Like reformed alcoholics slipping off the wagon, frontier African economies are sliding back into bad old ways, with yawning deficits, double-digit inflation and plunging currencies.
It is all a far cry from recent years when the poorest continent's central bankers and finance ministers were winning praise for keeping spending in check, building up rainy-day reserves and holding currencies and prices on an even keel to build the platform for an unprecedented decade of growth.
However, with the possible exception of Nigeria and Zambia, the first half of 2011 suggests that the steady improvement in economic governance has hit a wall - if not gone into reverse.
Reflecting policy confusion and investors' ebbing faith, four prominent regional currencies - Kenya , Uganda and Tanzania's shillings and Ghana's cedi - have all hit record lows against the dollar this year.
By contrast, South Africa's rand , a deeply traded emerging market currency rather than a more exotic 'frontier' unit, is at four-year highs.
“SAD DAY”
Worryingly for east Africa's 130 million people, one of the most egregious offenders has been Kenya, a $35 billion economy that serves as the engine of growth for the whole region.
With an election looming next year, the central bank has underestimated the impact of soaring world fuel and food prices, even cutting interest rates in January in the face of accelerating inflation.
It has since reversed the move but the damage has been done: coupled with its selling of shillings to build reserves, investors' already slim faith in the currency has evaporated.
When Governor Njuguna Ndung'u said this week he would not intervene to prop up the unit after a 10 percent slide against the dollar this year, foreign exchange trade all but dried up, with bid-ask spreads widening to as much as 50 cents.
The disdain among traders was palpable.
“Sad day,” one Nairobi-based dealer posted in Reuters' Africa Markets chatroom, which is read by central bank officials. “B4 some dude opened his mouth there was a mkt.”
Nor is the government helping matters.
In his 2011/12 budget, finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta outlined a 15 percent spending hike that will take the deficit to 7.4 percent of GDP - a larger shortfall than last year that the already overstretched local bond market cannot bankroll.
To fund its ambitions Nairobi has instead gone cap in hand to donors such as the World Bank, Japan, France and Germany - at face value a cheaper source of finance but one that will come with a host of other strings attached.
“This is a country that's talking about a euro bond and that wants to graduate away from aid and they're going back to it,” said Stuart Culverhouse, an economist at frontier brokerage Exotix in London. “It's a convenient but backwards step.”
RESERVES OR FIGHTER FUND?
Uganda's shilling took a battering in the jittery run-up to a February election, and last week resumed its slide - now 10 percent in the last year - after the Bank of Uganda Governor laid into President Yoweri Museveni for using foreign reserves to buy Russian fighter jets.
Analysts say the comment, which was taken to mean the reserves might be little more than a presidential piggy-bank, was a classic case of officials not appreciating the sensitivities of markets - something Ghana's central bank could also be accused of.
Although the cedi has been better behaved of late than its east African peers, it hit a string of record lows against the dollar in January before the Bank of Ghana broke with its habit of only intervening in the currency market on Wednesdays.
“Africa now is an international attraction. If we do not continue to develop our skills, we could well find someone asleep at the wheel,” said Roy Daniels, head of trading for Africa at Rand Merchant Bank in Johannesburg.
Meanwhile, two smaller countries - Malawi and Swaziland - are vying for the overall policy-making booby prize.
Malawi's claim lies in a government that has relied heavily on foreign handouts expelling the ambassador of Britain, its biggest donor, triggering a potentially catastrophic aid freeze.
And Swaziland, Africa's last absolute monarchy, has brought itself to the brink of financial collapse by refusing to trim the continent's most bloated civil service despite a dramatic drop in the regional customs receipts that normally account for two-thirds of state revenue.
So far, it has just about kept its head above water by eating into central bank reserves and running up more than $180 million in domestic arrears - almost as much as the estimated $200 million fortune of King Mswati III. - Reuters