Lebanon: the IMF wants reforms, households are already footing the bill

According to France 24, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is demanding new economic and banking reforms from Lebanon, while many Lebanese households are struggling to meet everyday expenses. Still according to the broadcaster, the implementation of these measures is raising questions. Economist Jassem Ajaka analyses the risks they pose for the population and the fragilities of the country's economy.

That's the facts. The rest is our reading, and it starts from a limitation: the report does not detail the precise content of the reforms demanded, nor the timetable, nor the figures for rising prices. We will not invent them. What is known is the scene: a creditor dictating, families counting.

This scene is no accident. Marxist anti-colonial thinkers have long described a dependency: countries on the periphery are not simply "behind", their economies were shaped to serve the centre, and debt, like conditional lending, locks in that position. When an IMF programme pulls up a chair, the question is not only "which reforms?" but "who absorbs the shock?" In most adjustment programmes, the answer is the same: those with no assets to protect, no account abroad, and no lobbyists in the corridors.

This is where the Lebanese case raises questions. A banking reform can be fair or unfair, depending on who is made to pay: the shareholders and large depositors, or the employee whose purchasing power is already melting away? The report does not settle this, and we do not yet know how the losses will be distributed. But that is precisely the question creditors prefer to treat as a technical detail. A "restructuring measure" always has a face, often that of the cashier rather than the banker.

We should also beware of the slope that thinkers of dispossession describe: privatisations, sales of public assets, services turned into commodities to repay debts. Nothing in what France 24 reports suggests Lebanon is there yet; but when the IMF talks of reforms and households can no longer cope, it is the kind of path that must be watched. What is public sells fast when debt presses.

Finally, these thinkers remind us of an old trap: a local elite can perfectly well run the inherited apparatus without changing its structure. The flag stays, and so does the logic. The Lebanese do not need it explained to them that the system is fragile; they pay the bill at the supermarket. What must be demanded is that every reform be judged by its effect on the shopping basket, not on the creditors' spreadsheets.

We are therefore waiting for the detailed version of the programme, and above all for the names of those who will pay. Until we know them, prudence suggests we assume it will be, as usual, the least able to refuse.