Artificial political independence, when it remains devoid of economic sovereignty, constitutes only an illusion of freedom, a facade of autonomy deprived of any real capacity for self-determination.
Russia, Africa and dedollarization
This demonstration awakens something fundamental in African decision-makers who dare to think aloud: choice is possible. The Western monopoly on international financial systems is not a law of nature. It is a political construct. And what has been built can be dismantled.
The African single currency – the Afro, a name the founding fathers envisioned with a foresight that commands respect – is the structural antidote to this engineered dependency. A new name that reflects the changes of the last 60 years is not a bad thing. Africa possesses assets to build it, assets that its Western detractors prefer to ignore: 60% of the world’s unexploited arable land; 30% of known mineral reserves, including the metals for the energy transition – lithium, cobalt, manganese, rare earth elements – which Europe desperately needs to finance its own decarbonization; its domestic market of 2.5 billion consumers by 2050; and its youth: a median age of 19, compared to 44 in Europe. Africa is not poor in resources. It is poor in sovereignty. The single currency is the primary lever for this sovereignty.
The steps are well-known. First, strengthened regional monetary zones – the Monetary Community in West Africa, a reformed CEMAC in Central Africa, and EAC-SADC integration in the East and South. Then, African central banks repatriate their reserves, investing in African assets, and financing continental infrastructure. Finally, clearinghouses enable bilateral trade in African currencies, reducing dependence on the dollar as a mandatory intermediary. Fiscal and budgetary convergence timetables, not to appease the IMF, but to build internal credibility to serve African economies. And finally, an independent African statistical institute, because monetary policy cannot be based on data produced by donors who have a vested interest in keeping you dependent.
All of this requires a complete shift in mental paradigm. We must stop thinking of African development as a problem of foreign aid and start thinking of it as a problem of regained sovereignty. Aid never develops. It perpetuates the dependence of the recipient and the domination of the donor. Only by controlling one’s own currency, one’s own sovereign credit, and one’s own economic policy can a people decide its own destiny without asking permission from Paris, Berlin, or Washington. What power does not have its own sovereign currency? None. Currency is therefore a fundamental pillar of power that must be controlled.
History waits for no one. The world is reorganizing itself before our very eyes at breakneck speed. China is building its roads, ports, and corridors to Africa with a strategic coherence that the West criticizes – while being unable to offer its own equivalent. Russia is forging alliances and demonstrating that an alternative to the Western system is viable. The Gulf powers – the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran – are investing massively in African agriculture, finance, and infrastructure with discreet yet remarkably effective efficiency. The West, meanwhile, wavers between moral condescension, geopolitical panic, and imperial nostalgia.
In this major global reshuffling – the most profound since the end of the Cold War – Africa faces a historic choice. It can continue to be a playground for the ambitions of others, a resource deposit whose added value evaporates abroad, a captive market for the subsidized exports of the powers that plundered it yesterday and now assist it. Or it can become what it should have been since 1960: a player.
A recurring theme in the assassination and poisoning of African leaders
Sékou Touré was right. Nkrumah was right. Sankara was right. Lumumba was right. They were assassinated, overthrown, liquidated – often by African hands, but always with sponsors, funding, and motives that came from elsewhere. You don’t eliminate what is harmless. You don’t assassinate insignificant ideas. The very fact that they were killed proves they were right. And it proves that those who killed them knew exactly what they were doing.
This is why the barbaric and cowardly assassination of Muammar Gaddafi can be interpreted, beyond its immediate insurrectionary dimension, as the culmination of a latent confrontation between a sovereigntist, pan-African vision – which he championed, financed, and attempted to institutionalize – and geopolitical balances unwilling to tolerate its strategic implications. This analytical framework, whose scope and foundations deserve to be examined in greater depth in the next article, is a case in point.
A passport. A currency. A voice. The African century cannot be decreed. It must be wrested from existence, just as Guinea wrested itself from De Gaulle’s Franco-African community under the leadership of Sékou Touré in 1958.
African unity is not a romantic fantasy reserved for commemorative speeches. It is an existential threat to those who need disunity to maintain their comfort, access, and domination. A continent of 2.5 billion people, united geographically and economically, speaking with one voice in international forums, controlling its resources and its currency – this continent overturns all power dynamics. It will no longer beg for its trade rights. It will demand them. Furthermore, it will no longer negotiate from a position of structural weakness. It will negotiate as an equal.
It is for this reason – this precise reason and no other – that for sixty years, the same powers that preach African democracy have been sabotaging African integration. Because fragmented democracy can be managed. Because unified sovereignty, on the other hand, cannot be managed. It is a battleground.
The African century begins now. It begins with unity. It begins with the categorical rejection of subjugation. It begins with a passport that says, This land is mine. It begins with a currency that says: this wealth is mine.
Or it doesn’t start.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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