A claim that Mali has become the first African country to be debt-free has circulated widely across social media platforms. The message, retrieved from WhatsApp, claims the country’s finance minister made the announcement.
The message, shared along with an image, states, “Mali is now a debt-free country. The country’s Finance Minister has announced that Mali has become the first African country to be debt-free. After the military took over, they sold all the assets belonging to the corrupt elites and sent them to jail, including the former president’s son and ministers.”
Charles Oputa, popularly known as Charly Boy or Area Fada, shared the same post on X on November 15, 2024. The post has garnered over 275k views as of the time of retrieval from the microblogging platform.
The same claim has been shared widely across social media platforms, as seen here, here, here, and here.
Claim: Mali has become the first African country to be debt-free, as allegedly announced by the country’s finance minister.
Verification
The CDD War Room investigated the viral claim to determine its accuracy. The source of the claim was traced to a post by a platform known as Record TV Africa. It was observed that the viral content was identical to the post shared by Record TV Africa on November 13, 2024. The only source cited in the post was the country’s finance minister.
Further checks were conducted to verify if the country’s economy minister, Alousseni Sanou, had made such an announcement. However, no credible media sources reported any such disclosure by the minister.
In October 2024, Sanou reportedly announced on state television that “Mali will pay off 200 billion CFA francs ($332 million) of its internal debt from next week until the end of the year in a bid to ease its debt burden.”
While the economy minister did not provide an overall figure for the country’s total internal debt, this announcement of debt repayment directly contradicts the viral claim that Mali is debt-free or the first African country to achieve such a status. CDD War Room also checked the figures of debt owed by African countries. According to FDI Intelligence, which quoted figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mali as at 2024 owes the IMF the sum of $479.3 million.
Verdict: FALSE
The claim that Mali has become the first African country to be debt-free is false. No credible evidence or official announcement supports this assertion, and statements from the country’s economy minister directly contradict the claim, highlighting ongoing efforts to ease the nation’s debt burden rather than eliminating it entirely.
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