Dependency theory was developed to articulate this extractive process. We learn that the 'core' is reliant on exploiting resource flows from the 'periphery'. The rich nations do not invest in income-poor nations to make them richer. This extractive process is necessary for the continued material prosperity of the 'core' nations and the prevention of realisation crises. The exploitation evolved over time from brutal slavery regimes to more sophisticated and less obvious means of maintaining political and economic servitude.

The Scramble for Africa carved up Africa among the advanced powers after they had successfully invaded the continent. A.G. Hopkins talks of the 'plunderers' who depicted the Africans as 'being primitive and barbaric', which was a convenient smokescreen to legitimatise the invasions.

After failing to stem the Algerian independence movement, which led to the demise of the Fourth Republic in 1958, the new president, Charles de Gaulle, immediately offered the colonial elites in their colonies a 'loaded' independence deal, which would continue to tie the new nations to France. The elites saw their own interests more aligned with France than the fortunes of their people. This was at a time when France was undergoing reconstruction after its economy had been devastated in World War II and it needed the resource wealth in its colonies. Its currency was weak and so it had to work out a way to continue extracting that wealth on favourable terms.

The direct-rule colonial arrangements were thus replaced by Françafrique, the political and economic framework for control and exploitation. As a key part of this strategy, the French introduced a common currency in 1945 for several African colonies – the CFA franc (originally franc des colonies françaises d'Afrique). The official French government line was that the currency would protect the colonies from inflation arising from the devalued French franc, a consequence of the devastation experienced during World War II.

The CFA franc is issued in two currency blocks by separate central banks – Banque Centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (BCEAO) and the Banque des États de l'Afrique Centrale (BEAC). The French can veto their decisions and monetary policy is set by the ECB (previously the Banque de France). The settings reflect European priorities.

The CFA franc is pegged against the euro (previously the French franc) and the French Treasury guarantees convertibility with the euro. The 'cost' for this guarantee is that the BCEAO and the BEAC have to deposit 50 per cent of their foreign reserve holdings with the Treasury, receiving low returns (sometimes even negative real returns). This control of reserves means all cross-currency transactions involving the CFA Franc have to be mediated by the Treasury.

Things didn't improve for the former African colonies after France joined the eurozone. In fact, a nasty cocktail has emerged with the ongoing currency arrangements, merging with the neoliberal austerity bias of the eurozone to further limit hopes for African prosperity. The unseemly colonial resource grab thus morphed, later, into a neoliberal regime that maintained the extraction mechanisms and increased inequality. But it was a creeping process.

In June 2019, despite a senior ECOWAS official describing the situation as 'dismal', ECOWAS agreed to launch a new currency, the eco in January 2020. It will be the CFA franc by another name – pegged against the euro at a rate largely set by France, who will retain the control of convertibility with the euro. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même!

This tether, invisible but firmly secured, is not the product of Yapsy's imagination: it actually exists and has been in place since the colonial period, precisely since 1945, when the CFA franc was created. It doesn't bind France only to the Ivory Coast, but to a total of 14 countries, grouped into two monetary zones: the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU, also known by its French name UEMOA: Union économique et monétaire ouest-africaine), comprising Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo; and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC from its name in French: Communauté Économique et Monétaire de l'Afrique Centrale), which includes Cameroon, Gabon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic and the Republic of the Congo. These two monetary unions each have their own central bank. They use two distinct CFA francs, but which share the same acronym: for the CEMAC franc, CFA stands for 'Financial Cooperation in Central Africa', while for the WAEMU franc it stands for 'African Financial Community'. The two CFA francs work in exactly the same manner and are pegged to the euro with the same parity. However, the CFA banknotes of these two monetary unions are not directly convertible into one another: if you want to exchange a CFA franc of the CEMAC for a CFA franc of the WAEMU, or vice versa, you generally have to go through the euro. A fifteenth state, the Comoros, uses another franc, the Comorian franc, but is also linked to France by the same rope. These 15 states comprise the so-called 'franc zone', an area governed by common principles of monetary management. Overall, more than 162 million people use the two CFA francs (plus the Comorian franc), according to the UN.

This situation owes nothing to chance. It is even, to some extent, engineered. Since the colonial period, every effort has been made to ensure that the users of the CFA franc know as little as possible about the device hidden behind these three enigmatic letters. It is precisely this invisibility, or more precisely this smokescreen, that Yapsy's underwater rope illustrates so well. The reason for this concealment is easy to understand: the mechanism underlying the CFA franc is simply devious.

The reason for this concealment is easy to understand: the mechanism underlying the CFA franc is simply devious. … In the past, French colonial propaganda presented the 'motherland' as a benign force that protected Africans. Thanks to France, it was said that the continent was progressing towards prosperity and wellbeing. In 1950, the 5,000-franc banknote used in the colonial empire depicted Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, reassuringly embracing two African figures. The aims of the CFA franc were, in fact, quite different: guaranteeing France's economic control of the colonies and facilitating their wealth's drainage towards the then economically fragile metropole.

Nowadays, the French government says that the CFA franc has become an 'African currency' run by the Africans themselves; however, as we will see in the following pages, this statement deserves to be seriously called into question. For sure, the design of the banknotes and the staff of the central banks have been 'Africanised': Marianne and the 'heroic figures' of imperial France have been replaced by savannahs and African national monuments. But these clichés conceal a very different reality: to this day, the coins and notes used daily by the Africans of the franc zone continue to be manufactured in the former metropole, and specifically in the department of Puy-de-Dôme, and in Pessac, in the department of Gironde.

The spirit and purpose of the device on which this colonial creature rests remain the same as when it was created in 1945. Indeed, the CFA franc is much more than just a currency, allowing France to manage its economic, monetary, financial and political relations with some of its former colonies according to a logic functional to its interests. It is the most powerful weapon of the 'Françafrique', this peculiar neocolonial system of domination that the French state established on the eve of the independence of the former colonies, with the precise aim of preserving the advantages of the colonial pact.

Unlike all the other colonial powers, however, France managed an incredible feat: to maintain its monetary empire built around the CFA franc even after the African countries officially gained their independence. This is why today people talk of the CFA franc as a 'colonial relic', a 'vestige of colonialism' or, more simply, as a 'neocolonial currency'.

