There is a currency circulating across 14 African nations. Designed in Paris, printed in France, it required for decades that its users deposit up to half their foreign reserves in the French Treasury. Called the CFA franc (officially Communauté Financière Africaine, i.e. African Financial Community), it has operated continuously since 1945. The same instrument created to control and manage France's colonial possessions in sub-Saharan Africa still functions in many ways today. More than 155 million people use it; 14 formally sovereign nations depend on it. And the debate over whether it represents stability or subjugation has never been louder.
UEMOA + CEMAC + Comoros = CFA franc zone.
A country that controls another country's currency controls that economy. France understood this better than almost anyone. While the British pound zone dissolved France held on and the invisible scaffolding linking Paris to Dakar, Abidjan, Yaoundé and Libreville has never been dismantled.
Return to 1945. Europe lies in ruins. France, liberated from Nazi Germany, struggles to feed itself. Inflation spirals; the metropolitan franc loses value weekly. Across the Atlantic the Bretton Woods agreements establish the postwar financial order: the gold-backed dollar as global anchor, every nation required to declare its currency's value to the new IMF. France's shattered economy forces a sharp devaluation of the metropolitan franc against the dollar.
West African CFA franc—fiat bills with zero intrinsic value, backed only by an ECB-mandated fixed exchange rate to the euro.
De Gaulle's finance minister Pleven applies different rates to the metropole and the colonies. In France the franc falls hard. In French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, and the Comoros a new currency is born at a stronger rate: one CFA franc equals 1.7 metropolitan francs. By 1948 the ratio is two to one. The colonies suddenly possess a currency stronger than France's own.
Presented as generosity, the mechanics tell another story. A strong currency in a raw-material exporter that imports finished goods acts as an import subsidy and export tax. It cheapens French manufactures for the colony and makes the colony’s own goods less competitive abroad. From day one the CFA franc's pricing structure channeled African purchasing power toward French industry and quietly strangled the development of competitive local export sectors. Solid Rothschild architecture designed to endure.
A fixed exchange rate set below equilibrium creates excess demand for foreign currency (Qd > Qs), which the central bank must cover by selling reserves to maintain the peg.
And its original name said everything: Colonies Françaises d’Afrique—French Colonies of Africa. No euphemism. Notes were printed then, and still are, in Chamalières by the Banque de France. Four pillars underpinned the system and proved remarkably durable: a fixed exchange rate with the French franc (later the euro) guaranteeing unlimited convertibility by the French Treasury; free capital movement between the CFA zone and France; and the operations account requiring the zone's central banks to deposit a large share of foreign-exchange reserves in the French Treasury.
At founding that share was 100 percent. By 1973 it fell to 65 percent; by 2005 to a 50 percent ceiling. Even at half, 'sovereign nations' handed over half their foreign exchange wealth to a former colonial power in exchange for a guarantee against currency collapse. Defenders cite stability: relatively low inflation compared with much of Africa, insulation from crises that wrecked Zimbabwe or Venezuela. Outside one massive 1994 devaluation the CFA franc has tracked the French franc and then the euro almost lockstep for nearly eighty years. But stability for whom, and at what cost?
Viral 2019 Italian TV clip of Giorgia Meloni (then opposition leader, now Prime Minister) holding a CFA franc note and calling it France's "colonial currency" to exploit resources via seigniorage and export controls.
Pegged at 655.957 CFA francs to the euro, member states cannot adjust the exchange rate to their own conditions. They cannot devalue to boost exports, expand the money supply in a downturn, or set independent interest rates. Monetary policy—the core tool of any sovereign country—is outsourced to the European Central Bank, which sets policy for Germany, France and the Netherlands, not Senegal, Cameroon or Chad. In 2008 and again during the COVID-19 plandemic, countries with sovereign currencies printed money and cut rates; CFA countries could not.
