Government prioritizes “Parties Election”

Since February 2022, Somaliland has been in a state of confusion and disarray over the way forward in its electoral processes. Tensions have been building after it became increasingly clear that the Somaliland government intends to reopen the restricted political party system through an unusual process: A direct “parties election”. It envisages a one-person, one-vote election of political parties — not to elect candidates into offices, but only to determine the three political parties to be registered for a ten-year period. The move is perceived to threaten the existence of the current opposition parties and to imply a delay of the presidential election due on November 13, 2022.

Meetings between the President and the opposition leaders and repeated promises of dialogue provided some hope for a political settlement. If nothing else, there seemed to be consensus that – regardless of which election was to come first – the process to update the voter register would need to begin urgently, by mid-May. In a meeting with the political parties early March, the National Electoral Commission (NEC) also provided clarity to all stakeholders that, from a technical perspective, only one electoral process was feasible before November 2022. The election management body assessed that this would need to be the presidential election, which – contrary to the “parties election” – is mandated by the constitution and has an uncontested and complete legal framework.

However, the government has since then made it amply clear that it intends to hold the “parties election” before the presidential elections. President Bihi made public statements to that effect at a speech at the army headquarters in March, at the 20th anniversary celebrations of Kulmiye Party in May, and recently again during his visit to Sanaag Region in June.

Heading into a Dead End

The official narrative continues to be that the presidential election will take place on 13 November 2022, contested by a new slate of political parties coming out of a prior “parties election”. In practice however, only the process to call for the registration of new political associations is actually moving forward to some extent. In May, the House of Representatives approved the seven members of the “Political Parties & Associations Registration and Approval Committee” (RAC), the body to oversee the registration process for new political associations. On May 25, President Bihi already met with a group of politicians who have declared their intention of registering new associations, further fuelling expectations among fresh contestants who are actively mobilising. And RAC has begun handing out the application forms to aspirants.

At the same time, it is increasingly evident that the impediments to holding any election before the end of the year are daunting. On a technical level, one only has to recall that even for a presidential election in November, the voter registration process needed to have started by mid-May. Instead it has been suspended since the onset of a crisis in NEC in May.

The situation was then complicated further because the entire electoral commission (NEC) was subsequently forced to resign under severe political pressure. Though the process to nominate a new NEC is underway and the House of Representatives moved with speed to approve four new members, the commission will most probably not be sworn into office until the confirmation of its seven commissioners is complete. Once that is the case, it will take time for the new NEC to acquaint themselves with their role, develop a working mode of operation, restore public confidence, assume ownership of the operational plans prepared by the NEC secretariat, resume the voter registration, and prepare the technical aspects of elections.  It is safe to assume that it would not be possible to resume the process in less than two to three months. And this is just one of several technical and procedural indicators suggesting that no election can take place in 2022.

The impediments are particularly overwhelming for the “parties election” and go beyond the NEC and technical readiness to deliver an election. Though RAC as a committee is now in place, none of the required groundwork has been done to hold the “parties poll” in time before the licenses of the current parties expire in December. Last year, the Somaliland Government introduced an amendment to the Political Parties Law (No. 14 of 2011) which quickly became subject to political and legal dispute. Though in its ruling on 16 January 2022, the Supreme Court principally allowed this election of parties to take place, neither the Political Parties Law nor the integrated Elections Law (No. 91) have subsequently been amended to pave the way for the actual electoral process. Therefore, in legal terms, the poll has not been defined in any detail, and generally continues to be marked by serious conceptual problems.

Developing and adopting changes to the electoral law has been a cumbersome and lengthy process under the best of circumstances in the past, but with a new NEC still finding its step, and more so, without political agreement on the process, is hardly realistic at all. Therefore, even if RAC registers and vets the political associations to contest in the “parties election” over the coming weeks, the electoral commission would find itself in no position to deliver a parties election before the end of the year, let alone in time for a presidential election with new parties on 13 November 2022.

Crunch Time

While an extension of President Bihi’s term in office appears inevitable at this point, the parties to the dispute can still determine whether this will be based on negotiations and agreement or on political confrontation and eventually unilateral action by the government and the House of Elders alone.

