The effort to regulate special funds, launched by MPs several weeks ago, remains unfinished, and it is precisely this lack of a definitive framework that explains why a significant portion of the state’s discretionary spending still escapes effective oversight by the National Assembly. The process began with determination: on 10 August 2026, deputies held an emergency session to examine a bill on the legal regime for special credits, championed notably by MP Guy Marius Sagna. The text sought to dismantle the historical opacity surrounding these funds, traditionally held at the Presidency and the Prime Minister’s Office, by establishing a strict legal framework and a confidential audit mechanism entrusted to a parliamentary committee and magistrates from the Court of Auditors.

But the project met with executive resistance by mid-August. On 13 August, Justice Minister Moussa Sarr presented a government amendment aimed at refocusing the text on general principles, without specifying precise implementation and oversight modalities—these, according to the argument, falling under regulatory power and thus the executive itself, under Articles 67 and 76 of the Constitution. An additional amendment, filed on 14 August, proposed explicitly including the Presidency, the National Assembly, and the Prime Minister’s Office within the scope of the reform, a sign that the controversy centered less on the principle of strengthened oversight than on the level of norm and the exact extent of parliamentary control to be established. The text was finally passed on 19 August, before its examination was suspended the next day following a challenge lodged by the executive.

That challenge had its effect: on 25 August 2026, the Constitutional Council outright rejected the ordinary bill, ruling that the regime for public credits fell exclusively under an organic law, not an ordinary law passed by a simple parliamentary initiative. This censure forced MPs to restart the work from scratch on a different legal basis. Thus, on 2 September 2026, the Bureau of the National Assembly declared admissible a new organic bill, this time directly amending Organic Law No. 2020-07 of 26 February 2020 on finance laws. Under the institution’s rules, 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 the adoption of an effective control mechanism.

In plain terms, as long as this procedure is not completed, 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 eliminate the confidentiality inherent in sovereign spending, but to replace total absence of control with a circumscribed oversight exercised by bodies authorized to handle secrets without disclosing them. Still, the question of whether this control will fully extend 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 that MPs themselves may be reluctant to see their own credits subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as those of the executive.

On the financial front, the scale of the issue remains poorly understood. Since 2011, the amount of special fund credits in the initial finance law has been renewed unchanged at 8,856,296,000 CFA francs, even though the amounts ultimately mobilized during the year consistently deviate from this 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.

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