The IMF loan agreed by the TEC was US$889 million (R2.8 billion) under the IMF’s Compensatory and Contingency Financing Facility (CCFF) to ‘help countries cope with temporary exogenous shocks affecting export earnings without resorting to undue and unnecessary adjustments’. The objective was to avoid a balance-of-payments crisis in the run up to the 1994 election, caused mainly by a drought in 1992, which cut cereal exports. The CCFF loan represented 1.5 per cent of total government debt.