The African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) is a pan-African multilateral financial institution established in 1993 with the mandate to finance and promote trade both within Africa and between Africa and other regions.
In January 2026, it terminated its credit rating relationship with Fitch Ratings after a prolonged dispute over a downgrade that edged the bank towards “junk” status.
Afreximbank maintained that Fitch had misunderstood its treaty-based mandate and its preferred creditor protections, effectively assessing it as a commercial lender rather than a pan-African development institution with a unique public-interest role.
In a statement, the African Union’s African Peer Review Mechanism said it viewed Afreximbank’s decision as justified, cautioning that further unsolicited ratings from Fitch could mislead investors and distort perceptions of African development finance.
Although Afreximbank retains investment-grade ratings from other agencies, mainstream commentary treated the clash with Fitch as a narrow technical quarrel over metrics and models.
That misses the point.
The stand-off is about power: who gets to define financial risk in Africa, whose knowledge counts and by what standards Africa’s development institutions are judged.
The episode revives long-standing but newly urgent questions: Who ultimately controls the narrative of Africa’s creditworthiness? What does the control mean for the continent’s development, sovereignty and future?
Credit ratings as instruments of power
Credit rating agencies present themselves as neutral arbiters of financial risk. In reality, they are among the most powerful unelected actors in the global economy.
A single downgrade can raise borrowing costs overnight, trigger capital flight and force governments or development banks to abandon long-term investments in infrastructure, climate adaptation or industrialisation.
For Africa, this power asymmetry is acute. The “Big Three” credit rating agencies — Fitch Ratings, Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings — control about 95% of the international market for credit ratings. Their methodologies, designed for mature capitalist economies and long contested for misreading African realities, are nevertheless applied almost wholesale to African states and development finance institutions whose mandates are explicitly counter-cyclical, developmental and political in the most constructive sense of the term.
This is not a technical oversight. It is structural bias.
African countries consistently pay more to borrow than peers with comparable fundamentals elsewhere. The “prejudice premium” is driven by subjective risk perceptions and foreign exchange risks rather than by default data.
Even multilateral African banks with preferred creditor status are assessed using commercial banking metrics that disregard their treaty-based protections and development mandates.
The result is a system that systematically overprices African risk and underprices African resilience.
Fitch’s decision to downgrade Afreximbank hinged largely on its exposure to African sovereigns and the classification of certain loans as non-performing.
Afreximbank, supported by the African Union’s African Peer Review Mechanism, contested both the data and the logic. The bank’s reported non-performing loan ratio stood at 2.44%; Fitch’s estimate was nearly three times higher.
More telling than the numbers, however, was the methodology.
By treating Afreximbank as a private commercial lender in a volatile market rather than a treaty-based, pan-African institution designed to stabilise economies, Fitch highlighted a deeper reluctance within global finance to recognise African institutions on their own terms.
Consequently, Afreximbank’s decision to terminate the relationship was not merely defensive; it was political. It signalled that Africa would no longer submit to epistemic frameworks that undermined its own development goals.
Credit rating imperialism
What we are witnessing can only be described as credit-rating imperialism: a system in which the power to define risk, credibility and prudence remains concentrated in the Global North, while the costs of misjudgment are borne disproportionately by the Global South.
This form of credit-rating imperialism is layered and deeply political. It begins with methodological imperialism — the stubborn imposition of a single Euro-American model of political economy that disregards Africa’s history, structural constraints and developmental realities.
It is reinforced by perception imperialism, in which African economies are penalised for crises they did not cause — from pandemics to inflationary shocks generated in advanced economies — while their resilience is discounted.
It deepens into institutional imperialism, where access to finance hinges on approval from external gatekeepers who wield enormous power yet bear little accountability to African citizens.
And perhaps most corrosively, it culminates in psychological imperialism: a cycle of downgrades that manufactures a narrative of African failure, even when the evidence shows fiscal prudence, reform and remarkable economic resilience.
This is not new. As Walter Rodney warned decades ago, underdevelopment is not the absence of development but the product of unequal power relations. Today, the relations are embedded not only in trade and aid but in spreadsheets, risk models and rating committees thousands of kilometres away.
Why this matters for sustainable development
The consequences are profound. Africa faces a critical financing deficit across its climate, energy and infrastructure sectors. The annual climate adaptation gap is estimated at $187 billion (about R3 trillion) to $359bn, while energy needs require an additional $31.5bn to $45bn. Furthermore, although the continent requires $130bn to $170bn for infrastructure annually, funding levels reach only $80bn, leaving nearly half its development needs unmet.
Yet inflated risk premiums make long-term capital prohibitively expensive. Funds that could be used to construct power grids, railways or flood defences are instead allocated to servicing debt, the cost of which is influenced by bias as much as by risk.
The dynamic undermines the sustainable development goals. More critically, it attacks the essence of African sovereignty.
When global risk perceptions — frequently biased and externally enforced — restrict fiscal flexibility, policy independence disappears. Governments shift from being proactive to merely reactive. Development banks adopt a more cautious stance instead of taking on a catalytic role. In essence, credit-rating imperialism transcends debt issues; it represents a system that constricts the prospects for Africa’s future.
Toward financial decolonisation
The response cannot be merely to plead for fairer treatment within an unjust system. Africa needs to pursue financial decolonisation with the same commitment that its forefathers dedicated to achieving political independence.
This entails, first, establishing African analytical sovereignty, including credible Africa-based credit rating agencies that understand regional realities and development mandates.
Second, it involves reinforcing pan-African financial institutions, ensuring they are adequately capitalised and safeguarding their legitimacy against inappropriate external benchmarking.
Third, it requires the enhancement of intra-African capital markets,
enabling African savings to fund African development and minimising vulnerability to unpredictable global sentiments.
Last, it is essential to promote a new narrative: one that portrays African development finance not as reckless risk-taking but as a rational investment in collective resilience and shared prosperity.
A pan-African moment
Afreximbank’s confrontation with Fitch should not be regarded as a mere isolated conflict.
It forms part of a larger pan-African movement in which issues of data sovereignty, financial governance and epistemic justice are progressively moving from the periphery to the centre of policy discussions.
Africa does not require charity from the global financial system. It demands equity. And where equity is systematically denied, it necessitates alternatives founded on solidarity, collaboration and self-determination.
The eradication of credit-rating imperialism will not occur instantaneously.
However, political decolonisation did not happen overnight either. What matters is recognising the struggle for what it represents: not merely a technical dispute but a contest over power, narrative and Africa’s right to shape its own destiny. In this context, the issue extends beyond ratings. It concerns the essence of freedom.
Oluwaseun James Oguntuase engages in research with the nonprofit organisation The Anthropocene Research Academy in Nigeria, advancing a pluralistic sustainability perspective to address developmental challenges in the Global South.
The power to define risk, credibility and prudence remains concentrated in the Global North, while the costs are borne mainly by the Global South
