Africa: The CFA Franc Is Not a Currency. It Is a Constitutional Constraint

The debate about the CFA franc keeps happening on the wrong terrain.

My mother used to sell food in front of our house in Biyem-assi. Not because she enjoyed it, or because it was the natural extension of some entrepreneurial ambition. She did it because the structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s had done their work on my father's salary at the Ministry of Public Service, and the arithmetic of feeding four children no longer added up without a second income. She was resourceful, and dignified, and she never complained in front of us. But I was old enough to understand what the table in front of our house meant, even if I was too young to name the forces that had put it there.

In January 1994, the CFA franc was devalued by fifty per cent overnight. My father had parked his Peugeot 504 already; the price of fuel had become, on a civil servant's salary already reduced by structural adjustment, a calculation that did not work. The devaluation halved the purchasing power of every franc he had managed to save. It was not a crisis that arrived gradually, giving people time to adjust. It arrived by decree, in the language of macroeconomic necessity, decided by men in Paris and Washington who had not been elected by anyone in Yaoundé and would not live with the consequences of what they had decided.

I was two years old. I grew up in the world that devaluation made.

Most debate about the CFA franc treats it as an economic question: does the franc's peg to the euro provide the monetary stability that benefits its fourteen member states, or does it lock those economies into an exchange rate calibrated for European monetary conditions rather than African developmental realities? This is a real question with real answers. But it is the second question. The first is constitutional: by what right does the monetary policy of fourteen formally sovereign African nations remain anchored to decisions made in Paris?

That question makes people uncomfortable. In Paris, for obvious reasons. Also in Yaoundé, Abidjan, and Dakar, where a certain class of political and economic leadership has invested, across decades, in not asking it. That reluctance is itself information.

The CFA franc was created in 1945, during the final years of formal French colonialism, as a mechanism for maintaining French economic influence over its African territories as the political winds shifted toward independence. The arrangement was not hidden; it was structural. France guaranteed convertibility. Member states deposited a portion of their foreign exchange reserves in an operations accoun