Borrow against tomorrow’s barrels to pay today’s bills. Chad did it, Congo did it, Gabon did it again in April. The mechanism is legal, expensive and almost impossible to see from the outside.

An oil-backed loan is simple in principle. A state, or its national oil company, receives cash now from a commodity trader or a bank. Repayment comes in cargoes, priced at the market rate when delivered. For a government short of liquidity, it is fast money that does not require a bond prospectus or a rating.

Three cautionary tales

• Chad. Its debts to the trading house Glencore, contracted against future oil, became so large that they dominated the country’s debt profile. Chad was the first country to seek treatment under the G20 Common Framework, and the negotiation dragged for two years because private creditors and official ones could not agree who took the loss.
• Congo-Brazzaville. Its opaque trader debts delayed IMF support for years. The country had to reconstruct and disclose obligations that its own ministries had not fully recorded.
• Gabon. In April 2026, Libreville signed a $1bn facility with Trafigura, months before issuing a eurobond and while auditing its own debt stock.

Why they are so expensive

The headline rate is rarely the real cost. Pricing formulas, discounts on the cargoes, fees and the obligation to sell through a designated intermediary all shift value away from the state. Because the contracts are commercially confidential, parliaments and citizens rarely see the terms. When a debt audit is finally done, as in Gabon, these are the contracts that take longest to reconstruct.

What the dossier should establish

The article should map, country by country, the oil-backed facilities currently outstanding in CEMAC: counterparties, volumes committed, maturities and the share of future production already pledged. That last number is the one that matters. A state that has pre-sold its barrels has pre-spent its future budget.