During the pre-colonial period, different types of currencies circulated on the African continent. Rubber balls, iron and copper bars, shells, zinc fragments, cotton wool, brass wires, glass beads and porcelain grains were just a few of the materials used as means of transaction. Money was certainly a medium of exchange and payment but it was, above all, an institution that helped reconfigure social relations. For this reason, it was entrusted 'to the elderly, to the village leaders, who were responsible for protecting the binds between the community and its founders'. The cowries, a shell found in the Indian Ocean, called timekla by the Tuareg and oudà in Timbuktu, and particularly widespread among the Yoruba, a people of Nigeria, was long used in West Africa, which in fact was known as the 'cowrie zone'. It was at the centre of the construction of powerful pan-African trade networks, particularly in the western Volta region, located in present-day Burkina Faso, and in Sudan in present-day Mali. In the first half of the eighteenth century, cowries even had an official exchange rate vis-à-vis the livre tournois, the prevailing unit of account in France from the Middle Ages until 1795, when the franc became the only currency in the country. In 1724, 1,000 cowries were worth 960 deniers tournois, a sub-multiple of the livre tournois.

Overall, the banks and companies in question responded to the logic of the 'colonial pact', which was centred around four fundamental rules: the colonies were forbidden from industrialising, and had to content themselves with supplying raw materials to the metropole which transformed them into finished products that were then resold to the colonies; the metropole enjoyed the monopoly of colonial exports and imports; it also held a monopoly in the shipping of colonial products abroad; finally, the metropole granted commercial preferences to the products of the colonies. This 'colonial pact' established relationships of dependence that forced the colonies to constantly adapt to the economic conjuncture of the metropole and to the requirements of its economic development.

Even though the devaluation of the metropolitan franc and the creation of the colonial francs could be seen as positive signs, the principles proclaimed by Pleven were far from being motivated by the 'generosity' of the French government. To begin with, the parity of the CFA franc had been set without taking into account the specificities of the different colonial blocks. During the war, inflation had been more pronounced in the AOF than in the AEF. If the French authorities had really wanted to 'take into account the interests' of each territory, they would have had to create two different currencies, one for the AOF and other one for the AEF, and to assign to each of them a different parity, in line with their respective economic situations. But that's not what they did. Worse still, Paris gave the CFA franc an excessive value – as mentioned, a CFA franc bought 1.70 French francs – that was incompatible with the economic strength of the AOF and AEF, onto which a highly overvalued currency was imposed.

The CFA franc, a creature of the French Ministry of Finance, was actually designed to allow France to regain control of its colonies. During the war, these had diversified their commercial relations. In 1939, 85 per cent of the AOF's exports and 74 per cent of the AEF's exports were destined for the metropole; in 1945, these figures had fallen to 56 and 47 per cent respectively. During the same period, the share of their imports met by the metropole had decreased from 64 to 23 per cent for the AOF and from 45 to 4 per cent for the AEF. However, the French economy, strongly weakened by the war, needed to regain its market share and secure the supply of raw materials once again. In this context, an overvalued CFA franc was perfectly functional to Paris's interests. The fact that its value was higher than that of the metropolitan franc made the products of the metropole cheaper. This would encourage the colonies to increase their imports from mainland France. At the same time, a strong CFA franc would have the effect of increasing the prices of colonial export products, thus making them more expensive than those of their competitors in Asia and Latin America. Therefore, in order to find outlets for their exports, the colonies would necessarily have to turn to the metropole. The trade flows of the colonies would thus be reoriented in favour of the metropole, which would benefit both in terms of exports and imports, without having to touch its foreign exchange reserves.

Far from marking the end of the 'colonial pact', the birth of the CFA franc favoured the restoration of very advantageous trade relations for France. The creation of this new currency also sanctioned the institutionalisation of a 'principle of automaticity': since the currency of the colonised territories was firmly pegged to that of the metropole, the colonies were deprived of the possibility of regulating the exchange rate of their currencies and therefore found themselves forced to passively endure the unilateral decisions of the metropole, which adjusted the external value of its currency according to its needs. The 'overseas territories' would thus pay the price of the instability of the metropolitan franc. On 26 January 1948, the latter was subject to a devaluation of 44 per cent. The CFA franc adjusted accordingly. On 17 October 1948, the metropolitan franc was devalued a second time, but at that point the French authorities decided to change the parity of the CFA franc: a CFA franc would now buy two metropolitan francs. When the 'new franc', termed 'heavy franc', was created on 27 December 1958, the parity of the CFA franc was maintained. Subsequently, between 1958 and 1986, the French currency would devalue four more times, each time with heavy repercussions for the territories that used the CFA franc.

Some African deputies of the French National Assembly had understood that this principle of automaticity made the CFA franc a currency at the service of the 'colonial pact'. During the parliamentary session of 21 June 1949, Sourou-Migan Apithy, the future president of the Republic of Dahomey, deplored the lack of autonomy of the CFA franc: 'The CFA franc is not an independent currency, but a multiple of the metropolitan franc, to the same extent that a decilitre is a multiple of the litre', he said, referring to the fact that the CFA franc at the time was stronger than the franc. 'The history of the CFA franc […] is the most eloquent demonstration of the strengthening of the colonial pact', said Gabriel Lisette, founder of the Chadian Progressive Party. The Senegalese Lamine Guèye, deputy of the SFIO (French section of the workers' international) and future president of the National Assembly of Senegal, also denounced the hypocrisy of the French Union, which on paper proclaimed the equality of rights and duties, but in practice recognised to overseas populations 'only duties and no rights'.

Before granting them 'independence', the French authorities forced the future states to sign a long list of so-called 'cooperation agreements'. The French prime minister Michel Debré summarised very clearly the principle of 'conditional' independence in a letter sent to his Gabonese counterpart Léon Mba in July 1960: 'We grant independence on the condition that the state, having gained its independence, endeavours to respect the cooperation agreements. […]. There one does not go without the other.'

The heart of this device – based on recognising the former colonies’ formal rights that they were prevented from enjoying in practice – was the currency. France formally recognised the right of African countries to have their own currency and issuing institution but, in practice, denied them this possibility.

His words are very revealing of the way in which the colonies’ independence was ‘negotiated’: ‘We acknowledge the fact that two new independent states, whose history coincides with ours, wanted to sign agreements with us as their first act of sovereignty.’ He continued: ‘These states are reasonable; they understand perfectly that it is not the case to sever emotional, cultural and economic ties that have lasted so long.’ Finally, he stressed that it was crucial for France ‘to obtain [from these countries] the promise of a reciprocal preferential regime in our economic relations and for these states to remain in the franc zone'.

With the creation of the franc zone, in 1939, France aimed to transform its colonial empire into a commercial and monetary shield that would protect its economy in a context of international monetary, economic and political crises. This monetary union, which brought together the territories under French administration in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas and the Antilles, was based on a system of exchange rates that allowed France to control the purchase and sale of the various currencies, and therefore to defend the external value of the metropolitan franc against foreign currencies.

