Last November, Chad announced the end of its military agreement with France, removing one of the longest-standing pillars of French influence in sub-Saharan Africa. Once a kind of Hong Kong for Paris – a logistical hub for its operations across the Sahel – the country had remained a key stronghold after France had pulled out of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in recent years. Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire – the latter host to the largest remaining contingent – soon followed suit, announcing the departure of French troops from their territories. With this severance of military ties, France nears the end of a historic chapter that began with de Gaulle’s strategic southward push in the early 1960s, when Algerian independence jeopardized access to Saharan oil.

N’Djamena’s decision surprised many; Macron was the only non-African leader to attend the inauguration of Déby fils in 2021. Yet signs of a shifting landscape were clear: France was conspicuously absent from an anti-Boko Haram operation along the Nigerian border in November. The latest drawdown marks the virtual disappearance of European hard power from West and Central Africa, with the arc from Mauritania to Sudan now entertaining a growing roster of other players: Russia, China, the Emirates and Turkey. France’s civilian network – the technical advisers, expats and NGOs which both justified its military presence and acted as a relay for its armed interventions – has been dismantled too. Unwilling to fully abandon what the Pentagon considers an essential counterterrorism ally, Washington – having recalled its personnel last April – discreetly negotiated the return of a special-forces contingent to Chad in the autumn.

As France retreats, other EU countries have been consolidating their economic ties to the region. Germany has quietly overtaken France as the Eurozone’s leading exporter to the continent, while the Netherlands unveiled a new ‘Africa Strategy’ in 2023, seeking to revive the neocolonial ‘VOC mentality’ – the ‘dynamic’, globally expansionary spirit of the Dutch East Indian company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). Italy, with its Mattei Plan, and Spain, under the guise of managing migration flows, have likewise charted independent paths. French diplomacy, meanwhile, finds itself increasingly sidelined in multilateral arenas. The coveted post of UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, once a Gallic preserve, now appears destined for China. On the Security Council, the Sino-Russian rapprochement has repeatedly thwarted French resolutions – payback for Paris’s trickery in the lead-up to the Libyan civil war.

Macron inherited much of this situation and has done little to distinguish himself from his predecessors. His early presidency was marked by crude paternalism – sleeves rolled up, poring over Sahel maps as if 5,000 troops from Operation Barkhane could somehow control a territory spanning 5 million square kilometres. Eventually forced to go cap in hand to his African counterparts, he resorted to propitiatory gestures: acknowledging the 1944 Thiaroye massacre in Senegal, staging the return of looted artefacts to Benin. His overtures to African diasporas, imagining he could manage Africa ‘with Africans’ from Paris, fell flat. Pro-Gbagbo Ivorians, anti-Biya Cameroonians and pro-Lissouba Congolese were unwilling to overlook France’s continued support for autocrats. Macron’s inconsistency – endorsing the Déby dynasty in Chad while denouncing Mali’s junta – only compounded the damage.

This week, reacting to the recent spate of withdrawals, Macron accused the Sahel states of ‘ingratitude’: ‘they forgot to say thank you’ for France’s ‘involvement against terrorism’. ‘None of them would be a sovereign country today if the French army hadn’t deployed in the region.’ Despite the vindictive tone of such comments, which prompted indignant responses from the leaders of Senegal and Chad, Macron’s mishandling of the Mali dossier has led some to suggest that Paris was seeking excuses to hasten its withdrawal. His demeanour when announcing the end of Operation Barkhane in June 2021 betrayed an intention to scale back long before the verbal sparring with local powers escalated. France’s cavalier seul approach had become untenable among its Western allies, making alignment with international norms inevitable. Essentially this means adopting the US model, abandoning permanent bases and conventional interventions in favour of drones and special forces.

At what appears to be the twilight of French influence in Africa, one relic of colonial rule remains: the CFA franc, widely seen as Paris’s last significant lever of control over its erstwhile pré carré. Conceived in the 1930s as a response to Britain’s sterling area and formalised in 1945, on the same day de Gaulle ratified the Bretton Woods agreements, the currency was pegged to the franc, now the euro, with convertibility guaranteed by the French Treasury. Following decolonization, the CFA franc was divided into two distinct currency zones, each with its own central bank: the West African Economic and Monetary Union (now known by its French acronym UEMOA), comprising eight countries broadly corresponding to the former French West Africa, and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (now CEMAC), covering six states from what was once French Equatorial Africa. Today, these two zones encompass 14 countries with a combined population of nearly 160 million, along with the Comoros, whose central bank operates within a similar framework.

