Ouagadougou: People of African descent and members of the African diaspora participated in a panel discussion on African economic and monetary issues in Ouagadougou on Thursday. The speaker, Dr. Williams Wallace, urged African nations to break free from the CFA franc and create a unified African currency, based on the continent’s resources, to ensure genuine financial independence.
According to Burkina Information Agency, the CFA franc “is merely an instrument of economic control” used to maintain African countries in a state of structural dependency. “As long as we use a currency printed and controlled from abroad, our development will remain blocked,” the speaker argued, analyzing the theme: “Economic Enslavement: The IMF, the CFA Franc, the Plundering of Resources.”
Dr. Wallace emphasized that Africa must break its dependence on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which perpetuate a vicious cycle of impoverishment on the continent through their conditional loans. He called for the creation of an African sovereign development fund and the establishment of an independent common currency.
He estimated that the debts incurred by African countries are “largely offset” by the undervalued natural resources that the continent has supplied to the rest of the world, including gold, uranium, and diamonds.
“They take our resources at low prices and resell them for hundreds of times more. We owe them nothing,” he insisted, calling for a reassessment of African debts and the denunciation of agreements signed “under duress.”
For him, Africa must unite around a single, sovereign currency, like the euro in Europe. He cited the countries of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) as a possible model to launch this initiative: “The AES countries can create a common currency, first local, then digital, before extending it to the whole of Africa.”