By virtue of the first of these principles, that of the fixed exchange rate, the CFA and Comorian francs are firmly pegged to the French currency, called the 'anchor currency': that is to say that their value in French francs does not change depending on the economic situation. It can only be modified by the political authorities of the franc zone. Thus, between 1958 and 1994, 1 CFA franc always bought 0.02 French francs (1 French franc was worth 50 CFA francs).

The fact that the AOF and the AEF had a single currency pegged to the metropolitan franc allowed the colonial administrations and metropolitan companies to significantly reduce their transaction costs. If the various territories under the French administration had each had their own floating currency, regulating commercial transactions would have been more complicated and expensive. The CFA system also helped organise economic exchanges according to the imperatives of the 'colonial pact'. The fact that the CFA franc's parity was set at an artificially high level, as we saw in Chapter 1, penalised African products: they were hard to sell on world markets, except in the context of the commercial preferences granted by the metropole. Conversely, the high external value of the CFA franc favoured imports, especially from the metropole. The functioning of the banking system of the franc zone also served to orient the allocation of resources in such a way as to further benefit the metropole and its operators: bank credit was mainly reserved for those sectors whose products were exported to the metropole and generated foreign currency, to the detriment of productions destined for national markets.

When a bank lends 1 million euros to a company, it simultaneously creates a deposit of 1 million euros for its client. In other words, it creates an additional purchasing power of 1 million euros in the local economy. In order to be able to grant this loan, the bank does not need to have previously collected savings for an equivalent amount. It simply taps some numbers into a computer and credits 1 million euros – which are effectively created ‘out of thin air’ – to the account of its client. Only later does the bank worry about collecting the required reserves. In modern economies, therefore, ‘fresh’ money is created when commercial banks grant loans. This leads to the surprising consequence that credit – the creation of money ex nihilo – is what finances investment, not savings. In fact, it works the other way round: the investment is what creates the savings, as the economic growth induced by the increase in the investment rate tends to increase the national saving rate as well.

Thus, a monetary system that represses internal credit, such as the CFA system, reflects a lack of confidence in the ability of economic agents to make productive use of bank loans: etymologically, the word 'credit' comes from the Latin 'credere', which means 'to trust' or 'to believe'. In this context, the paucity of bank loans is not the result of a lack of national savings. Quite the opposite: since loans create deposits, it is the paucity of loans that causes the scarcity of savings!

In reality, poor countries can finance their development without reducing their consumption and without relying on foreign capital. If you want to mobilise internal resources, the easiest way to do it is through money creation. Germany and China, two countries that have experienced rapid and spectacular economic progress, eloquently illustrate the power of money creation.

Money creation is often blamed for generating inflation, especially in developing countries. In principle, the risk of inflation does not exist so long as credit is allocated to productive investments that aim to increase the local productive capacity and reduce the under-utilisation of the workforce. Empirical studies have shown that episodes of high credit growth have rarely led to high inflation; or rather, that inflationary episodes have rarely been preceded by an increase in the money supply. … Many African countries import large quantities of food products, which take up a large amount of their foreign reserves. But they could take steps to produce locally the food that they need: land, work and know-how are generally available. What is missing, more often than not, is the financial means to develop their agricultural systems, as well as trade protection against foreign imports. If they financed the development of their agriculture, they wouldn’t reduce their foreign exchange reserves; on the contrary, they would save money!

Convinced that Guinea would choose independence and fearing that it would later appropriate the monetary reserves of the BCEAO's agency in Conakry, France ordered its army to discreetly evacuate the reserves from the country. The order was executed the same day by sea. The result of the referendum in Guinea was unequivocal: as Paris had anticipated, 95 per cent of voters rejected the idea of joining the Community.

Guinea remained part of the franc zone. For several months, the Guinean and French authorities tried to reach an agreement on the monetary question. The former, and especially Sékou Touré, wanted to create a national currency while remaining in the franc zone, but without having to accept its 'humiliating' rules. The Guineans were particularly concerned by the 'excessively centralising' nature of the franc zone, as well as by the prohibition, imposed by Paris on the country, to independently negotiate its trade agreements.

The SDECE also launched a series of economic attacks against the country. One of these, which was part of a destabilisation programme known as 'Persil', was particularly perverse: it consisted of using the printing presses of the SDECE to create false Guinean banknotes, which were then poured en masse into the country. The result was the collapse of the Guinean economy.

In 1964, Modibo Keita was forced to turn to Paris. In 1967, Mali returned to the franc zone, an operations account was opened at the French Treasury and the Malian franc was devalued by 50 per cent. 'President Modibo Keita's regime, due to an incorrect management of the currency, has committed hara-kiri', sentenced the economist Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi. Pouemi thought that the Malian government had committed the error of 'printing money' to finance unproductive projects. Moreover, the Malian president had failed to reform the banking system, which had maintained the same institutional architecture of the colonial period.

But the Togolese franc would never see the light of day: on 13 January 1963, at 7.15 AM, Sylvanus Olympio was shot dead in front of the gate of the American embassy, in Lomé, by a group of former Togolese soldiers who had served in the French army. Sergeant Étienne Gnassingbé aka ‘Eyadéma’, who was part of the murderous commando, would later claim responsibility for the murder, before denying it a few years later. He and his cohorts immediately sided with France, declaring: ‘France is our friend.’ On 26 January 1963, Théophile Mally, former Togolese Minister of the Interior, accused the French ambassador, Henri Mazoyer, as well as two French officers who served in the Togolese armed forces, of orchestrating the coup.

In six months, Sylvanus Olympio’s struggle for economic sovereignty had been wiped out. From the French point of view, everything returned to normal, in the sense of the ‘normalisation of relations between Paris and Lomé’. In 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Étienne Gnassingbé Eyadéma overthrew President Grunitzky. He remained in power until his death in 2005 and was succeeded by one of his sons, Faure Gnassingbé. Fifty-five years later, the responsibility for the murder of Sylvanus Olympio remains unknown, since the French and American archives have never been opened.

In the early 1970s, relations between France and its former colonies were characterised by a widespread intolerance towards the cooperation agreements concluded ten years earlier. It was precisely at the beginning of 1972 that several states – spearheaded by Niger, Mauritania and Congo – demanded that the agreements in question be partially or totally revised, or even abolished. In the eyes of the leaders of the African countries, but also of those of their public opinions, the agreements were obsolete and unequal and favoured the former metropole. France was also accused of not honouring its commitments: Paris had only disbursed a fraction of the development aid promised at the time of independence. Moreover, the countries of the franc zone had been forced to bear the 1969 devaluation of the French franc without even having been consulted, contrary to the provisions of the monetary cooperation agreements.