The resilience of the currency, which survived the political upheavals of the post-independence era, remains something of a puzzle. In the early 1950s, the end of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia sparked French debates about the value of maintaining overseas possessions. The concept of a complexe hollandais, later popularised by historian Jacques Marseille, reframed colonies as liabilities draining investment from the metropole. These tensions were vividly captured in journalist Raymond Cartier’s cynical case for the end of empire, ‘La Corrèze avant le Zambèze‘, a slogan taken up by Raymond Aron in a series of influential texts published during the Algerian War. Accepting the inevitability of decolonisation, Aron argued that monetary unity and political sovereignty could be decoupled, laying the theoretical groundwork for neo-colonial ‘cooperation’.

The CFA franc did not go uncontested. In the Maghreb, as in Indochina, newly independent countries opted immediately for monetary autonomy. South of the Sahara, Sékou Touré severed Guinea’s ties with the system in 1958, prompting de Gaulle to retaliate by ordering the SDECE, France’s foreign intelligence agency, to flood the country with counterfeit currency. Mali left the franc zone in 1962, only to return in 1984, while Madagascar and Mauritania exited in 1973. The case of Togo is perhaps the most telling. In 1962, President Sylvanus Olympio – a follower of Harold Laski at the LSE and former Unilever executive – sought to loosen ties to France. Courted by Washington and flanked by a German monetary adviser, he drew up plans for a national currency that threatened to break up the franc zone. In early 1963, when an agreement seemed imminent, Olympio was assassinated in a military coup. His successor, more attuned to Parisian imperatives, swiftly brought Togo back into the CFA fold.

For critics, this episode reveals the CFA’s true nature: a union sustained not by consensus but by the shadow of the French gendarme, and one inevitably weighted toward French interests. For decades, the franc zone has offered enviable advantages to Paris: reliable access to raw materials, paid for in its own currency, coupled with rents from the control of imports. Unlimited convertibility allowed French companies to repatriate profits unencumbered by local reinvestment obligations or exposure to currency risks. Their familiarity with France’s monetary ecosystem gave them a competitive edge over international rivals – backed, if necessary, by the heavies of the 11ème choc. Large public contracts in Africa, secured through a carousel of commissions and kickbacks, became a mainstay of French political life. The oil company Elf in particular, with its shady network of intermediaries exploited by both Gaullists and Socialists, served as a major financial engine of the Fifth Republic’s two-party system.

Endogenous factors also help to explain the durability of the currency. The relative robustness of franc zone economies during crises – most recently the Covid-19 pandemic – has maintained market confidence. Currency depreciations can be a problem for other governments, as demonstrated by this year’s elections in Ghana, where the governing New Patriotic Party was punished at the polls by pensioners and the middle class after the cedi’s collapse in 2022. From independence to the early 2000s, inflation in franc zone countries averaged 7%, compared to over 75% elsewhere on the continent. Since France adopted the euro, it has been capped at 3%. This stability led Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau to join the CFA despite their lack of colonial connections to France. For comprador elites, guaranteed convertibility offers clear advantages, enabling wealth accumulation in the safe financial havens of the Eurozone. And while capital flight has drained public finances, defenders of monetary orthodoxy argue that the system’s stability shields the poorest – those without access to foreign exchange – from the destructive effects of inflationary cycles.

Yet critics have described participation in the CFA as ‘voluntary servitude’. Paris remains the arbiter, managing the system reactively and conceding only the minimum necessary to maintain order. When the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971 sparked unrest in franc zone countries, President Pompidou responded by Africanising senior staff and relocating central bank headquarters to Dakar and Yaoundé – measures that fell far short of the economist Samir Amin’s call for a return to national currencies. A similar approach shaped the 2019 reform of the West African monetary union, enacted amid instability in the Sahel and rising tensions within ECOWAS. These reforms removed the French Treasury’s representative from the West African monetary policy committee – the zone’s true decision-making body – though Paris ensured the seat remained under its influence. Meanwhile, the Bank of France retained its position on the Central African monetary policy committee.

Much of the criticism of France’s stewardship of the CFA system has centred on its perceived failure to fulfil its role as guarantor, the stated rationale for monetary centralisation. Tensions peaked during the 1980s debt crisis. The twin oil shocks of the 1970s triggered massive borrowing by energy-importing nations, while surplus revenues from oil exports flooded Western banks – fuelling the so-called Eurodollar market. In the franc zone, cheap loans financed the expansion of the state apparatus and urban infrastructure projects, particularly in Abidjan; Félix Houphouët-Boigny sought to ‘Europeanise’ Côte d’Ivoire’s capital and assert its primacy over both Dakar and Lagos. The tide turned sharply in the early 1980s after the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates, causing the cost of servicing external debt to soar. Mexico’s default in 1982 triggered a collapse in capital flows. For the franc zone, the crisis was exacerbated by the Mitterrand government’s devaluation of the French franc, which widened the gap between the CFA and the US dollar. Trade deficits ballooned, debt-servicing costs surged, and Paris was ultimately forced to bail out Côte d’Ivoire’s crippled economy.

