The push to bring Senegal’s special funds under legal scrutiny remains unfinished, and that unfinished state is exactly why discretionary state spending continues to operate beyond the National Assembly’s effective reach. The effort began with real momentum: on 10 August 2026, lawmakers met in emergency session to examine a private member’s bill on the legal framework for special credits, championed notably by MP Guy Marius Sagna. The text aimed to dismantle the longstanding opacity surrounding funds traditionally held at the Presidency and the Prime Minister’s Office, by creating a strict legal regime and a confidential audit mechanism entrusted to a parliamentary commission and magistrates from the Court of Auditors.

But executive resistance surfaced by mid-August. On 13 August, Justice Minister Moussa Sarr introduced a government amendment to refocus the text on general principles, without specifying detailed execution and oversight procedures — arguing that these fell under regulatory power and thus the executive itself, per articles 67 and 76 of the Constitution. A further amendment filed on 14 August proposed explicitly including the Presidency, the National Assembly and the Prime Minister’s Office in the reform’s scope, a sign that the controversy centered less on the principle of tighter oversight than on the level of the legal instrument and the exact extent of parliamentary control to be established. The text was finally passed on 19 August, before its review was suspended the next day following an executive appeal.

That appeal had its effect: on 25 August 2026, the Constitutional Council flatly rejected the ordinary bill, ruling that the regime for public credits fell exclusively under an organic law, not an ordinary law passed through a simple parliamentary initiative. That censure forced lawmakers to restart the process from scratch on a different legal basis. Thus, on 2 September 2026, the National Assembly’s Bureau declared admissible a new organic bill, this time directly amending organic law n°2020-07 of 26 February 2020 on finance laws. Under the institution’s rules of procedure, the President of the Republic must now be consulted for an opinion before the new text is sent to committee and placed on the agenda — a procedural step that further delays adoption of an effective oversight mechanism.

In plain terms, until this procedure concludes, special credits continue in practice to escape any external accounting oversight. National defense secrecy remains preserved in all versions of the text examined so far; the stated goal is not to remove the confidentiality inherent in sovereign spending, but to replace total absence of oversight with a circumscribed form exercised by bodies cleared to know secrets without disclosing them. Still, whether that oversight will extend fully to funds held not only at the Presidency but also at the Prime Minister’s Office and the National Assembly itself continues to divide opinion, with some observers suggesting lawmakers may themselves be reluctant to see their own credits subject to the same level of scrutiny as the executive’s.

Financially, the scale of the issue is also poorly understood. Since 2011, the amount of special fund credits recorded in the initial finance law has been renewed unchanged at 8,856,296,000 CFA francs, even though amounts actually mobilized during the year routinely diverge from that figure, with no independent verification mechanism currently able to account for it precisely. Until the organic bill completes its parliamentary journey, all these expenditures — from the Presidency to the Prime Minister’s Office and potentially the National Assembly — remain outside fully operational parliamentary oversight, despite the offensive launched by Ousmane Sonko and his fellow MPs since early August.

Institutional debates on the bill to regulate special funds reveal major disagreements. The parliamentary majority wants to restrict these funds to sovereign matters alone, while the executive defends their use for humanitarian and social emergencies. Tensions focus on defining the perimeters and purposes of the funds, as well as oversight procedures.