‘Hamani Diori was personally convinced by my analysis’, explains Samir Amin. ‘But he still had to convince the Ivory Coast and Senegal, which rejected the proposal flat-out. As France did.’ Indeed, the French president Georges Pompidou was not particularly receptive to Diori’s ideas when the latter presented them to him in June 1969. In the weeks following the meeting, relations between the two countries became even more tense, creating a climate of mutual distrust. When France delayed paying Niger what it owed the country for the exploitation of its uranium reserves, the Nigerien authorities suspected that it was a punishment for having requested a revision of the cooperation agreements.

In truth, he had no such project: he was simply using the monetary question to negotiate with the French. Aware of the importance they attached to the CFA franc, Bokassa exploited the issue in the hope of obtaining extra development aid from Paris. It worked: as the political scientist Didier Bigo explains, the French government caved in because ‘it considered Bokassa’s rapprochement with some countries too dangerous, and agreed to increase the cooperation funds on condition that Bokassa renounced his new contacts (Romania, the USSR, Libya)’. If the French government ‘agreed to continue with the aid’, notes the researcher, it was also because ‘the maintenance of Chad in the French sphere of influence passed through the Central African Republic’.

In the end, the French agreed to abandon their military bases. But no common ground was found on the monetary question. The Malagasy authorities drew their conclusions. On 21 May 1973, General Gabriel Ramanantsoa declared: ‘We prefer to remain poor but dignified, rather than kneeling before wealth.’ Perhaps he had in mind the famous phrase pronounced by Sékou Touré in front of general De Gaulle in 1958 – ‘We prefer to be poor in freedom than rich in slavery’? The following day, from Paris, Didier Ratsiraka announced Madagascar’s intention to leave the franc zone. Once again, the French did not want ‘to be induced, through a “global” negotiation, to consent to assurances that would set a precedent for other states’, Le Monde explained.

The heart of the system, however, remained unchanged: in sub-Saharan Africa, apart from Mauritania and Madagascar, no state dared to ask for greater monetary independence. Thus, France's sphere of influence remained practically unchanged. At the end of 1973, when all the 'cooperation agreements' had already been revised or were under revision, a summit of heads of state of French-speaking Africa took place in Paris, officially on the initiative of the Nigerien president Hamani Diori and the Ivorian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Since then this formula would be repeated every year, taking the name of 'France-Africa summit'. Hamani Diori did not participate in the following editions of this 'gathering': his government was overthrown in April 1974 by General Seyni Kountché, three days before an important Franco-Nigerien meeting scheduled to renegotiate the price of the Nigerien uranium purchased by France. Diori understandably wanted to raise the price, against the wishes of Paris. The detachment of the French army in Niamey did not intervene during the coup.

In 1985, the Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti asked him: 'Is the CFA franc not a weapon for the domination of Africa? Does Burkina Faso plan to continue carrying this burden? Why does an African peasant in his village need a convertible currency?' Sankara replied: 'If the currency is convertible or not has never been the concern of the African peasant. He has been plunged against his will into an economic system against which he is defenceless. I therefore think that he should take action to protect himself against the misdeeds of the system in question. As for the monetary issue, it is never isolated from the rest of the economic system. In this sense, we can say that the CFA franc, as it is linked to the French monetary system, is a weapon for the domination of Africa. The French economy, and therefore the French capitalist mercantile bourgeoisie, has built its fortune on the shoulders of our peoples through this bond, this monetary monopoly. This is the reason why Burkina is fighting to end this situation through the struggle of our people to build an independent and self-sufficient economy. How long this fight will last, I can't say.'

On the continuum of monetary sovereignty, he distinguished four categories as far as the African countries were concerned. Firstly, those states that tried to manage their currencies well but suffered a hostile international economic context: the countries of the Global North tried to discourage the industrialisation of the Global South and to this end did not hesitate to exploit the IMF, which, according to Pouemi, had the tendency to 'repress any government that tries to offer their country a minimum of wellbeing'. Secondly, those countries that possessed the monetary instrument but used it ill-advisedly. Internal 'monetary repression' or 'self-repression' (small presence of Africans in the banking sector, negative interest rates, self-financing practices and price controls, especially in the agricultural sector) were, in his opinion, a gangrene for economic progress. Thirdly, those states that employed 'satellite currencies', that is, national currencies functionally integrated with those of their former colonisers, through the free movement of capital and fixed exchange rates. The fourth and final case concerned those countries whose currencies were still administered on the basis of colonial principles and logics, and which, according to Pouemi, were by all means 'colonial currencies'. The reference was mainly to the countries that used the CFA franc.

The CFA franc, for Pouemi, was a 'chimera', 'a creature of the French state', just like the French franc, and it represented a purely political and uneconomic choice as a result of which the future of today's and tomorrow's Africans was sacrificed on the altar of the past. According to the economist, the CFA franc was an instrument of colonial economic development: it was not designed to stimulate the growth of African productive forces. It was rather a system that deprived access to credit all those African economic actors who did not adapt to the model of colonial accumulation based, on the one hand, on the production of raw materials for export and, on the other, on the consumption of goods imported from the metropole.

Like Sylvanus Olympio 20 years earlier, Thomas Sankara would not get a chance to complete his project either: he was assassinated on 15 October 1987. One of the main suspects in his murder – for which no trial was ever held – is his successor and former brother in arms, Blaise Compaoré. The latter, who remained in power until 2014, never contested the existence of the CFA franc and maintained very close ties with France. Basile Guissou, Thomas Sankara's Minister of Foreign Affairs, expressed his disappointment in 2017 for failing to achieve monetary independence: 'The currency remained colonial. We tried to exit, but unfortunately it is all a question of power relations. […] As members of the CFA zone, we were unable to mint our own currency and escape the repression of neighbouring countries and of France.'

An example of this is the devaluation of the French franc in December 1958, on the eve of the independence process, and again in August 1969. These unilateral decisions forced the African countries to undertake a heavy adjustment in order to maintain the parity with the French franc, and had serious negative repercussions in the African countries, including an increase in the cost of living, especially in the cities, as well as in the value of their foreign debt.

Through the foot that it retains in the African institutions of the franc zone and beyond, Paris effectively takes all the important decisions regarding the CFA and Comorian francs, often without even informing the concerned states in advance. An example of this is the devaluation of the French franc in December 1958, on the eve of the independence process, and again in August 1969. These unilateral decisions forced the African countries to undertake a heavy adjustment in order to maintain the parity with the French franc, and had serious negative repercussions in the African countries, including an increase in the cost of living, especially in the cities, as well as in the value of their foreign debt. In 1994, a similar decision had even more dramatic consequences: against the opinion of the majority of African leaders, France decided to devalue the CFA francs by 50 per cent, thus altering their parity with the French franc for the first time in 46 years.

