How the French Plunder Africa

France's unchallenged political, economic, and military domination of its former sub-Saharan African colonies is rooted in a currency, the CFA franc. Created in 1948 to help France control the destiny of its colonies, fourteen countries--Benin, Burkina-Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Bissau Guinea, and Chad--maintained the franc zone even after they gained independence decades ago.

In exchange for France guaranteeing the CFA franc's convertibility, these countries agreed to deposit 65% of their foreign exchange reserves in a special account within the French Treasury and granted to France a veto over the franc zone's monetary policy whenever this special account was overdrawn. These decisions have had devastating consequences for forty years.

The bulk of the CFA franc money supply comes from trade between France and its African allies. As a result, the franc zone's basic features have always been scarce money and high interest rates. On the other hand, in line with IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs, strict budget discipline has kept inflation low--as if further belt tightening in the name of price stability was the right policy priority in desperately poor countries hit by decades of depressed demand.

The result has been a lethal combination of currency convertibility, skyrocketing interest rates, low inflation, and free capital movement, which merely fuels speculation and capital flight. Speculators transfer huge amounts of money from France to high-interest-bearing local deposit accounts, collect their tax-free gains every three months, and take the no-risk plunge again.

Commercial banks are awash with these volatile short-term speculative funds, which they lend to governments on the most stringent conditions. The banks and speculators reap handsome gains, governments are overburdened with unsustainable commercial debts, the domestic productive sector is starved of medium- and long-term financing, and most people remain mired in appalling poverty.

Capital flight, meanwhile, stems from free transfer of profits, debt payments, and the propensity of the elite to exile their assets. This massive hemorrhage of foreign currency is channeled exclusively to France, thanks to a capital control it put in place in 1993. As a result, some of the poorest countries in the world are financing part of the French budget deficit.

The only rational reason for the CFA franc's existence is connivance between France and the governing elites of its former colonies in order to plunder the franc zone states. Even the common currency's beneficial effects on trade among member countries were nullified by the paradoxical decision taken by the former sub-Saharan French colonies to dismantle the federal governmental structure and the single market of colonial times and to erect trade barriers in their place.

As though all of this were not bad enough, the CFA franc's exchange rate, which had remained unchanged since 1948, was devalued by 50% in 1994. What better time--from the prospective of foreign investors, that is--to undertake a vast privatization of state assets? Under the auspices of the IMF and the World Bank, lucrative sectors such as energy, telecommunications, water supply, and banks were sold off at knockdown prices to western companies.

So the end result of the partnership between France and its former African colonies has been spectacularly lopsided. France has secured a vast market for its products, a steady supply of cheap raw materials, repatriation of the lion's share of local savings, unrivaled political influence, a strategic presence with military bases occupied free of charge, and the certainty that it can rely on its African allies' diplomatic support. But for the Africans, the partnership has meant weak trade performance, tight money, high interest rates, massive capital flight, and mountains of debt whose repayment prevents higher investment in education, training, health, food production, housing, and industry.

This arrangement's negative effects extend, moreover, to the entire African continent. At the political level, France and its allies opposed the concept of a continental government advocated in the late 1950's and early 1960's by the likes of Nasser and Nkrumah. They helped block the project and establish the notoriously inefficient African club of heads of states, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), thus setting back the clock of African integration by decades.

When the OAU mandated the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to promote regional economic and monetary union, France and its allies moved quickly to impede it by spearheading the creation of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) and the Central African Economic and Monetary Union (CEMAC). This partly prevented ECOWAS from emulating the economic performance of it sister organizations, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Common Market of East and Southern Africa (COMESA).

But for France's African allies, grafting a program of economic integration onto a pre-existing artificial monetary union is delusory and unworkable. Indeed, it has been tearing apart the fabric of these societies ever since so-called independence came in 1960. No wonder that nowadays most of these countries face civil unrest, rebellion, and risk of implosion.

If French Africa is to grow, the franc zone must be dismantled. The euro's birth provided an opportunity for these former colonies to break free of France's suffocating embrace. They missed it. Instead, they shifted the peg for the CFA franc to the euro while keeping the same rules, institutions, and mode of functioning. For the citizens of Francophone Africa, this will certainly have tragic consequences.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sanou Mbaye was an economist with the African Development Bank

Look, I think "it is good to hate the French" as much as the next guy, but this is marxist bilge. France has many sins and some of them are in Africa (patrons of the Hutus anyone?) - but providing a sound currency to countries that would be basket cases on their own is not one of them. Inflation is not a good thing poor Africans are being kept out of.

