Last Saturday, France, through the instrumentality of their most
faithful poodle in West Africa, Alasane Ouattara, kidnapped the West
African currency that was to be launched next year for the 15 countries
in the region. In a press conference in Abidjan, Presidents Macron and
Ouattara announced that the 8 West African countries using the CFA Franc
currency would adopt the Eco as their new currency next year.
The
announcement was done the day ECOWAS was meeting for a final adoption
of Eco, also decided for 2020. The French move breaks up the 30-year
struggle by ECOWAS to establish a regional currency to promote trade and
development. What France has done is that it takes over the
responsibility of establishing and even printing the new currency and
presents the other countries in the region with a fait accompli.
France
is also keeping the new currency attached to the Euro and therefore
aligning it with its colonial interest as it has always done with the
CFA. This means that the other seven West African countries can only
join on conditions established by France. The implication is that
Nigeria is essentially kept out of the currency because the country will
not accept the conditionalities established by France.
The long
delay in establishing the Eco has been caused by the inability of the 15
ECOWAS countries to meet the convergence criteria they set for
themselves. These are that the inflation rate of less than 5 percent is
maintained. The budget deficit is not more than 3 percent of GDP and
that each country has enough foreign reserves to cover at least 3 months
of imports.
The problem now is after failing to meet these
conditions over the past two decades, the eight countries have now
adopted the currency without meeting them. This means economics has been
set aside for political reasons. There are three political factors that
motivated the French decision to take over the baby ECOWAS has had
great difficulty in delivering.
The first reason is that over the
past five years, a successful campaign has been on-going castigating
the CFA Franc as the instrument through which France maintains total
control over the economic affairs of its colonies – the argument being
economic decolonization never occurred. The Francophone countries have
to keep 50 percent of the foreign reserves permanently with the French
treasury and they cannot make international transactions without going
through Paris.
There were demonstrations that French board
members in the West African (French) Central Bank must be removed, which
is the reason that France has finally agreed that it will not have
direct representatives in the Eco Central Bank. What France is trying to
do now is to argue that the “colonial” CFA Franc established is now
dead and the Eco is a new currency that is not French controlled. It’s
the biggest lie of the year.
The second political reason is
related to recent developments on the war on terror in the Sahel. It
will be recalled that on 11 January 2013, French warplanes attacked
jihadist convoys that were advancing on Bamako, Mali’s capital. The
jihadists were already in control of two thirds of Malian territory
having successfully defeated and evicted the Malian army from northern
Mali.
Initially, the three jihadist groups involved, namely Al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), its offshoot The Movement for the
Oneness of Jihad (MUJAO by its French acronym) and Ansar Dine were
confident that they would takeover Bamako but the French stopped them. I
visited Mali shortly after and France was super popular in Mali and
ordinary people were flying the French flags in their houses and cars.
Over
the past few years however, France became very unpopular in the Sahel
because of widespread belief that they were pretending to fight the
jihadists in public but supporting them in secret. People are saying
with their vast array of drones, planes and satellite cover, how are
convoys of hundreds of terrorists able to drive over hundreds of
kilometres and attack soldiers without warning from the French. These
attacks have been happening with increasing regularity and devastating
effect.
President Macron has been very angry that Sahelians were
criticizing his country and ordered the Presidents of the five Sahelian
countries to report to Pau in southern France to be told off for not
convincing their citizens that France was a good friend. The meeting
which was to hold this December has been postponed to January following
the killing of 71 soldiers in Niger by the jihadists. France is
therefore using the Eco currency launch as a public relations gimmick to
rebuild its battered image.
The third political motive for the
Eco move is to ensure that Nigeria is permanently kept out of the
currency. As Professor Ibrahim Gambari has always said, France has
always defined itself as the main power block in Africa and so has
always seen Nigeria’s self-definition as an African power as a threat to
its interests. It is therefore surprising that Nigeria, which is the
main target of this French action has been quiet about what is going on.
Meanwhile, the French are trying to woo Ghana to join Eco so as to
completely isolate Nigeria. The fact that Nigeria has closed its borders
with its three Francophone neighbours also created conditions to push
the Francophone countries to join this plot against Nigeria. In this
tenth year of the battle against Boko Haram in which France is a major
player with troops, planes and drones on the ground, understanding the
French role in West Africa is very important and my hope is that we have
a strong working group following the issues.
0 Comments