The executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, António Pedro, believes that there are "four or five more" African countries that could join the G20 mechanism for restructuring public debt.

"You could say that there are four or five countries out there that are certainly at risk of falling into that debt trap," he said in an interview with financial news agency Bloomberg, refusing to say which countries might choose to follow the example of Zambia, Chad, Ethiopia and Ghana and present a formal proposal for restructuring public debt under the G20 mechanism known as the Common Framework.

Among the countries that could be on this list, calculated on the basis of the percentage of interest that investors demand to trade in the debt of these African countries, are Mozambique, Tunisia, Nigeria and Egypt, with interest rates of around 10%, a figure above which it is generally considered that the debt is unsustainable and that a restructuring is inevitable.

Chad was the first country to join this instrument, created after, in April 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, the International Monetary Fund and the G20 created the Debt Service Suspension Initiative, which allowed the deferral of debt interest payments until the end of last year, to make room in the budget for the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

After Zambia became the first African country to default due to the consequences of the pandemic, Chad was the first country to reach an agreement to restructure its debt under this Common Framework beyond the ISDS in 2021, while Ethiopia and Zambia are in the process of negotiating with creditors, and Ghana has announced that it intends to join the plan.

"The rise in interest rates and the appreciation of the dollar will probably make more countries join in," said António Pedro, pointing out that since a significant part of these countries' debts are in dollars, an appreciation of the 'hard currency' automatically makes the debt more expensive, since the revenues are raised in the local currency.

Among the measures put forward by António Pedro to try to relaunch African economies and avoid a full-scale debt crisis is the development of a mechanism to share the burden between official and private creditors, the expansion of creditor committees to include private creditors from the outset, the expansion of the Framework to cover middle-income countries and not just the poorest, and the extension of the deadline for nations to take advantage of this mechanism.

Adherence to the Framework has been viewed skeptically by the majority of African countries with excessive debt because adherence to this mechanism implies a renegotiation of debt repayment terms and amounts, which automatically triggers a rating review process by the financial rating agencies, in practice making it difficult to access financing on the international markets. (Notícias ao Minuto)