The CFA franc debate — Sanou Mbaye and Ndongo Samba Sylla read the same currency differently

<p>The CFA franc — the common currency of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU, eight states) and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC, six states) — has been pegged to the French franc since 1948 and to the euro since 1999. It is the longest-surviving monetary union of formerly colonized states. It is also the most contested African monetary institution, and the contestation matters for understanding what monetary sovereignty in Africa could mean.</p> <p>Sanou Mbaye, the Senegalese former African Development Bank official whose *L&#x27;Afrique au secours de l&#x27;Afrique* (2009) is the locus classicus of the critique, argues the CFA framework is structurally extractive. The required deposit of foreign reserves with the French Treasury — historically 50%, now formally ended for WAEMU under the 2019 reform — and the French representation on the BCEAO and BEAC boards meant that monetary policy was subordinated to French inflation and exchange-rate preferences, not to West African developmental needs. The fixed-peg overvaluation, on this reading, has systematically undermined CFA-zone industrial competitiveness for sixty years.</p> <p>Ndongo Samba Sylla, the Senegalese economist whose work with Fanny Pigeaud (*L&#x27;arme invisible de la Françafrique*, 2018) extended the critique, has gone further: the CFA is a colonial currency in continuous operation, and the 2019 Eco-rebranding reform — renaming the WAEMU CFA as the Eco while preserving the euro peg and the BCEAO governance structure — is cosmetic. Real monetary sovereignty requires both unpegging and reorienting governance toward continental rather than metropolitan priorities.</p> <p>The contrarian position, articulated in detail by Kako Nubukpo and earlier by Albert Ondo Ossa, accepts much of the critique but argues the CFA&#x27;s peg has delivered macroeconomic stability that the non-CFA West African states have struggled to achieve. Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Sierra Leonean currencies have lost large fractions of their purchasing power over the past two decades; CFA-zone inflation has averaged in low single digits. The cost of stability has been competitiveness; the benefit has been predictability for households holding domestic-currency savings.</p> <p>What the debate often elides is that the CFA-zone states have not, individually, accumulated the institutional depth — bond markets, supervisory capacity, anti-corruption infrastructure — that would make autonomous monetary policy reliably better than the peg. Adom Getachew&#x27;s *Worldmaking After Empire* (2019) treats the broader question of post-colonial economic sovereignty: sovereignty as autonomy is hollow without the institutional capacity to exercise it well. Mbaye and Sylla are right that the CFA constrains. Nubukpo is right that lifting the constraint without rebuilding the institutions would not produce better outcomes. The constructive task is to do both — which is harder, and slower, than either side of the polemic implies.</p>