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’.

Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa's Last Colonial Curr…, loc. 176