Following weeks of stalemate, the opposition parties sought to build public pressure. On June 5, a “spontaneous” meeting of Waddani supporters in a café resulted in the arrest of the café’s owner. On June 9, Waddani Chairman Abdirahman Cirro lead a “spontaneous” protest to Khairiya Square in Hargeisa. Reports and videos indicate that police swiftly dispersed the large group, using tear gas. Both sides accused each other of firing live ammunition. Several Waddani supporters were shot and injured, including a prominent MP. Police arrested a dozen opposition members and two journalists.

Waddani leader Abdirahman Cirro called for nationwide protests on 11 June, but the demonstrations were called off after a group of businesspersons and elders intervened and offered to mediate. But no talks got off the ground and more than two weeks later, former Information Minister (and leading Waddani politician) Abdillahi Cukuse, Waddani Vice-Chairman Ahmed Omar Hamarji and UCID Press Secretary Yusuf Kayse Abdillahi remain in prison.

In talks with international donor representatives, the Government repeatedly committed to dialogue. Various groups of private citizens, elders and Guurti members reportedly offered to mediate in vain. The government eventually committed to talks led by a group of Guurti members and traditional elders on 22 June, which have been slow to start. Too slow to achieve an agreement before RAC opened up the application process for new political associations on 27 June. Even though it is not clear where this process will lead to, opening the applications process creates facts before the parties reach consensus on the overall electoral process. Moreover, it begins the remodelling of Somaliland’s political arena, providing grounds for infant associations to claim “a seat at the table” – something that at least the established opposition parties will find impossible to accept, making it even more difficult to find a solution acceptable for all.

Mediation and negotiation are up against a critical deadline: 13 July 2022 – which is four months before the presidential election. The day marks the cut-off date for NEC to set the presidential election date on 13 November 2022. All indications are that the commission – if at all a quorum of at least four commissioners swear their oath of office before 13 July – would not be in a position to set this date. Failure to do so would trigger the (over-used) force majeure clauses of the Constitution, which provided the basis for extensions of previous President’s terms in office in 2008/9 and 2015. Building consensus across the political spectrum before the House of Elders acts on the matter – which could be any time after 13 July – will be critical to a peaceful continuation of the democratic process.

Negotiations

The agenda of any possible negotiations remains vague so far. The government might be interested in seeking a formal agreement with the opposition for face-saving purposes. An agreement, however coercive the circumstances, would deny the opposition the opportunity to brand the government as illegitimate after the extension. The opposition parties would have to give up the political oxygen they could otherwise draw from a unilateral extension and from claiming the “moral high ground”. However, one may wonder just how much the Kulmiye government would be willing to cede in return, given that it is taking such a strong posture on the “parties election”. By all accounts, the application process now seems to be underway, and expectations have been raised among aspirant politicians who are forming new associations. And, last not least, it looks like the ruling party has adopted the reshuffling of the political parties as the centre piece of its re-election strategy. Therefore, it would most probably seek to focus the talks on the duration of the extension alone.

The opposition largely frames its public demands in terms of the upcoming expiry of the President’s term, accusing Muse Bihi of “overstaying”. But the sequencing of the elections is a more pressing concern than the extension of Muse Bihi’s term (and its duration). If indeed the “parties election” comes first, the opposition parties risk to be outmanoeuvred and therefore excluded from the presidential election altogether. On a level playing field, this may be a much less of a risk for Waddani than for UCID. In fact, depending on the resulting party and clan constellation, Waddani might stand to benefit from a demise of UCID. But neither UCID nor Waddani seem to have faith in the process. And neither the RAC nominations process nor the overall political climate provide grounds to mitigate these perceptions. The question therefore is why they should endorse a process at the end of which they may not stand the chance to contest in the presidential election. Moreover, a “parties election” before the presidential election would certainly imply a much longer extension of the President’s term of office.

The opposition is likely to insist that the presidential election, which is anchored in the President’s constitutionally mandated term, is superior to the parties election in which it cannot see any urgency, especially in light of the legal gaps. It could also cite precedent: The renewal of the parties system was originally slated for a local council elections in 2007, but as constitutionally mandated bodies the first three political parties (UDUB, Kulmiye and UCID) remained until the local council elections in 2012.

Term Extension – for what?

However contested the issue may be, an actual resolution of the crisis requires a decision on the sequence of the elections and on Somaliland’s approach to the political associations registration problem. Only once the stakeholders answer this key question can the electoral commission be tasked to develop a technical timeline on which the Guurti can base the extension of the President’s term.