Economists have long argued the franc is chronically overvalued relative to the productive capacity of its users. Overvaluation makes imports cheap and exports expensive—fine for comprador elites buying luxury goods in Paris, devastating for farmers selling cocoa or cotton against competitors with weaker, flexible currencies. The structural result is a permanent tilt toward importing rather than producing and deep dependence on foreign capital. This is a design feature, not an accident.
Olympio, murdered—like Kennedy—by the small hat money printers in 1963.
Sylvanus Olympio, first president of Togo, was elected in 1961 and immediately pushed to leave the CFA system and establish a national central bank. He saw monetary and political sovereignty as inseparable. On January 13, 1963, less than three years after independence, he was assassinated in a coup led by a French-trained sergeant. The new government proved far more amenable to French interests; Togo remained in the CFA zone. Leaders who challenge French economic control tend to meet violent ends or removal; those who cooperate enjoy long, French-supported tenures.
Sankara—radical anti-imperialist, pan-Africanist and austere leader
—prioritized self-reliance, massive social reforms, and integrity.
Murdered by the small hat money printers in 1987.
The most iconic case is Thomas Sankara. In 1983, aged 33, he seized power in Upper Volta and renamed it Burkina Faso—"land of upright people." He ran mass vaccination campaigns, planted over ten million trees against desertification, banned female genital mutilation, appointed women to high office, refused air-conditioning, drove a modest Renault 5 and cut official salaries including his own. His greatest offense in Paris's eyes was open challenge to the CFA franc and Françafrique—the web of political, military and economic ties binding former colonies to France. On October 15, 1987 he was assassinated in a coup led by his deputy Blaise Compaoré, who then ruled the country for 27 years and reversed the anti-French course. In April 2022 a Burkinabe military tribunal convicted Compaoré and associates in absentia; Compaoré, living in exile in Ivory Coast, received a life sentence. The tribunal confirmed French agents were in Ouagadougou the day after the coup. Sankara's family formally accused France of masterminding the killing. Macron pledged in 2017 to declassify related documents; they have not been fully released.
Françafrique operates on a larger scale still: French bases, advisers inside ministries, preferential access for French firms to African resources, and the CFA franc as monetary backbone. Comprador elites enjoyed convertibility that let them move wealth to Paris, an overvalued currency that made luxury imports affordable, and French political and military protection. Ordinary citizens faced scarce credit, interest rates dictated by European conditions, import competition that crushed local firms, and capital mobility that functioned largely as a one-way valve outward.
France confronts rising anti-French sentiment in West Africa—Bamako,
Mali, 2020: "France get out" demonstration against French, EU and UN forces.
By the late 1980s the franc was severely overvalued. Commodity prices—cocoa, coffee, cotton, oil—were falling while the French franc appreciated, dragging the CFA with it. On January 12, 1994 the CFA franc was devalued 50 percent overnight. The decision was taken in Paris, not in any African capital. French Prime Minister Édouard Balladur later confirmed it was done at France's instigation "to help these countries in their development." Overnight the purchasing power of roughly 150 million people was halved. Prices of imported food, medicine and fuel doubled; urban poverty surged; foreign-currency public debt effectively doubled. The cost fell entirely on African citizens who had no vote and no veto. The event laid bare the system's reality: sovereign in name, monetary dependencies in fact.
When France joined the euro in 1999 the CFA franc was pegged at 655.957 to the euro—a rate that still holds. The anchor changed; the dynamics did not. Monetary policy is now set by the European Central Bank for a union of wealthy European states with zero representation or accountability to the African economies bound to it. Notes continue to be printed in Chamalières; until recent reforms the operations accounts still funneled reserves to the French Treasury; French representatives sat on the boards of the BCEAO in Dakar and the BEAC in Yaoundé.
