African states are one by one falling outside the shackles of French neocolonialism. Six decades after 'independence' Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger reject France's uninterrupted domination of African financial, political, economic, and security affairs. It is absolutely impossible to understand Africa's current turmoil without understanding the nature of French neocolonialism. The key is the CFA franc, the colonial franc, introduced in 1945 in French Africa, which still rules over 14 African countries.
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| » The slave that cannot carry out his own revolt deserves no pity. « Captain Ibrahim Traoré, President of Burkina Faso, July 2023. |
The whole world remembers that after the 2008 global financial crisis, Libya’s Leader Muammar Gaddafi was Chairperson of the African Union, and called for the establishment of a pan-African currency pegged to gold, the African Gold Dinar. By that time Gaddafi had developed Libya from one of the most miserable into the richest country in Africa. Libya was economically and socially stable, had a prosperous and educated people, its own currency, no obligations to the IMF, the World Bank nor the BIS, zero foreign debt and about 150 tons of gold, kept in its own fully sovereign central bank - not in London, not in Paris, and not in New York. Together with South Africa's gold the new pan-African currency would have had its own independent financial center in Tripoli, Libya, and a sovereign African Development Bank in Yaoundé, Cameroon. For scores of African nations that was the plan and strategy to finally jail break from the CFA and from the entirely fraudulent Western global monetary and financial system that was imposed at gunpoint on the 'decolonized' after 1945 by the new 'free world' champions: the US, the French and the British.
What Libya still did not have was nuclear weapons, satellite-guided long-range missiles nor an efficient air defence. In March 2011 the first airstrike on Libya came from a French Mirage fighter jet. France's bombing campaigns on Tripoli, Misrata, Sirte - on water supply and electricity infrastructure, on public buildings and civilian living quarters alike - started even before simulated 'emergency talks' between western leaders in Paris ended. The US kept on bringing in through Cyrenaica tens of thousands of their Jihadists out of Syria and Iraq via US bases in Türkiye for the dirty work on the ground. In the course of the assault the French COS looted the central bank in Tripoli and airlifted all of Libya's gold to Paris while the EU Commission seized all Libyan assets in Europe (by the way, during the 2014 Maidan coup UKSF rushed out 40 tons of Ukraine's central bank gold to London and New York). After murdering Gaddafi in October 2011, France became the first country in the world to recognize a US-fabricated mercenary Jihadist 'National Transitional Council' as the legitimate government over a completely destroyed and dysfunctional Libya, contaminated by countless US, British and French Depleted Uranium projectiles.
The African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was immediately cut off from all funds and cleansed from pan-African sovereign aspirations and diplomats by a concerted coup of the US, the British, the French and the EU Commission. The new head of the African Union became one of Jacob Zuma's ex-wifes, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Her agenda replaced formerly well funded programs for health, education, infrastructure, industrialization and pan-African trade with mass-vaccination and sterilization campaigns of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WHO-'Ebola' test runs for the Covid-19 plandemic, gender issues, CO2 reduction programs, WEF-Central Bank Digital Currency experiments, and an EU-funded African Union military intervention in Somalia, to name but a few of her achievements. When Zuma's term ended in 2017, any genuine purpose of the African Union had been erased. Since 2011 the neocolonial consortium of the US, the British, the French and the EU Commission had launched the so called 'Arab Spring', destroyed Libya, established some two dozens of additional military bases, fostered ethnic separatist movements, armed jihad fanatics, imposed bogus 'peace keeping' and 'humanitarian' military interventions and turned the Horn of Africa, the Great Lakes Region, and the Sahel from Mali to Sudan into quagmires of violence and misery. This triggered displacement and migration of tens of millions within Africa - Egypt alone now hosts some 11 million refugees - as well as mass migration of epic proportion into Türkiye and Europe.
The French CFA racket in Africa makes the Mafia look like street punks. The monetary policy of 14 African nations with a population of more than 120 million is controlled by the French Treasury in Paris. The Central Bank of each African nation was initially required to keep at least 65 percent of their annual foreign exchange reserves in an 'operation account' held at the French Treasury, plus another 20 percent to cover financial 'liabilities'. Even after some 'reforms' were enacted since 2005, these nations were still required to transfer 50 percent of their foreign exchange to Paris, plus 20 percent V.A.T. The CFA Central Banks impose a cap on credit to each member country. The French Treasury invests these African foreign reserves in its own name on the Paris bourse and pulls in massive profits on Africa's dime. More than 80 percent of foreign reserves of African nations in those 'operation accounts' are used by the French Treasury as if they were French capital and as collateral in pledging assets to French payments to the EU and the ECB. French conglomerate Bolloré controls ports and marine transport throughout West Africa; Bouygues/Vinci dominates construction and public works, water, and electricity distribution; Total has huge stakes in oil and gas. And then there is France Telecom and big banking - Societe Generale, Credit Lyonnais, BNP-Paribas, AXA (insurance), Areva - France's highest valued company (uranium) - and so forth. France de facto controls the overwhelming majority of infrastructure in Francophone Africa. It is a virtual monopoly. Policies are issued by the President of the Republic of France and his 'African cell'. They have nothing to do with parliament, or any democratic process, since the times of Charles De Gaulle. The 'African cell' is a General Command and uses the French military apparatus to install 'friendly' leaders and to get rid of those that threaten the system.
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| ECOWAS = Of the Colonialist, by the Colonialist, for the Colonialist? |
The French exploitation scheme became shaken to its core by the 2021 military coup of Colonel Assimi Goïta in Mali, the 2022 military coup of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, now President of a transitional government of Burkina Faso, and the recent military coup of General Abdourahmane Tchiani in Niger in July 2023. They are now counting on their own abilities and capacities and support from Russia and China. During the past twenty years China became Africa's biggest trading partner and foreign investor. No wars, no coups, no destabilization involved. Without a single shot. Bypassing the African Union and based on bilateral agreements, China built thousands of kilometers of railways and roads, cargo trains, high speed trains, urban transportation systems, dozens of airports, sports stadiums, schools, universities, some twenty deep water ports, container hubs, hydroelectric dams, some eighty large power plants, tens-of-thousands of kilometers of power lines, hundreds of factories, mining projects and hospitals, sent twenty thousand Chinese medical workers providing free care to hundreds of millions of Africans, and had invited some one hundred fifty thousand Africans with all inclusive academic scholarships to China. Many African countries expect an increasing Russian engagement, mainly in order to promote their defense capacities and food security.
Reference:
Palki Sharma (2023) - How Did France Colonise Niger and West Africa? (video)
Ian C. Taylor (2019) - France à fric: the CFA Zone in Africa and neocolonialism.
Ian C. Taylor (2019) - France à fric: the CFA Zone in Africa and neocolonialism.
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