If both sides dig in on the registration of political associations, the parties and the mediators could be tempted to opt for a bad compromise: In a quid pro quo, they would agree to extend the President’s term and to delay the opening of the political parties at the same time. The electoral process itself and especially the sequencing of the elections would not form part of the agreement. Apart from securing some harmony in the short term and buying the parties some time, this would simply mean “kicking the can further down the road”. The duration of such an extension would be fairly arbitrary, rather than grounded in technical realities. Therefore, the extension as such would be unproductive for the democratisation process, would further hollow out the Constitution, and simply reset the clock on a ticking time bomb while denying NEC the political (and subsequently legal) basis to fulfil its mandate.

The recurrent electoral crises that have marked Somaliland’s democratization process since inception have led to a degree of fatigue if not indifference amongst local and international observers. A widespread sentiment is that the country has been “to the brink and back” so many times, it will “always sort itself out”. Indeed Somaliland’s institutions and civil society have time and again demonstrated resilience and the ability to lead the political process back to consensus and unity. The current mediation efforts provide for a degree of optimism and the parties are sending some conciliatory signals. But this should not divert attention from the fact that failure of the mediation could leave Somaliland in a severe and in several ways unprecedented situation: A constitutional crisis over the way forward in the democratic process, without a clearly defined and broadly accepted set of political stakeholders, and in the absence of a complete and functional electoral management body. Combined with the threats to relegate the existing parties to a “transitional” status after the opening of the political associations registration process, and mindful of the damage that the political infighting has done to NEC as an institution, this could inflict lasting damage to Somaliland’s widely respected electoral democracy.

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This article was published in collaboration with Hbs Horn of Africa.

Do we move to change, or do we move to stay the same?

That seems to depend on who we were, to begin with. In most cases, it seems we move in an attempt to become even more of whatever we think we are.

A good Kenyan friend of mine once (deliberately) caused great offense in a Nairobi nightspot encounter with a group of Ugandans he came across seated at a table. There were six or seven of them, all clearly not just from the same country, but from the same part of the country.

“It always amazes me,” he said looking over their Western Uganda features, “how people will travel separately for thousands of miles only to meet up so as to recreate their villages.

He moved along quickly.

“Most African Migration Remains Intraregional” is a headline on the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies website:

Most African migration remains on the continent, continuing a long-established pattern. Around 21 million documented Africans live in another African country, a figure that is likely an undercount given that many African countries do not track migration. Urban areas in Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt are the main destinations for this inter-African migration, reflecting the relative economic dynamism of these locales.

Among African migrants who have moved off the continent, some 11 million live in Europe, almost 5 million in the Middle East, and more than 3 million in America.

More Africans may be on the move now than at any time since the end of enslavement, or perhaps the two large European wars. Even within the African continent itself. They navigate hostilities in the cause of movement—war, poverty and environmental collapse.

The last 500 years have seen the greatest expression of the idea of migration for the purpose of staying the same (or shall we say, becoming even more of what one is). The world has been transformed by the movement of European peoples, who have left a very visible cultural-linguistic stamp on virtually all corners of the earth. It is rarely properly understood as a form of migration.

It took place in three forms. The first was a search for riches by late feudal Western European states, in a bid to solve their huge public debts, and also enrich the nobility. This was the era of state-sponsored piracy and wars of aggression for plunder against indigenous peoples. The second form was the migration of indentured Europeans to newly conquered colonial spaces. The third was the arrival of refugees fleeing persecution borne of feudal and industrial poverty, which often took religious overtones.

Certainly, new spaces often create new opportunities, but only if the migrants concerned are allowed to explore the fullness of their humanity and creativity. The historical record shows that some humans have done this at the expense of other humans.

A key story of the world today seems to be the story of how those that gained from the mass and civilizational migrations of Western Europe outwards remain determined to keep the world organised in a way that enables them to hold on to those gains at the expense of the places to which they have migrated.

