Ndongo Samba Sylla is a Senegalese development economist and a founding member of the Collective for the Renewal of Africa (CORA). He is the coauthor of Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story (London: Pluto, 2021).
Last Sunday, the military rulers of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger quit West African economic union ECOWAS. It’s a major blow to the regional integration project — and a rebuke to Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to interfere in France’s former colonies.
The US-dominated economic order constructed after Bretton Woods did not take the Global South into consideration. A new, just system will have to change that.
Today’s Africa-France summit is a typical show of French president Emmanuel Macron’s imperial grandstanding. But it wouldn’t be possible without business leaders and intellectuals who paint France’s interference in its old colonies in a humanitarian light.
In France’s former African colonies, imperialist monetary policies from Paris continue to cripple domestic economies and undermine democracy. Colonialism in Africa won’t have meaningfully come to an end until true economic sovereignty is allowed to flourish.
François Mitterrand warned that France would be irrelevant to twenty-first-century history unless it maintained its control of Africa. Its instrument for so doing is the CFA Franc — a colonial currency entrenching French rule more than fifty years after independence.