The effort to regulate special funds, launched by lawmakers weeks ago, remains unfinished. That absence of a definitive framework explains why a substantial share of the state’s discretionary spending still escapes effective oversight by the National Assembly. The process began with considerable energy: on August 10, 2026, deputies examined in an emergency extraordinary session a bill on the legal regime for special credits, championed notably by MP Guy Marius Sagna. The text sought to break the long-standing opacity surrounding these funds—traditionally held at the Presidency and the Prime Minister’s Office—by establishing a strict legal regime and a confidential audit mechanism entrusted to a parliamentary commission and magistrates from the Court of Auditors.

But the project met executive resistance by mid-August. On August 13, Justice Minister Moussa Sarr presented a government amendment to refocus the text on general principles, without fixing precise modalities of execution and oversight, which would fall under regulatory power—and thus the executive—under Articles 67 and 76 of the Constitution. An additional amendment filed on August 14 proposed explicitly including the Presidency, the National Assembly and the Prime Minister’s Office in the reform’s scope, a sign that the controversy was less about the principle of stronger oversight than about the level of legal norm and the exact extent of parliamentary control to be established. The text was finally passed on August 19, before its examination was suspended the next day following an appeal by the executive.

That appeal had its effect: on August 25, 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 deputies to restart the effort from scratch on a different legal basis. Thus, on September 2, 2026, the Bureau of the National Assembly declared admissible a new organic bill, this time directly amending Organic Law No. 2020-07 of February 26, 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 oversight mechanism.

In plain terms, until this procedure is 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 lack of oversight with a bounded control exercised by bodies cleared to handle secrets without disclosing them. Still, the question of whether this oversight 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. Some observers believe deputies would themselves be reluctant to see their own credits subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as those of the executive.

On the financial side, the scale of the issue remains poorly understood. Since 2011, the amount of special fund credits in the initial finance law has been renewed identically, at 8,856,296,000 CFA francs, even though the amounts actually mobilized during the year regularly deviate from that figure, with no independent verification mechanism currently able to account for it precisely. As long as the organic bill has not completed its parliamentary journey, all these expenses—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 deputies since early August.

Institutional debates on the bill to regulate special funds reveal major disagreements. The parliamentary majority wants to restrict these funds to strictly sovereign matters, 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 on oversight modalities.