We can understand the invention and development of the modern passport—or at least its modern application—as an earlier expression of that. Originally, passports were akin to visas, issued by authorities at a traveler’s intended destination as permission to move through the territory. However, as described by Giulia Pines in National Geographic, established in 1920 by the League of Nations, “a Western-centric organization trying to get a handle on a post-war world”, the current passport regime “was almost destined to be an object of freedom for the advantaged, and a burden for others”. Today the dominant immigration models (certainly from Europe) seem based around the idea of a fortress designed to keep people out, while allowing those keeping the people out to go into other places at will, and with privilege, to take out what they want.

Certainly, new spaces often create new opportunities, but only if the migrants concerned are allowed to explore the fullness of their humanity and creativity.

For me, the greatest contemporary expression of “migration as continuity” has to be the Five Eyes partnership. This was an information-sharing project based on a series of satellites owned by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Its original name was “Echelon”, and it has grown to function as a space-based listening system, spying on telecommunications on a global scale – basically, space-based phone tapping.

All the countries concerned are the direct products of the global migration and settlement of specifically ethnic English Europeans throughout the so-called New World, plus their country of origin. The method of their settlement are now well known: genocide and all that this implies. The Five Eyes project represents their banding together to protect the gains of their global ethnic settlement project.

In the United States, many families that have become prominent in public life have a history rooted, at least in part, in the stories of immigrants. The Kennedys, who produced first an Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and then through his sons and grandsons, a president, an attorney general, and a few senators, made their fortune as part of a gang of Irish immigrants to America involved in the smuggling of illicit alcohol in the period when the alcohol trade was illegal in the United States.

Recent United States president Donald Trump is descended from a German grandfather who, having arrived in 1880s America as a teenage barber, went on to make money as a land forger, casino operator and brothel keeper. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States was the paternal grandson of a trader named Warren, a descendant of Dutch settlers who made his fortune smuggling opium into China in the 1890s.

While it is true that the entire story of how Europeans came to be settled in all the Americas is technically a story of criminality, whether referred to as such or not, the essential point here is that many of the ancestors of these now prominent Americans would not have passed the very same visa application requirements that they impose on present-day applicants.

The purpose of migrations then was the same as it is now: not simply to move from one point to another, but also from one type of social status to another. It was about finding wealth, and through that, buying a respectability that had not been accessible in the country of origin. So, the point of migration was in a sense, not to migrate, but to change one’s social standing.

And once that new situation has been established, then all that is left is to build a defensive ring around that new status. So, previously criminal American families use the proceeds of their crime to build large mansions, and fill the rooms with antiques and heirlooms, and seek the respectability (not to mention business opportunities) of public office.

Many of the ancestors of these now prominent Americans would not have passed the very same visa application requirements that they put to present-day applicants.

European countries that became rich through the plunder of what they now call the “developing world”, build immigration measures designed to keep brown people out while allowing the money keep coming in. They build large cities, monuments and museums, and also rewrote their histories just as the formerly criminal families have done.

Thus the powers that created a world built on migration cannot be taken seriously when they complain about present-day migration.

Migration is as much about the “here” you started from, as it about the “there” you are headed to. It is not about assimilating difference; it is about trying to keep the “here” unchanged, and then to re-allocate ourselves a new place in that old sameness. This is why we go “there”.

This may explain the “old-new” names so common to the mass European migration experience. They carry the names of their origins, and impose them on the new places. Sometimes, they add the word “New” before the old name, and use migrant-settler phrases like “the old country”, “back east”. They then seek to choose a new place to occupy in the old world they seek to recreate, that they could not occupy in the old world itself. But as long as the native still exists, then the settler remains a migrant. And the settler state remains a migrant project.

To recreate the old world, while creating a new place for themselves in it, , such migrants also strive to make the spaces adapt to this new understanding of their presence that they now seek to make real.

I once witness a most ridiculous fight between three Ugandan immigrants in the UK. It took place on the landing of the social housing apartment of two of them, man and wife, against the third, until that moment, their intended house guest. As his contribution to their household, the guest had offered to bring a small refrigerator he owned. However, when the two men went to collect the fridge in a small hired van, the driver explained that traffic laws did not permit both to ride up front with him – one would have to ride in the back with the fridge. The fridge owner, knowing the route better, was nominated to sit up front, to which his friend took great and immediate exception; he certainly had not migrated to London to be consigned to the back of a van like a piece of cargo. After making his way home via public means, and discussing his humiliation with his good wife, the arrangement was called off – occasioning a bitter confrontation with the bewildered would-be guest.