In December 2019, under pressure, Macron and Ivory Coast's Alassane Ouattara announced reforms in Abidjan: the West African CFA franc would become the Eco; the 50 percent reserve deposit requirement would end; French board seats at the BCEAO would disappear; the operations account would close and reserves return to Dakar. Headlines called it historic. The fine print was more cautious: the fixed euro peg remained, French convertibility guarantee continued, and France retained a backup credit line. The most symbolically offensive features were removed; the macro-economically decisive peg stayed. Muammar Gaddafi's African gold dinar was a 2009-2011 pan-African initiative to introduce a single, gold-backed currency aimed to replace the US dollar and the French-backed CFA franc across Africa, allowing nations to sell oil and resources for gold to achieve complete financial independence from Western systems. Murdered by the small hat money printers in 2011.
Critics call it rebranding. The name Eco had already been chosen for a broader ECOWAS common currency that would have included Nigeria; a francophone-only Eco complicated that project. The reforms covered only the eight West African states. The six Central African users of the BEAC franc—Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon—still deposit 50 percent of reserves in Paris and still have French board representation. As of today, the Eco has not launched; the latest ECOWAS target of 2027 is viewed with widespread skepticism.
Meanwhile the Sahel transformed. Coups between 2020 and 2023 toppled governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Guinea, each fueled in part by anti-French sentiment over military presence, European and US sponsored Jihadist terrorism, economic extraction and the CFA franc. In 2024 Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger left ECOWAS and formed the landlocked Alliance of Sahel States, explicitly rejecting French influence and discussing exit from the CFA franc toward national or shared Sahelian currencies. Chad and Senegal demanded withdrawal of French troops, Niger the retreat of the French and Americans.
Senegal's president Bassirou Diomaye Faye and his prime minister Ousmane Sonko campaigned in 2023 on economic sovereignty; Sonko declared in 2025 that the CFA franc is "both a symbolic and an economic problem." The cry "La France dégage" (France, get out!) has echoed from Niamey to Bamako to Ouagadougou to Dakar, encompassing French military bases, mining concessions and, above all, monetary sovereignty. The CFA franc had become the most visible symbol of unfinished decolonization.
» Jub, Jubal, Jubanti.
«(Be upright, act with integrity, and rectify what is crooked.)
Faye, elected president of Senegal in 2024, had expelled French troops by March 2025 and was
elected Chairman of ECOWAS in July 2026; however, Senegal has not left the CFA franc. Hello Eco...
What replaces it remains complicated. Exit without credible alternatives requires building central-bank capacity, reserve management, monetary-policy frameworks and market confidence from scratch. Countries that left earlier—Guinea in 1960, Madagascar and Mauritania in 1973—faced significant turbulence. Yet defenders must confront the system's record: the 14 CFA countries include some of the world's poorest; Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic and Burkina Faso rank near the bottom of the UN Human Development Index; per-capita GDP remains a fraction of the global average. Eighty years of promised stability have not delivered development, poverty reduction or structural transformation. The question is no longer only whether these countries can afford to leave, but whether they can afford to stay.
Why would-should-could all these countries remain in the CFA franc zone?
A monetary system whose notes are printed in France, whose reserves have historically been held in the French Treasury, whose exchange rate is set by a European institution, and in which the actual users long had no meaningful say, was designed under colonialism, preserved through co-optation, coercion and violence, and maintained by institutional inertia and the complicity of local comprador elites who benefit.
At no point in history has the CFA franc been closer to its demise, just coinciding with the scheduled 2027 rollout of the Eco—the proposed new ECOWAS common currency, directly pegged to the Euro. Again. One couldn't make this up. And it just sounds, looks, and smells as fantastic and promising as the Euro...
The CFA franc is a monument to the idea that independence can be granted with one hand while economic sovereignty is withheld with the other. The most effective control is not always exercised with guns and borders; sometimes it is exercised with exchange rates, reserve requirements and banknotes printed thousands of kilometers from the pockets that carry them.
Whether or when the CFA franc system collapses, adapts once more as the Eco, national sovereign currencies, or something else remains open. What is clear is that a reckoning is already under way across the Sahel and beyond. A new generation asks the question Sankara asked four decades ago: "If a nation does not control its own money, can it truly call itself free?"
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