Sierra Leone’s Public Debt Is SLE47.5 Billion

By Aruna Momoh Kargbo

The public debt of Sierra Leone as at 31st December 2022 is SLE47.5 million which is equivalent to the sum of Le47.5 trillion in the Old Leones.

This was captured by the protector of the Sierra Leone public purse, Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL) in their recent Audit Report, noting that the level of both external and domestic loans remains very high.

Even though ASSL noted that there has been immense improvement in managing and reporting public debts for domestic arrears and external loans.

They (ASSL) furthered that the Public Debt Management Department (PDMD) has been working with the Bank of Sierra Leone and development partners to ensure that the risk of high debt service to total revenue is managed through refinancing and rollover of maturities.

“The total outstanding public debt of the Government as at 31st December 2022 was SLE47,577,345, 870 which is 94% of the Gross Domestic Product. We noted that domestic revenue (SLE8,088,376,000) could not meet the debt service obligation (SLE14,879,143,000) for 2022,” ASSL stated.

The report maintained that their audit procedure (to ascertain the accuracy of External Public Debt relating to multilateral and bilateral creditors recorded in the GPFS) was restricted to creditor confirmation because of insufficient information for audit scrutiny.

And that of a total External Debt of SLE35,607,013,870 reported in the GPFS, SLE33,298,061,466, which accounts for 96%, were confirmed but that external creditors did not confirm SLE2,308,952,404, which represents (4%) of the total debt.

“We could not perform other audit procedures to gain assurance over the remaining unconfirmed balance,” the report affirmed.