The article is also incoherent. It blames the French for capital flight and for capital entry. If high interest rates aren't merited by the real risks, then why is capital flight a problem? Do locals not want in on such a good thing? The reality is the risks are high, and the rates are free market ones. Those rates provide real capital, not internal looting displacements from one class to another, which is all inflating the currency can accomplish.

The author also confuses a need to go through France with actual inconvertability, toward the end. If african francs have to first be traded into francs (or Euros), that doesn't stop anything. You just sell the francs or euros you traded them for, for whatever else.

As for continental government led by the likes of Nasser, sure that would have helped (sarcasm alert). Marxist tyrants would like the run the place themselves, loot all foreign capital already there, and inflate like mad to steal from their own populace. Look at Zimbabwe if you want to see where that leads.

Thanks for the ping to more documentation of ghoulish blood sucking the French scumbags have done to Africa.

We have a very close friend who retired from the CIA about 10 years ago. One of his areas of expertise was the middle east, Africa and the financial connections between the French and later the Germans and USSR with these poor countries.

He has called what the French Blood Sucking Ghouls have done in Africa as the new French Colonism created after the second WWII.

Many of the "newer" Arabic countries had deep connections to the French before WWII. When these countries were re founded/established/lined up post WWII, their Despot leaders like the $oddomite made secret financial deals with French companies and French leaders that were great for the despots and the French Blood Sucking Ghouls. These agreements resulted in mass poverity for the ordinary people like the Iraqis. The get fondness between ChIraq and the $oddomite is a prime example of these terrible agreements between France and a despot, like the $oddomite.

These agreements are just part of the reason the despots hate America, democracy and kill their own people with abandonment. They are a big reason why the French hate us. Without these agreements, France's socialist economy would tanked a long time ago.

Why don't these African countries just adopt the Euro then?

A few countries in this hemisphere have decided to peg their currency to the US Dollar. Ecuador and Panama, for instance. These countries actually use the US Dollar. Argentina had pegged its currency to the dollar, but kept spending too much, so had to remove the peg. But these countries should practice sound monetary policy, and I don't think that the French should be blamed for that.

"France has many sins and some of them are in Africa (patrons of the Hutus anyone?) - but providing a sound currency to countries that would be basket cases on their own is not one of them. Inflation is not a good thing poor Africans are being kept out of. "

Germany, tnem Belgium, not France, was the colonial power in Ruanda-Urundi, which became the states of Rwanda and Burundi. The Germans and the Belgians both supported a political system which they saw as run by "Tuutsis" and ethnicized the country along Tuutsi/Hutu lines until independence.

Inflation is not a good thing, but since most Africans in the CFA zone have little cash savings (if any) the effect of the CFA-Euro link is higher prices for most people and binds these countries to the French economy. Compare prices in Ghana or Guinea with those in the CFA zone

Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, Rwanda's Hutu Power dictatorship had enjoyed the patronage of France. As a former Belgian colony, Rwanda was a French speaking country, and Paris's neo-colonial policy in Africa was to support those who spoke its language at all costs. In the early '90s, when Rwanda was plunged into civil war between the Hutu government, and the predominantly Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandese Patriotic Front, France threw its military support behind the Hutu regime. After all, the RPF came out of Uganda--where its leaders had been living in exile--and Uganda is an English speaking country. French leaders were unconcerned by their murderous Hutu Power clients. As the genocide reached its peak in the early summer of 1994, France's President François Mitterand was reported to say, "In such countries as this, genocide is not too important."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/readings/french.html>

I know the history of the congo, thanks. The French were still patrons of the Hutus, who are francophone, against the Tutsis, who are anglophone. The rivalry there goes back to scramble for Africa days and UK-French competition. The Hutus had a populist ideology they learned from French revolution principles, later stoked up by marxism, which sees the Tutsis as the local version of a "feudal" "nobility" against the "prols" of the Hutus.

The effect of inflation does not depend on the size of cash savings. It is a redistributionist measure that rewards the cities, where the newly printed money is glad-handed around, at the expense of the farming countryside, where there is no cash economy but the actual work occurs. Preventing it via a sound currency allows real capital investment and accumulation if local work suffices for it. When let loose instead, it puts up concrete high rises in the cities and feeds a parasitic government class, but does nothing for real economic development or for the real standard of living of the people. The people of west Africa are dirt poor because they have always been dirt poor, not because of marxist myths that sound money equals capitalist exploitation.

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