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by jacques_foccart
4174 days ago
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Half a trillion is not unrealistic. Take one of the numbers we know with a bit more certainty, Nguesso in the Republic of Congo (not the DRC!) takes only a little over 17% of the oil revenue locally - the rest is "exported" (this low price incidentally is how he has managed to remain in power for so long despite some pretty drastic attempts at changing that). Africa's GDP is around USD 2.4 trillion so seeing a fifth of that "disappear" seems like a conservative lower bound, actually (admittedly countries like South Africa skew the measure). |
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Do you honestly think that France is taking 3x this per annum and hiding it in offshore accounts?
Certainly France (and the US) meddled with successions in Africa (and even when they didn't have France's blessing, most elite soldiers in the immediate post-colonial period had served in the French Foreign Legion....) but for all the coups, former French colonies can and did leave the CFA Franc, one rejoined a couple of decades later and a couple of countries that weren't ever French colonies also decided to join.
I'm not familiar with the administrative details behind the CFA Franc, but it sounds quite likely the author is inexpertly trying to describe a pretty standard set of central banking arrangements (governments required to borrow reserves at the base interest rate to fund deficit spending, fiscal rules for a currency area, foreign currency reserves held with ECB to support commitment to Euro parity etc). A bit like the French in the Euro really...
There are good arguments for the CFA Franc not being wholly beneficial for its member states, but this isn't one of them.