It all began in the early 1980s with rising global interest rates, falling commodity prices and the resulting international debt crisis. The countries of the franc zone, which until then had seemed to be in good economic health, were severely affected. The zone's heavyweights, Cameroon and the Ivory Coast, quickly entered a downward spiral. The response of the IMF, which had already provided loans to various countries without being repaid, was to demand a 'real adjustment', meaning a compression of internal demand through a reduction in public spending and imports, in order to bring the public accounts and trade balance back into equilibrium. It also suggested combining this real adjustment with a 'monetary adjustment': a devaluation of the CFA francs.

In 1991, with the exception of Burkina Faso and Chad, all the countries of the CFA franc zone registered a foreign debt exceeding 100 per cent of GDP: over 600 per cent in Equatorial Guinea and Congo, more than 300 per cent in the Ivory Coast, over 200 per cent in Gabon, Mali and Cameroon.

France rejected this second measure, as it was afraid of touching a precious symbol of Franco-African monetary cooperation. It wanted a real adjustment and nothing else. But its internal politics complicated things. The socialist government of François Mitterrand, elected in 1981, had effectively adopted a strategy of 'competitive disinflation': having failed in his attempt to revive the French economy, he wanted to achieve greater price competitiveness by reducing France's inflationary gap vis-à-vis competing countries. This plan included the pegging of the French franc to the German mark, a strong and credible currency in the eyes of financial markets. The French franc appreciated as a result, causing the CFA francs to strongly appreciate as well. The result was a significant deterioration in the competitiveness of the African countries of the franc zone.

In 1992, rumours of an imminent devaluation spread, which aggravated capital flight. This triggered a panic among the African leaders, who had not received any warning from Paris. On 31 July, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, Omar Bongo, Blaise Compaoré and Abdou Diouf rushed to the Élysée. They asked François Mitterrand to intervene to prevent the devaluation. Their French host reassured them… when in fact the decision to devalue had already been taken!

On 2 August 1993, things became clearer: the monetary authorities of the franc zone suspended the redemption of CFA banknotes outside of the franc zone. Shortly thereafter, the BEAC decided to no longer guarantee the convertibility of its CFA franc banknotes within the WAMU. The BCEAO did the same with its banknotes within the CEMAC. The CFA franc notes of the two areas could no longer be exchanged directly between each other, but had to pass through the anchor currency. The aim was to stem capital flight, but also to 'limit the haemorrhaging' of CFA francs towards Nigeria and 'contain the invasion of products manufactured from that country', notes the economist Javier Herrera.

This new policy, called the 'Abidjan doctrine' or 'Balladur doctrine', rendered the devaluation inevitable, as the IMF announced that it would continue to deal only with those states that had agreed to devalue. The devaluation, therefore, was no longer presented as a tool to correct macroeconomic imbalances, but as the necessary condition for African states to have access to international funds.

The last act of this strange saga took place in January 1994 in Dakar. Officially, the representatives of the countries of the franc zone, including ten heads of state, were gathered to decide the fate of the Air Afrique airline, which was going through a serious crisis. In fact, the African delegations discussed for hours the question of the devaluation, which they still hoped to avoid, with the leaders of the French Treasury, including the director Christian Noyer, the French cooperation minister Michel Roussin, the IMF's director Michel Camdessus and a World Bank official, Katherine Marshall. After 17 hours of discussion behind closed doors, the African leaders threw in the towel and on the evening of 11 January, at 8.50 PM, the Cameroonian finance minister, Antoine Ntsimi, under the supervision of Michel Roussin and Michel Camdessus, announced to the media that at 12 AM on 12 January a CFA franc would have been exchanged for 0.01 French francs instead of the previous 0.02.

France scored at least three goals. Firstly, thanks to the single rate of devaluation, it kept the franc zone intact. Secondly, by teaming up with the IMF and using it as a smokescreen, it was able to elude its role as guarantor. It didn't have to pay out a single cent because it hadn't offered any guarantee of convertibility. And thirdly, the 50 per cent devaluation allowed France to double its financial capacity in CFA francs from one day to the next. The budget of the French Ministry of Cooperation, which at the time amounted to 8 billion French francs and was worth 400 billion CFA francs before the change of parity, was now worth 800 billion CFA francs.

While confirming France's sovereignty over the currency of the franc zone (Édouard Balladur even went as far as saying: 'La dévaluation, c'est moi'),37 the devaluation also revealed the true nature of the French 'guarantee of unlimited convertibility'. France activated the latter in the 1980s, as the operations accounts of the BEAC and BCEAO turned negative for the first time38 – since independence, the two central banks had always covered their monetary issuance with their own reserves, often beyond the levels required by the monetary agreements with France. To enable it to cope with the crisis, the French Treasury loaned an average of 32 billion CFA francs a year to the BCEAO between 1980 and 1990.39 However, while the overdraft offered by the French government to the central banks allowed them to regulate their payments with the rest of the world, it also gave rise to a very damaging phenomenon for the economies of the franc zone: capital flight. Initially caused by the economic crisis, these outflows of money were greatly facilitated by the functioning of the franc zone and precisely by the free movement of capital. So much so that in a short time they reached very worrying proportions. At least 450 billion CFA francs were repatriated from the franc zone in 1988 and 300 billion in 1989,40 huge sums, which were totally disproportionate to the overdraft 'offered' by France. It was precisely these capital outflows that reduced the central banks' foreign exchange reserves and sent their operations accounts in a debit position. By adopting measures to limit the free movement of capital, the BEAC and the BCEAO would probably have succeeded in greatly limiting the damage. Instead, the French guarantee allowed the continuation of the financial drain that eventually led to the devaluation.

At the end of the summit, the heads of state declared, in a statement prepared by Paris, that they had come to the conclusion that a 'readjustment of the current monetary parity' with the euro was not necessary. Thus they implied that the risk of a devaluation had effectively existed, although this was not the case. The idea of a monetary adjustment had actually been spread by Paris only to make the 'IMF pill' more digestible for the African heads of state and public opinion. In their final statement, the leaders stated that they had decided 'to start and conclude bilateral negotiations with the IMF in the near future'. The photo taken at the end of the summit is worth a thousand words: in it, you can clearly see the six heads of state physically placed between Michel Sapin and Christine Lagarde.

