Zimbabwe, a country in Southern part of the African continent is the latest nation state to adopt bitcoin as its currency.

Anyone with a remote sense of history will appreciate why this bit of news really matters.

A place which had the reputation of the food basket of Africa, in the aftermath of its independence from Britain in 1980, in the twinkling of an eye, became the basket case of the continent.

Back in 2003, this former British colony was grappling with a major financial and economic crisis, which led to inflation spiraling completely out of control. The nation’s central bank couldn’t print new bank notes to keep up with the devaluation of its currency — the Zimbabwean dollar — leading to a grotesque shortage of bank notes.

For multi national players doing business in Zimbabwe, they simply found a way of circumventing this problem by generating their own currency, which had its company name engraved on the Zimbabwean dollar, which allowed it to make a killing on all fronts.

You may argue with a degree of credibility that Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation in what still remains a politically and economically unstable region of the world is something of an outlier, but to make this point is to miss the wider arguments and the broader forces at play here.

I will explain why.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Huge swathes of Africa got its independence from Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and Spain.

For the likes of Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Togo, Benin, Congo Brazzaville, Central African Republic, Cameroon and Gabon, which make up a fair number of former French colonies in West and Central Africa, they are bound up in an economic and financial arrangement known as the CFA Francs, which ensures that large deposits are sat in the French Central Bank.

According to Ndongo Samba Sylla and Fanny Pigeaud, authors of how France continues to dominate its former colonies in Africa, we are given a flavour of what the CFA francs really is:

“The CFA franc is colonialism repackaged. The Franc of the French Colonies in Africa (FCFA) during colonial times became with independence the Franc of the Financial Community of Africa (FCFA) in West Africa and the Franc of Financial Cooperation in Central Africa. The French government is a specialist at reframing colonial structures using new names: this is really the story of France’s relationship with Africa.

In the CFA franc system the African central banks have for decades been obliged to deposit a large proportion of their foreign currency reserves into the French treasury. Those amounts represent double the amount of aid from France to sub-Saharan Africa. France essentially gives African countries back a fraction of these forced deposits as ‘help’.”

For the countries bound to the CFA Francs, they remain French colonies in all but name; France gets to determine its economic and political policies, which is a profoundly sad and tragic state of affairs in the twenty-first century.

Which is why this article is being written; to present the case for the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in Africa.

As I wrote in my previous post about the over exposed and hyper inflated dollar, Bitcoin represents the greatest hedge you can have.

It turns out that in Africa with its myriad problems, the world’s preeminent cryptocurrency is simply one way for these nations, labouring under the yoke of Neocolonialism to make a complete break from its murderous and insatiably rapacious former colonizers.

During the EndSars protests which rocked Nigeria over a year ago, the government was frightened by the fact that its young population were raising capital by way of utilizing Bitcoin and chose to ban the cryptocurrency.

I thought it was a wrong headed move back then and now by the Nigerian government to outlaw the use of Bitcoin.

Nigeria is paying a high price for pegging its currency to the dollar, with a sharp fall in the value of its currency and not to mention the steep rise in the costs of goods for the everyday man and woman.

The current state of affairs in Africa’s largest economy does call for a serious rethink on its policy to ban its citizens from trading Bitcoin.

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Zimbabwe, in adopting Bitcoin, is charting a new course in its history; one that seeks to break away from centuries of imperialist and Neo colonial economic ideologies.

The former French colonies who have been enslaved economically by the CFA Francs for the last sixty years, have been presented with a once in a lifetime opportunity to cast off the shackles of their colonizers; I sincerely hope that they will do the right thing and embrace Bitcoin.

It’s no exaggeration to state that we are living in the age of Bitcoin.

And now is the time for Africa to rise up and shine!


References:
The World For Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
How France Continues To Dominate Its Former Colonies by Ndongo Samba Sylla and Fanny Pigeaud