There must have been so many understandings of the meaning of their migration to Britain, but like the Europeans of the New World, the Ugandans had settled on replicating the worst of what they were running from in an attempt to become what they were never going to be allowed to be back home.

A good case in point is the ethnic Irish communities in Boston and New York, whose new-found whiteness—having escaped desperate poverty, oppression and famine under British colonial rule on what were often referred to as “coffin ships” —saw them create some of the most racist and brutal police forces on the East Coast. They did not just migrate physically; they did so socially and economically as well.

It starts even with naming.

The word “migrant” seems to belong more to certain races than to others, although that also changes. When non-white, normally poor people are on the move, they can get labeled all sorts of things: refugees, economic migrants, immigrants, illegals, encroachments, wetbacks and the like.

With white-skinned people, the language was often different. Top of the linguistic league is the word “expatriate”, to refer to any number of European-origin people moving to, or through, or settling in, especially Africa.

According to news reports, some seven million Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion were absorbed by their neighboring European countries, most of which are members of the European Union. Another 8 million remain displaced within the war-torn country.

This is an outcome of which the Europeans are proud. They have even emphasized how the racial and cultural similarities between themselves and the Ukrainian refugees have made the process easier, if not a little obligatory.

This sparked off a storm of commentary in which comparisons were made with the troubles earlier sets of refugees (especially from the Middle East and Afghanistan) faced as the fled their own wars and tried to enter Western Europe.

And the greatest irony is that the worst treatment they received en-route was often in the countries of Eastern Europe.

Many European media houses were most explicit in expressing their shock that a war was taking place in Europe (they thought they were now beyond such things), and in supporting the position that the “white Christian” refugees from Ukraine should be welcomed with open arms, unlike the Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians before them.

Human migration was not always like this.

Pythagoras (570-495 BC), the scholar from Ancient Greece, is far less well remembered as a migrant and yet his development as a thinker is attributable to the 22 or so years he spent as a student and researcher in Ancient Egypt. The same applies to Plato, who spent13 years in Egypt.

There is not that much evidence to suggest that Pythagoras failed to explain where he got all his learning from. If anything, he seems to have been quite open in his own writing about his experiences, first as an apprentice and later a fellow scholar in the Egyptian knowledge systems. The racial make-up of Ancient Egypt, and its implications, was far from becoming the political battleground it is today.

Top of the linguistic league is the word “expatriate” to refer to any number of European-origin people moving to, or through, or settling in, especially Africa.

Classic migration was about fitting in. Colonial migration demands that the new space adapt to accommodate the migrant. The idea of migrants and modern migration needs to be looked at again from its proper wider 500-year perspective. People of European descent, with their record of having scattered and forcibly imposed themselves all over the world, should be the last people to express anxieties about immigrants and migration.

With climate change, pandemic cycles, and the economic collapse of the west in full swing, we should also focus on the future of migration. As was with the case for Europeans some two to three hundred years ago, life in Europe is becoming rapidly unlivable for the ordinary European. The combination of the health crisis, the energy crisis, the overall financial crisis and now a stubborn war, suggests that we may be on the threshold of a new wave of migration of poor Europeans, as they seek cheaper places to live.

The advantages to them are many. Large areas of the south of the planet are dominated physically, financially and culturally, by some level of Western values, certainly at a structural level. Just think how many countries in the world use the Greco-Latin origin word “police” to describe law enforcement. These southern spaces have already been sufficiently Westernized to enable a Westerner to live in them without too much of a cultural adjustment on their part. The Westerners are coming back.

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This article is part of a series on migration and displacement in and from Africa, co-produced by the Elephant and the Heinrich Boll Foundation’s African Migration Hub, which is housed at its new Horn of Africa Office in Nairobi.

Despite being one of Africa’s greatest economists, Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi is little known outside Francophone intellectual circles. Writing in the 1970s, he offered a stinging rebuke of orthodox monetary theory and policy from an African perspective that remains relevant decades later. Especially powerful are his criticisms of the international monetary system and the CFA franc, the regional currency in West and Central Africa that has historically been pegged to the French currency—at first the franc, and now the euro.