Due to their lack of monetary sovereignty, the CEMAC states could not follow the example of Nigeria, another oil-producing country, which managed to avoid ending up in the IMF's clutches. From the outset of the crisis, Nigeria excluded any recourse to IMF loans and adjustment programmes as a solution to its economic and financial problems. Instead, it preferred to seek the financial support of the AfDB to implement a programme of reform. The first tranche of the loan was disbursed without problems. But Westerners used their influence within the AfDB to condition the payment of the second tranche to a preliminary assessment of the country's reform programme. Rather than bowing to this diktat, the Nigerian authorities preferred to turn to China. Beijing agreed to lend the country a much higher sum than the one promised by the AfDB.

The CFA franc banknotes are produced in France by the Bank of France's printing plant in Chamalières, in the department of Puy-de-Dôme, while the coins are minted at the Paris mint, located in Pessac, in the Gironde department. The countries of the franc zone are not the only ones to have their currencies produced abroad. Only eight of the 39 African countries that do not belong to the franc zone have their own printing facilities: Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan.

Some justify this situation by saying that the manufacturing process is too complex for African countries. But this argument is not very convincing, especially in the long run. A country like Kenya cooperates with a private company that has agreed to outsource the production of the shilling to Kenya. If the Democratic Republic of the Congo was able to obtain the necessary means to manufacture its currency, the countries of the franc zone should be able to do so as well. It would be in their interest, given that the current system is very expensive. Between 2013 and 2017, the BCEAO spent 226.8 million euros for the 'maintenance of the currency circulation', which involves the purchase, transport and insurance of banknotes, at an average cost of €45 million per year. Between the mid-2000s and 2017, the bill has reached over half a billion euros.

There is another important point to note: the Bank of France holds almost 90 per cent of the gold reserves of the BCEAO, and therefore of the WAEMU countries, estimated in 2017 at 1,174.234 ounces, or nearly 36.5 tons. In general, central banks store their own gold reserves, except in very specific historical circumstances, since gold is the currency of currencies.

Ultimately, France once again demonstrated that its guarantee is a myth. It is sufficient to examine the budget laws of the years 2016, 2017 and 2018 to confirm this: as already stated in Chapter 2, the French government has not allocated any funds to ensure, if necessary, the convertibility of the CFA franc. The amount indicated on the line dedicated to the 'monetary agreements', which refers to the Treasury's commitments towards the BEAC, the BCEAO and the BCC, is zero euro.

France is also the country that provided the largest funding to Cameroon between 1975 and 1998, granting the country 253 loans worth $5,035 million, much more than Germany, the second bilateral lender (86 loans for a total of $2,166 million), according to the ECA. These loans were mostly 'tied', meaning that they involved a counterpart: in exchange for the loans, Cameroon had to procure goods and services from France. As a result, France became Cameroon's largest creditor but also its main supplier. Some other data reported by the ECA: French loans have never been denominated in CFA francs, although the latter is 'the natural extension of the French currency in Cameroon', but rather in French francs (at the time) or in dollars. For this reason, the Cameroonian debt contracted with Paris – meaning the value of its outstanding debt – increased as a result of the 1994 devaluation.

In 2013, China surpassed France in the franc zone as well, with a market share of 17.7 per cent compared to 17.2 per cent for France. In fact, France's commercial decline was particularly marked in the franc zone, especially in the Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Gabon. But this is not surprising given the relative protection enjoyed by France for a long time. Between 2005 and 2011, its market share also decreased by 18 per cent in the Ivory Coast, by 8 per cent in Gabon and by 6 per cent in Senegal. However, it is still a relative decline: the turnover of French companies, in fact, continues to increase in absolute terms. The portion of the cake decreases, but the size of the cake increases. Furthermore, France is still ahead of China in the Ivory Coast, with a market share of 14 per cent against 6 per cent for the Asian giant, in Senegal (17 per cent against 10 per cent) and in Gabon (33 per cent against 8 per cent).

If the economies of the two CFA sub-regions were to develop and grow too rapidly, France would be less capable of assuming this attitude of monetary paternalism towards them. In less controversial terms: this system is feasible as long as the economies of the CFA zone remain small in size in comparison to the French economy.

An economist has calculated that the theoretical cost of the convertibility guarantee (that is, the sum that the French Treasury would have to pay if the foreign exchange reserves of the franc zone were to run out and France had to activate its famous guarantee) has steadily decreased over the years, to the point of becoming trivial. We are talking of a sum that, over the 1962– 2005 period, oscillated between a minimum of 0.8 per cent and a maximum of 1.3 per cent of the French GDP. The reason the figure is so small is that the BCEAO and the BEAC, as demanded by France, have always kept their operations accounts well stocked, even overstocked, thus eliminating, de facto, the need for the guarantee. A further reason is the growing development gap between the French economy and the African economies of the franc zone: the poorer and more underfinanced the African countries remain, the lower the theoretical cost of the guarantee of convertibility is.

The changeover to the euro has led to a variation in the calculation of the remuneration that the French state must pay to the central banks: it is now established on the basis of two key ECB rates. The first one, the main refinancing rate, is applied to the foreign exchange reserves placed in the levelling account, which we discussed in Chapter 2. The second one, the marginal lending facility rate, is applied to the mandatory share of the reserves in the operations accounts (50 per cent for the BCEAO and 50 per cent, with a tolerance of 40 per cent since 2014, for the BEAC). … This means that they lost money and that, just like in the past, they 'have paid the French Treasury to store their foreign reserves', as Pouemi noted.

The French state doesn't only benefit financially and economically from the CFA system, but politically as well. The raw materials that it imports at low cost, such as uranium and oil, are what allow it to maintain its status as a 'great power'. In particular, the CFA franc provides Paris with a series of instruments of pressure, repression and control that allow it, if necessary, to go beyond the economic sphere and orient the political trajectory of the 15 African states of the franc zone.

Between 1960 and 1991, it was, after Cuba, the country that deployed the largest number of soldiers in Africa. During this period, while Havana supported African national liberation movements, Paris carried out nearly 40 military interventions in 16 countries to defend its interests. France still has permanent military bases or 'support points' in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Chad, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

Almost 40 years after this statement, the Ivory Coast, the largest producer of cocoa and one of the indispensable pillars of the franc zone, paid the price of this policy. When the monetary weapon failed to bring down Gbagbo 'like a rotten fruit', in the words of Alassane Ouattara, in April 2011, France chose to resort to force. … The cuts, the physical appearance of our currency had been completed', he says. 'We had decided to maintain the same nominal value as the CFA franc in order not to destabilise the population too much. The notes and coins would have been produced by a foreign country. We were negotiating with a friendly African country, who had agreed in principle to manage our foreign currency account until our central bank was operational. We were at an advanced stage in our new policy of monetary cooperation when France, certainly aware that it risked losing the Ivory Coast, launched its final assault. Just as we were on the verge of beating it on its own ground, France, to avoid a defeat, resorted to the one thing that it had in greater quantity than us: weapons.'

