planet. I’m haunted by the payoffs to the leaders of poor countries, the blackmail, and the threats that if they resisted, if they refused to accept loans that would enslave their countries in debt, the CIA’s jackals would overthrow or assassinate them.

I wake up sometimes to the horrifying images of heads of state, friends of mine, who died violent deaths because they refused to betray their people. Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, I try to scrub the blood from my hands.

[DefendTheTruth]

Well, smart could be in the eyes of the onlookers, depending on from which angle you might be looking at it.

Zmeselo, I think you wrote somewhere recently something like "it is only in Ethiopia that this can happen" or something similar, essentially criticizing the government's peace deal with the ragtag militia of TPLF, as if Ethiopia had any other better choice. If there is no other better choice, then the next relative better will be the best. Ethiopia had to make a painful choice of ending the war as soon as possible and rescue the economy from a total collapse, else the whole 120 souls will rise up and effectively eat up the government itself.

Ethiopia is faced with multitude of challenges, rising population size, political turmoil one after the other, insurrections in different parties of the country, one of lead to a devastating war, global shocks of different kinds and scales in the last 2-3 years alone, effects of climate change, effects of locust swarms, insurgency of different kinds and maginitudes, the list is very long. Having managed to overcome all those challenges without a threat of a collapse under the resulting effects is already a miracle, if we can look at it more objectively.

Still Ethiopia has its army of well equiped technocrats dealing with the imposition from the Bretton Woods institutions and they are fighting back as much as they could, within the framework of what is possible for a third world country like Ethiopia there.

Flexibility for the country is very important. One size does not fit all

This country is facing massive challenges and it could only be better in the years to come and it's critically important to navigate the broad spaces of different spectrums very much attentively.

[DefendTheTruth]

But there are also, despite all the challenges, positive outlooks: Ethiopia is growing and growing relatively fast.

However, Ethiopia, which the IMF had projected in its October 2022 outlook would overtake Kenya to become Eastern Africa’s largest economy, is now expected to overtake both Angola and Kenya to become the third largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa.

[Horus]

Well, smart could be in the eyes of the onlookers, depending on from which angle you might be looking at it.

Zmeselo, I think you wrote somewhere recently something like "it is only in Ethiopia that this can happen" or something similar, essentially criticizing the government's peace deal with the ragtag militia of TPLF, as if Ethiopia had any other better choice. If there is no other better choice, then the next relative better will be the best. Ethiopia had to make a painful choice of ending the war as soon as possible and rescue the economy from a total collapse, else the whole 120 souls will rise up and effectively eat up the government itself.

Ethiopia is faced with multitude of challenges, rising population size, political turmoil one after the other, insurrections in different parties of the country, one of lead to a devastating war, global shocks of different kinds and scales in the last 2-3 years alone, effects of climate change, effects of locust swarms, insurgency of different kinds and maginitudes, the list is very long. Having managed to overcome all those challenges without a threat of a collapse under the resulting effects is already a miracle, if we can look at it more objectively.

Still Ethiopia has its army of well equiped technocrats dealing with the imposition from the Bretton Woods institutions and they are fighting back as much as they could, within the framework of what is possible for a third world country like Ethiopia there.

Flexibility for the country is very important. One size does not fit all

This country is facing massive challenges and it could only be better in the years to come and it's critically important to navigate the broad spaces of different spectrums very much attentively.

Idiotic selfie monologue. It is the system, stupid! It is the ወረሞ tribal ethnocracy that is the mother of all these crises and chaos!

[Fiyameta]

But there are also, despite all the challenges, positive outlooks: Ethiopia is growing and growing relatively fast.

However, Ethiopia, which the IMF had projected in its October 2022 outlook would overtake Kenya to become Eastern Africa’s largest economy, is now expected to overtake both Angola and Kenya to become the third largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa.

Back in 2011, when the IMF was projecting Eritrea's economy to grow by 17%, our Eritrean minister of investment Dr. Woldai Fitur, however, advised us not to believe the IMF report, for the report was not only misleading but factually‌ ‌incorrect,‌ and outright malicious‌. Suppose you drive to a car dealership looking to buy a new car, and a smooth talking salesman would compliment you on how well you took care of your old car in an effort to persuade you into buying a very expensive car that's beyond your budget. Sales pitch.

The IMF also uses similar sales pitches and tactics to persuade governments into accepting loans. Image conscious governments in particular are prey for sales pitches. When the IMF was reporting 11% growth for Ethiopia during TPLF's reign, around 20 million people in the country were surviving on a Safety Net Program, while the external debt kept doubling, tripling, quadrupling, as it reached a staggering $30 billion dollars!! IMF's projection is all smoke and mirrors.

[DefendTheTruth]

But there are also, despite all the challenges, positive outlooks: Ethiopia is growing and growing relatively fast.

However, Ethiopia, which the IMF had projected in its October 2022 outlook would overtake Kenya to become Eastern Africa’s largest economy, is now expected to overtake both Angola and Kenya to become the third largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa.

Back in 2011, when the IMF was projecting Eritrea's economy to grow by 17%, our Eritrean minister of investment Dr. Woldai Fitur, however, advised us not to believe the IMF report, for the report was not only misleading but factually‌ ‌incorrect,‌ and outright malicious‌. Suppose you drive to a car dealership looking to buy a new car, and a smooth talking salesman would compliment you on how well you took care of your old car in an effort to persuade you into buying a very expensive car that's beyond your budget. Sales pitch.

The IMF also uses similar sales pitches and tactics to persuade governments into accepting loans. Image conscious governments in particular are prey for sales pitches. When the IMF was reporting 11% growth for Ethiopia during TPLF's reign, around 20 million people in the country were surviving on a Safety Net Program, while the external debt kept doubling, tripling, quadrupling, as it reached a staggering $30 billion dollars!! IMF's projection is all smoke and mirrors.

It could be possible that the IMF is somehow sugarcoating its forcast reports for some reason, I am not an insider and can't judge that objectively.

But still in my little understanding of the subject matter the idea of trying to equate the number (proportion) of poors in the country to the trajectory of econmic growth, measured in GDP, and the amount of debt a country might have taken to realise it should be lack of the understanding of the subject matter at hand.

I am a learner, could learn something more today, if you have one for me.

[Zmeselo]

Truth defender,

I hear you loud & clear.

I know it's all about money, at the end of the day. It's about money for Tunisia too though, but the country made a better choice for the source of the money (BRICS) in my opinion.

Besides, the BRICS don't harass countries to change their internal politics to get the money.