Behind the stalled effort to regulate special funds lies a deeper structural puzzle. For weeks, lawmakers have tried to build a framework for these credits, but without a final law, a large share of discretionary state spending remains beyond the National Assembly’s practical reach. The push began with unusual energy: on August 10, 2026, deputies convened an extraordinary session to fast-track a bill on the legal regime for special credits, championed by MP Guy Marius Sagna. The proposal aimed to dismantle decades of opacity around funds traditionally held at the Presidency and the Prime Minister’s Office, introducing a strict legal framework and a confidential audit mechanism run by a parliamentary commission and magistrates from the Court of Auditors.

But executive resistance surfaced by mid-August. The August 13 amendment sought to reduce the text to broad principles, leaving precise execution and oversight to regulatory power, and therefore to the executive itself. A further amendment on August 14 proposed explicitly including the Presidency, the National Assembly, and the Prime Minister’s Office within the reform’s scope — a sign that the dispute was less about whether to tighten oversight than about the legal level at which to do it and exactly how far parliamentary control should extend. The bill passed on August 19, only to have its examination suspended the next day after the executive filed an appeal.

That appeal proved decisive. On August 25, 2026, the Constitutional Council struck down the ordinary bill outright, ruling that the regime for public credits falls exclusively under an organic law, not an ordinary law passed through a parliamentary initiative. The censure forced deputies to restart from scratch on a different legal basis. 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 text returns to committee and reaches the agenda — a procedural step that further delays any real oversight mechanism.

In plain terms, until this process concludes, special credits continue to escape any external accounting control. National defense secrecy remains intact in every version examined so far. The stated goal is not to abolish the confidentiality inherent to sovereign spending but to replace total absence of oversight with a bounded control exercised by bodies cleared to handle classified matters without disclosing them. Still, whether that oversight will fully extend to funds at the Presidency, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the National Assembly itself remains divisive. Some observers suggest deputies may be reluctant to subject their own credits to the same scrutiny as the executive’s.

Financially, the scale of the issue is also 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 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 expenses — from the Presidency to the Prime Minister’s Office and potentially the National Assembly — remain outside fully operational parliamentary control, despite the offensive launched by Ousmane Sonko and his fellow deputies since early August.

Institutional debates over the bill reveal major disagreements. The parliamentary majority wants to restrict these funds to sovereign matters only, 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 the modalities of oversight.