However, in the same period, several countries in the franc zone, including Equatorial Guinea (–6.8 per cent), the Central African Republic (–6.6 per cent) and Chad (–0.2 per cent), enjoyed much weaker performances.

France promoted the birth of the CEAO in 1973 with the aim of countering Nigeria's ambitions to lead the process of regional integration through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), an institution created in 1975 with headquarters in Abuja and comprising 15 countries. In 1994, Nigerian officials believed for a moment that the devaluation of the CFA franc was a signal that France was cutting Africa loose to focus on European integration. But faced with the creation of the WAEMU, which they saw as a further brake on the push towards regional integration, they had to rapidly reconsider.

Since 1948, its parity with respect to its anchor currencies (first the French franc, today the euro) has been changed only once, during the 1994 devaluation. This classifies the CFA franc as a 'truly fixed' exchange rate regime, in the words of Jeffrey Frankel, that is, a very restrictive exchange rate regime in which the parity vis-à-vis the anchor currency is, in fact, fixed and not adjustable.

So far the EU has only managed to get a few countries to sign and ratify them. For the countries of the franc zone, these EPAs would have the effect of a double sanction: their products would be penalised by the CFA franc, which is a strong currency, and by renewed international competition caused by the withdrawal of tariff and regulatory protections. There is no more effective recipe for keeping them in the trap of primary specialisation.

The decision to maintain a low inflation rate had the effect of curbing the growth potential of the countries of the zone. The situation did not improve following the pegging of the CFA franc to the euro in 1999. Since then, the African countries of the franc zone have recorded an average annual growth rate of per capita income of 1.4 per cent, vis-à-vis 2.5 per cent for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole.

For example, the estimated amount for Cameroon is almost 13 times higher than its foreign debt (1,190 per cent). For Gabon, the Ivory Coast and Congo, the percentages are the following: 923 per cent, 527 per cent and 490 per cent.

According to their estimates, every dollar spent in Africa for servicing the debt translates into a 29 per cent reduction in the health budget (which, in more tragic terms, can be translated economically as follows: every $140,000 allocated to the debt service, a child dies). These figures allow us to better understand the gap that exists between the apparent economic progress, in terms of GDP per capita, registered in countries such as Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo and the Ivory Coast, and their poor performance in the fields of health and education.

Following the debates triggered by the 1994 devaluation, the CFA franc once again became a non-theme, especially for the French media. The situation has changed since 2015–16, probably due to a combination of various factors: the rumours of a devaluation of the CEMAC area in 2015 and 2016; the critical statements made by the Chadian president Idriss Déby in August 2015, who called for ‘cutting the umbilical cord that prevents Africa from taking off’; the growing awareness of the younger generations; the position taken by several African intellectuals. In particular, the publication, in September 2016 in France, on the eve of a meeting of finance ministers of the franc zone, of a collective book by African and French economists, Sortir l’Afrique de la servitude monétaire. A qui profite le franc CFA? (Getting Africa Out of Monetary Servitude. Who Benefits from the CFA franc?), has given new visibility to the Franco-African currency in the French media landscape.

In line with the arguments put forward by Samir Amin and Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi in the 1970s and 1980s, the criticisms of contemporary African economists are mostly technical in nature: the currency of the franc zone is not managed in such a way as to help the cause of development (let alone a self-centred development). These intellectuals criticise the lack of monetary autonomy of the central banks, which are thus forced to pursue a particularly restrictive monetary policy, and challenge the monetary status quo based on a heterodox conception of the nature of money – which, as a foundation of social relations, cannot be reduced to a medium of exchange – and of its central role in capitalist economies, which are precisely ‘monetary production economies’. According to this perspective, money, in the sense of creating an additional purchasing power that does not presuppose the existence of prior savings, is a condition of production. Without advances to producers in the form of credit, a growth in production on a permanent basis is inconceivable.

In France, the authorities seem to have become aware of the growing antagonism of African citizens vis-à-vis the CFA franc. This is testified, first of all, in the sudden increase in the French media of articles by ‘experts’ who obviously don’t waste any chance to celebrate the ‘stability’ of the CFA system, but rarely mention the handicaps involved.

In 1950, with its 41 million inhabitants, the French population was larger than that of the current franc zone, which at the time had 30 million inhabitants. Today the relationship is reversed: the 15 African countries of the franc zone are two and a half times more populous than France (162 million inhabitants against 64 million in 2015). By 2100, they will count 800 million inhabitants against 74 million in France, according to UN projections. The ability of Paris to ‘guarantee’ the African currencies will inevitably be weakened, because the French economy will probably no longer be big enough to lend credibility to such a promise.

The first two paragraphs of article 36 of the WAEMU treaty states: ‘Every member state can withdraw from the West African Monetary Union. The decision to withdraw must be notified to the Conference of Heads of State and Government of the WAEMU. It will come into full effect one hundred and eighty (180) days after its notification. However, this period may be shortened by mutual agreement between the parties.’ Article 58 of the CEMAC treaty contains similar provisions.

In short, if a state wants to leave the franc zone, it does not need to ask for permission. He just has to assume its responsibilities. Having said this, we need to distinguish between two possible exit scenarios: an individual exit and a collective exit. The first could be described as a 'nationalist exit': the countries that decide to follow this path would simply begin to mint their own currency. Obviously, if one of the leading countries of the two monetary unions, Cameroon, Ivory Coast or Senegal, chose to leave the franc zone, as Algeria, Guinea, Madagascar, Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia and Vietnam did, the CFA system would likely not survive. The solution of an isolated exit, however, involves many risks and uncertainties and would not be immune to sabotage attempts (as several countries experienced in the past; see Chapter 3). The other option is the so-called 'pan-African exit': in this case, the African countries of the same monetary union would decide to abolish the monetary cooperation agreement and the agreement on the operations account with France in a collective and solidary manner. Instead of a single country leaving the monetary union, France would be the one to be 'kicked out', while the monetary union would remain in place. As a result, the operations account, the centralisation of the foreign exchange reserves in Paris and the French 'guarantee' of convertibility would disappear. Obviously, France would no longer be represented in the central banks and the foreign exchange reserves would come under the control of the African countries.

At present, there is no state in the world with a population of over 100 million inhabitants that doesn't own its own currency. Nigeria's current population is expected to double by 2050, reaching nearly 400 million inhabitants and surpassing that of the United States.

