Speaking at an electoral meeting in Tizi Ouzou on 28 April, Ahmed Ouyahia — leader of the Rassemblement National Démocratique (RND) — lambasted the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) latest report on Algeria and said that it did nothing more than ‘invite us to take a silk scarf to commit suicide’.

The IMF has recommended that Algeria should take on foreign borrowing to ease its current budgetary difficulties. Ahmed Ouyahia — who managed and manipulated the 1994 IMF loan when he was prime minister in the mid-1990s — is now adamantly opposed to the IMF’s latest announcement. He says that Algeria will never submit to its recommendations concerning, among other things, the import of high-end consumer goods and what he calls ‘investment aid’. He continued that ‘We’re not going to bend. We will never give up our freedom and our sovereignty’.

Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal and many of his ministers are now believed to favour foreign debt as a solution to Algeria’s economic problems, but Ahmed Ouyahia is hell-bent on deeper austerity. We suspect that his opposition to the IMF is partially based on his own track record of managing the economy in the 1990s, when he used the IMF loan conditions to introduce his iroinically named ‘clean hands’ policy. A return to such IMF conditions would almost certainly lead to a re-examination of how Ahmed Ouyahia managed the economy at that time.

This is an article from our weekly Algeria Politics & Security publication.