Pouemi was born on November 13th, 1937, to a Bamiléké family in Bangoua, a village in western Cameroon. After obtaining his baccalaureate and working as a primary school teacher, Pouemi moved to France in 1960, where he studied law, mathematics, and economics at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Pouemi then worked as a university professor and policy adviser in Cameroon and Cote d’Ivoire. In 1977, he joined the IMF but quit soon after, vehemently disagreeing with its policies. He returned to Cameroon and published his magnum opus, Money, Servitude, and Freedom, in 1980. The recently elected president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, appointed Pouemi head of the University of Douala in August 1983—then fired him a year later. On December 27th, 1984, Pouemi was found dead of an apparent suicide in a hotel room. Some of his friends and students argue he was poisoned by the Biya regime (which still governs Cameroon), while others believe that harassment by Biya’s cronies drove Pouemi to suicide.

International Monetary System

Writing in the turbulent 1970s after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates, Pouemi anticipated the three “fundamental flaws” with the international monetary “non-system”: one, using a national currency, the US dollar, as global currency; two, placing the burden of adjustment exclusively on deficit nations; and, three, the “inequity bias” of the foreign reserve system, which makes it a form of “reverse aid.” All three issues have been highlighted by the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Long recognized as a problem, the challenges with using the US dollar as the world’s currency have once again become apparent. Low- and middle-income countries (which include essentially all African countries) have to deal with the vicissitudes of the global financial cycles emanating from the center of the global capitalist system. As the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to combat inflation by engineering a recession—because if borrowing costs rise, people have less money to spend and prices will decrease—they are increasing the debt burden of African governments that have variable-rate loans in US dollars. Already, the World Bank has warned of a looming debt crisis and the potential for another “lost decade” like the 1980s. Moreover, higher interest rates in the US lead to the depreciation of African currencies, making imports more expensive and leading to even higher food and oil prices across the continent.

Pouemi viewed the IMF’s attempt to create a global currency through the 1969 establishment of the special drawing rights (SDR) system as an inadequate response to the problems created by using the US dollar. The issuance of SDRs essentially drops money from the sky into the savings accounts of governments around the world. The IMF has only issued SDRs four times in its history, most recently in August 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With African governments dealing with falling export earnings and the need to import greater amounts of personal protective equipment—and, eventually, vaccines—there was a clear need to bolster their savings, i.e., foreign reserves. The problem is that the current formula for allocating SDRs provides 60% of them to the richest countries—countries that do not need them, since they can and have borrowed in their own currencies. Of the new 456 billion SDR (approximately US$650 billion), the entire African continent received only 5% (about US$33 billion).

Decades ago, Pouemi had slammed SDRs as “arbitrary in three respects: the determination of their volume, their allocation and the calculation of their value.” Instead, Pouemi advocated for a truly global currency, one that could be issued by a global central bank in response to global recessions and that prioritized financing for the poorest countries. Such a reorientation of SDRs could provide a way of repaying African nations for colonialism and climate change.

Secondly, unable to get the financing they need, African governments with balance-of-payments deficits (when more money leaves a country than enters in a given year) have no choice but to shrink their economies. Pouemi strongly criticized the IMF, which he dubbed the “Instant Misery Fund” for applying the same “stereotypical, invariable remedies: reduce public expenditures, limit credit, do not subsidize nationalized enterprises” regardless of the source of a country’s deficits. Devaluing the currency is unlikely to work for small countries that are price takers in world markets and instead improves the trade balance by lowering domestic spending. The IMF has become “a veritable policeman to repress governments that attempt to offer their countries a minimum of welfare.” The current international monetary non-system then creates a global “deflationary bias,” since those countries with balance-of-payments deficits must reduce their spending, while those with large surpluses—like Germany, China, Japan, and the Netherlands—face little pressure to decrease their surpluses by spending more.

The third major issue with the current international monetary non-system is that developing countries have to accumulate foreign exchange reserves denominated in “hard” currencies like US dollars and euros, which means they are forced to transfer real resources to richer countries in return for financial assets—mere IOUs. Pouemi claimed that “if the international monetary system was not ‘rigged,’ reserves would be held as other goods like coffee or cocoa, gold for example. But the system is ‘rigged’; coffee reserves are quantified as dollars, pound sterling or non-convertible francs.” Instead, in the late 1970s, governments like that of Rwanda effectively lent coffee to the United States by using export earnings to purchase US treasury bills, whose real value was being quickly eroded by high inflation in the US. Hence, we live in a world where developing countries like China and Brazil lend money to rich governments like that of the US. As Pouemi explains: “The logic of the international monetary system wants the poor to lend to—what am I saying—give to the rich.”

