By Ismail H. Warsame

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – the twin high priests of global finance – have a peculiar religion. They worship spreadsheets, recite fiscal prayers, and preach sermons about “economic restructuring” to the starving faithful of the Global South. They never speak of corruption, only “leakages.” They don’t mention poverty, only “growth potential.”

You will never hear an IMF mission chief whisper the word thievery, even when billions vanish overnight from aid budgets. They call it “misallocation of resources.” When their Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) demand the shutdown of hospitals, schools, and local industries, they describe it as “fiscal discipline.” And when an African or Latin American minister flies first class to Washington to beg for another loan, it’s labeled a “capacity-building dialogue.”

The irony? These institutions claim to fight poverty by prescribing the same poison that caused it—tighten your belts, sell your assets, and privatize what’s left of your soul. They never ask who benefits from the pain they inflict. This is not a bug in the system; it is a feature. As one analysis notes, austerity is a tool for “shifting resources away from working people and into the hands of the wealthy elite,” ensuring that “austerity is for the workers, not for the millionaires.”

Their favorite mantra is “revenue mobilization.” Translation: tax the people who can’t escape. In Egypt, this meant quadrupling the price of subsidized bread, a staple for 65 million citizens, and hiking the cost of thousands of medicines. Never mind that the elites stash billions abroad with the silent complicity of Western banks. Never mind that every so-called reform program leads to more suffering, more dependency, and more photo-ops for the same recycled economists who caused the problem in the first place.

The IMF doesn’t see people—it sees ratios. It levies punitive “surcharges” on its most indebted borrowers, which act like junk fees on a late loan payment, further draining the budgets of nations like Morocco, which is still recovering from a devastating earthquake and a severe water crisis. The World Bank doesn’t see families—it sees feasibility studies. Together, they turn nations into laboratory rats, testing economic experiments no Western country would dare apply to itself. This dynamic is a modern form of neo-colonialism, a system of control that, as Thomas Sankara observed, doesn’t always come with guns but often arrives in the subtle form of a loan or blackmail.

In Somalia, Ethiopia, or Sudan, they call it “support for resilience.” In reality, it’s the same old neocolonial script with a digital signature. The poor are told to be patient. The rich are told to invest. And the IMF is told to continue the good work.

Welcome to the gospel according to the IMF—where corruption is invisible, suffering is data, and salvation comes with a PowerPoint presentation.

WDM Verdict:
They don’t fix economies—they restructure despair.