The real story behind Senegal’s stalled special funds reform is not a lack of political will but a procedural labyrinth that has quietly neutralized every attempt at oversight. On August 13, Justice Minister Moussa Sarr introduced a government amendment designed to reduce the bill to general principles, leaving the specifics of implementation and oversight to regulatory power—essentially the executive itself—under Articles 67 and 76 of the Constitution. That single move set the tone for everything that followed.
The effort to regulate special funds, launched by lawmakers weeks ago, remains unfinished, and this very absence of a definitive framework is why a significant share of discretionary state spending continues to escape effective oversight by the National Assembly. The process began with vigor: on August 10, 2026, deputies examined in emergency session an ordinary bill on the legal regime for special credits, championed by Member of Parliament Guy Marius Sagna. The text aimed to dismantle the historical opacity surrounding these funds—traditionally housed at the Presidency and the Prime Ministry—by establishing a strict legal regime and a confidential audit mechanism entrusted to a parliamentary commission and magistrates from the Court of Auditors.
But the executive pushed back hard by mid-August. On August 13, Minister of Justice Moussa Sarr introduced a government amendment to strip the bill down to general principles, relegating precise execution and oversight modalities to regulatory power—and therefore to the executive itself—under Articles 67 and 76 of the Constitution. A second amendment, filed on August 14, proposed explicitly including the Presidency, the National Assembly, and the Prime Ministry within the reform’s scope, signaling that the controversy was less about the principle of stronger oversight than about the level of legal norm and the exact reach of parliamentary control. The bill passed on August 19, only to be suspended the next day following a legal challenge from the executive.
That challenge proved decisive: on August 25, 2026, the Constitutional Council flatly rejected the ordinary bill, ruling that the regime for public credits fell exclusively under organic law, not an ordinary law passed through a simple parliamentary initiative. The censure forced deputies to start over on a different legal foundation. On September 2, 2026, the Bureau of the National Assembly declared admissible a new organic bill, this time directly amending Organic Law No. 2020-07 of February 26, 2020, on finance laws. Under the institution’s rules, the President of the Republic must now be consulted for an opinion before the text can be sent to committee and placed on the agenda—a procedural step that further delays any effective oversight mechanism.
In plain terms, until this process concludes, special credits continue to escape any external accounting oversight. National defense secrecy remains preserved in all versions examined so far; the stated goal is not to eliminate the confidentiality inherent to sovereign spending, but to replace total absence of oversight with a circumscribed control exercised by bodies authorized to access secrets without disclosing them. Still, whether this oversight will fully extend to funds at the Presidency, the Prime Ministry, and the National Assembly itself remains divisive, with some observers suggesting that deputies may be reluctant to subject their own credits to the same level of scrutiny as the executive’s.
Financially, the stakes are poorly understood. Since 2011, the amount of special fund credits in the initial finance law has been renewed identically at 8,856,296,000 CFA francs, even as actual amounts mobilized during the year consistently deviate from that figure—without any independent verification mechanism to account for it precisely. Until the organic bill completes its parliamentary journey, all these expenditures—from the Presidency to the Prime Ministry and potentially the National Assembly—remain beyond fully operational parliamentary oversight, despite the offensive launched by Ousmane Sonko and his fellow deputies since early August.
Institutional debates on the bill reveal major disagreements. The parliamentary majority wants to restrict these funds to sovereign domains alone, while the executive defends their use for humanitarian and social emergencies. Tensions center on defining the perimeters and purposes of the funds, as well as oversight methods.