CFA franc

Pouemi was also a harsh critic of the CFA franc, since maintaining the fixed exchange rate to the euro implies abandoning an autonomous monetary policy and the need to restrict commercial bank credit. Pouemi also argued that the potential benefits and costs of currency unions are different for rich and poor countries, and that therefore it is inappropriate to analyze African monetary unions through a European lens. His thoughts are especially relevant at a moment when the future of the CFA franc and West African monetary integration are up for debate.

In theory, by fixing the exchange rate to the euro, the two regional central banks that issue the CFA franc—the Banque centrale des états de l’Afrique de l’ouest (Central Bank of West African States) and the Banque centrale des états de l’Afrique centrale (Central Bank of Central African States)—have relinquished monetary policy autonomy. They have to mimic the European Central Bank’s policy rates instead of setting interest rates that reflect economic conditions in the CFA zone. The amount of CFA francs in circulation is also limited by the amount of foreign reserves each regional central bank holds in euros. Therefore, “the solidity of the CFA franc is based on restricting M [the money supply], a restriction not desired by the states, but one proceeding from the very architecture of the zone.” As a result, the economies of the CFA franc zone are starved of credit, especially farmers and small businesses, hindering growth and development. In Pouemi’s words, “There is no doubt, the CFA remains fundamentally a currency of the colonial type.”

When discussing the possibilities for a single currency for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Pouemi stressed that the potential benefits and costs of currency union are different for rich and poor countries. “There is not only a difference of perception of the mechanisms of cooperation” between Europe and Africa, “there’s a difference of the conception of common life. Economic cooperation as it is conceived in the industrialized West is the Kennedy Round, North-South dialogue, the EEC, etc.—in other words, essentially ‘customs disarmament’ or common defense; armament is the rule, disarmament the exception.” In Africa, however, economic cooperation is a positive-sum game. Conventional economic theory argues against monetary integration among African countries, since they trade little with each other. But to Pouemi, the goal of monetary integration is precisely to get these countries to trade more with one another. He also questions the view that monetary integration should come last, following the same sequence as the European Union from free trade zone to customs union to common market and, finally, to currency union. “This view is not only imaginary, it is practically non-verified; we have seen examples. Theoretically, it is indefensible: a 10% decrease in tariffs could be … offset by a devaluation of 10%.”

Pouemi also dismissed arguments that Nigeria would dominate the proposed ECOWAS single currency as another example of the classic colonialist tactic of “divide and conquer.” While he acknowledged that “monetary union between unequal partners poses problems,” these are “only problems, open to solutions.” They do not make monetary integration unviable. Such integration need not limit sovereignty. In a regional or continental African monetary union, no “currency would be the reserve of others. Each country would have its own central bank, free to conduct the policy that best suits the directives judged necessary by the government. The only loss of sovereignty following such a union would be the respect of the collective balance. It would not be appropriated by anyone; it would be at the service of all. It would be, for that matter, less a loss of sovereignty than the collective discipline necessary to all communal life.”

Pouemi advocated for an African monetary union with fixed exchange rates between members, the pooling of foreign reserves, and a common unit of account—like the European Currency Unit that preceded the euro. He thought that the debate over whether the CFA franc is overvalued is misguided, since there is no a priori reason for its members to have the same exchange rate. Fixed but adjustable exchange rates—as in the Bretton Woods system or European Monetary System—would allow each nation greater monetary and exchange rate policy autonomy. Settling payments using a common unit of account instead of foreign exchange reserves would help economize on the latter. Moving toward the free movement of capital, goods and labor—as envisioned by the African Continental Free Trade Area—would help diffuse shocks through the monetary union. Finally, such a union would need to have a common policy on capital controls or at least collective supervision of international capital flows.

As Pouemi so eloquently lamented: “History will hold on to the fact that all of [Africa’s] children that have tried to make her respected have perished, one after the other, by African hands, without having the time to serve her.” We do not know what Pouemi could have accomplished had he had the time to serve Africa for longer. All we can do is heed his call that “in Africa, money needs to stop being the domain of a small number of ‘specialists’ pretending to be magicians.”

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.