Similarly to the convergence criteria that the European treaties set as a condition for joining the euro, the African states are asked to respect certain criteria relating to inflation rate, budget deficit and public debt. This condition is highly unrealistic: it is difficult to quickly converge volatile and poorly diversified economies on the basis of mostly cyclical criteria. Countries with high levels of inflation and public debt will be obliged to adopt restrictive measures of dubious efficacy that risk weakening them further in order to meet those criteria.

If the CFA franc continues to exist, in spite of the most elementary economic and political sense, it is because a series of very powerful actors benefit from it. The franc zone contributes to maintaining a private domain for France and guaranteeing monopoly positions for French enterprises, while the French state has access to reliable sources of low-cost raw materials that it can pay for in its currency, all with the more or less active complicity of the African elites who have come to power – and remain in power – with France’s support. The anachronism of the CFA franc survives, therefore, because it satisfies both the interests of the French as well as those of the African ruling classes.

As explained by Katharina Pistor, professor of law at the Columbia Law School in New York, a twenty-first-century state is truly sovereign only to the extent that it has its own sovereign currency. That said, if many countries have their own national currency and therefore enjoy monetary sovereignty in the legal sense, very few can be said to have currency sovereignty from an economic point of view. This is due to the fact that they have not reached financial independence, as evidenced by the fact that they continue to borrow in foreign currency and on the basis of foreign law. In fact, a state that depends on foreign currency-denominated external financing to solve its balance of payments problems is not able to conduct an autonomous economic policy, even if it has its own national currency: the funds it receives are often accompanied by conditionality clauses that limit its autonomy. For example, most African countries that have their own national currency, such as Ghana, Angola or Mozambique, depend on IMF funding and are forced to manage their currency and budget according to the requirements of the Bretton Woods institution. According to Katharina Pistor, only the United States, Britain, Japan, China, Canada, Australia and Switzerland can today be considered truly monetary sovereign countries, in the sense that they have a currency with a flexible exchange rate and generally borrow only in their own currency.

A state that has its own sovereign currency has a big advantage: it can never become insolvent in its own currency. Similarly, a country that manages to set up a well-managed banking and financial system can finance important projects without having to resort to external financing.

‘A monetary system supported by the resources of a foreign state is ipso facto subordinated to the trade and financial arrangements of that foreign country’, said the president of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah at the first summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), on 24 May 1963.

As proof of the important work of political education that has been carried out, a recent poll shows that 66 per cent of Togolese believe that the CFA franc benefits mainly French interests. The same proportion of respondents believe that it should be abolished. The slogan 'France Dégage!', created in the context of Senegal to demand French withdrawal from the CFA system, has now become a rallying cry that transcends borders.

To turn the page on the CFA franc in West Africa, the WAEMU countries should at least have terminated the cooperation agreement between them and France. This is not the case since this agreement has been renewed without being made public. France will maintain its role as 'guarantor' of the convertibility of the CFA franc, a role it has rarely exercised and which it can no longer perform because of its own budgetary difficulties. Similarly, the fixed peg to the euro has been maintained, even though it has been the target of most of the criticisms of African economists since it implies the subordination of WAEMU's monetary policy to that of the eurozone.

As for the fourth and last operating principle, the centralisation of foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury, it does not really disappear. The Macron reform marks the transition to a more indirect system of control. Despite the closure of the operations account, there is nothing a priori to prevent the BCEAO from using its foreign exchange reserves to buy French government debt securities. As we have seen, the BEAC, for example, has made a habit of investing the non-mandatory portion of its foreign exchange reserves in French Treasury debt securities. In return for its 'guarantee', France will require, at a minimum, that the BCEAO inform it about the management of its reserves. The relationship between the Banque de France, the French Treasury and the BCEAO is not over.

The changes announced do not therefore put an end to the CFA system and cede monetary independence to the WAEMU. Rather, they are in line with the logic followed over the decades by France as described in Chapter 3. Paris, with the support of Côte d'Ivoire, has addressed in its own way the most visible symbols of coloniality that are the most decried by pan-Africanist movements and intellectuals, but without touching on the fundamental elements that ensure French domination. Former BCEAO governor Philippe Henri Dacoury-Tabley described Emmanuel Macron's reform as 'window dressing' and 'prestidigitation'.

By deciding to rename the CFA franc the eco without notifying the non-WAEMU ECOWAS member countries, French and Ivorian presidents Macron and Ouattara have visibly tried to torpedo the monetary integration project designed by ECOWAS. Some Anglophone analysts have spoken of the 'kidnapping' of the eco, based on the fact that the WAEMU countries, with the exception of Togo, do not meet the criteria defined by ECOWAS and also on the invitation made by Macron to Anglophone countries, with the exception of Nigeria, to join the WAEMU zone.

Since 21 December 2019, France began to alienate English-speaking countries in West Africa. More and more intellectuals are mobilising so that France does not 'steal' the ECOWAS eco or at least that it does not set itself up as an obstacle to regional monetary integration.

In the name of an abstract pan-Africanism, any objection to the risks and desirability of a euro-area type of monetary integration is generally dismissed and denounced as a desire to 'balkanise' the continent. Proponents of the eco seem to want to replace French monetary colonialism with monetary arrangements designed to serve the interests of global finance as a priority.

5. It should be noted that the French Treasury has an account in each of the central banks of the franc zone for its payment operations in these monetary areas: the payments it makes (pensions, military expenses, etc.) and those it receives (visa receipts, administrative documents, etc.). It credits the operations accounts if its account is in debit.

33. Between 2001 and 2002, informal employment, which generally does not enjoy legal social protection, represented on average more than three-quarters of employment in the capitals of the UEMOA countries. More than half of urban workers received a monthly salary below the legal minimum wage, which ranged from 13,800 FCFA (21 euros) in Lomé to 39,000 FCFA (59 euros) in Dakar.

34. Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi shows, in general, how costly the CFA system is for African countries. Had they converted their gold reserves rather than placed them in the operations accounts, they would have earned 250 billion CFA francs, the equivalent of three years of their debt service expenditure.

38. Furthermore, when the operations account agreements were amended in 2014, the French Treasury set an annual ceiling of 100 million euros for the guarantee of the CFA franc's exchange rate against the SDRs (the IMF's special drawing rights). This means that any potential exchange loss of the countries of the franc zone beyond this limit is carried over to the next financial year.

4. The same is true of France's military presence in its former colonies. Macron made his announcement during a visit to Côte d'Ivoire, where he came to celebrate Christmas (ahead of schedule) with French troops stationed at a permanent military base in Abidjan. France has owned this base since the colonial period. It has never dismantled it and has even reinforced it since 2011.