By the early 1990s, the foreign exchange reserves held with the French Treasury had dropped below the regulatory threshold of 20% of the CFA’s monetary base. Following the failure of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes, France imposed a 50% devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994, despite strong opposition from African leaders. Seeking to deflect blame, Mitterrand leaned on the institutions of the Washington Consensus – notably the IMF, then headed by former Bank of France governor Michel Camdessus. The devaluation left deep scars, exposing the CFA’s failure to deliver on its core promises, chief among them regional integration. Intra-community trade has stagnated at a modest 15%, compared to over 60% in the Eurozone. Member economies also remain reliant on raw material exports such as cotton fibre, sold unprocessed by the Sahelian states on international markets. The CFA currency regime, while greasing the wheels of French business in the region, has undermined local industry’s ability to compete with Nigerian and Ghanaian producers who benefit from managed exchange rates.

Yet the CFA franc has long been less an instrument of metropolitan enrichment than of control, especially since the switch to the euro opened the system to European competition. Although French interests remain substantial, Africa has largely become a fragmented patchwork of geographic and sectoral niches for French capital. Disengagement began as early as the 1980s, coinciding with the rise of a kind of ‘afropessimism’ among business elites – a sentiment propagated by figures as disparate as apartheid apologist Bernard Lugan and former Libération journalist Stephen Smith (now celebrated by Macron’s establishment as a prophet of Africa’s ‘scramble for Europe’). Today, trade with franc zone countries accounts for a negligible share of France’s economy – and around just 10% of its imports of so-called strategic resources.

Though the currency is less of an economic boon these days, Paris has repeatedly leveraged its influence to intervene in regional conflicts. During Côte d’Ivoire’s protracted political crisis in the 2000s – culminating in the 2010–11 post-election standoff – President Sarkozy backed his crony Alassane Ouattara against incumbent Laurent Gbagbo. The West Africa union threatened to freeze Gbagbo’s access to state accounts, while French banks shut their branches midweek, disrupting salary payments and amplifying pressure on the regime. More recently, the spectre of similar currency restrictions, coupled with ECOWAS sanctions, has hung over the revisionist regimes of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) – Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali – a threat that led to their recent departure from the West African community. The use of monetary instruments as tools of political coercion raises questions of extraterritoriality and criticisms of the sort that European nations, France in particular, have levelled against the dollar.

Today, the internal contradictions appear increasingly unsustainable. Political instability has given rise to a new generation of African leaders who echo post-independence critiques of the system’s structural inequities. Whereas in France twenty-five years of post-Maastricht orthodoxy has pushed the notion of sovereignty to the periphery of political discourse, it has become a rallying cry across West Africa, where monetary issues have galvanised politically engaged youth. In January 2017, a rally in Dakar saw pan-African activist Kémi Séba – onetime fringe internet personality in France turned improbable figurehead of anti-Paris agitation on the continent – burn a 5,000 CFA franc note in front of television cameras. This wave of mobilisation, which also rocked Burkina Faso through the Balai citoyen movement, culminated in the victory of the PASTEF party in Senegal last March, after an election campaign premised in large part on opposition to the CFA franc.

Despite revived pressure to abandon the currency, there is no consensus as to what might replace it: reforming the CFA franc, adopting national currencies or some entirely new scheme for regional integration. The most concrete alternative that has been proposed is a single common currency for the Western African states called the eco. Initially championed in the 1980s by Anglophone states led by Nigeria as a means of curbing French influence, the eco has since become a tool for Lagos to consolidate alliances and assert its leadership – against Abidjan and, more strategically, as a counterweight to South Africa’s industrial dominance. But a transition to the eco raises thorny questions: will it be pegged to the euro, tied to a basket of currencies – including the yuan, rouble, and dollar – or left to float? Each scenario carries the risk of increased exposure to divergent economic cycles. Would Nigeria, the continent’s leading oil exporter, assume the role of lender of last resort? The evasive approach to such questions in launching the project suggest otherwise. Revived by Macron and Ouattara as part of the 2019 reform, the eco was slated to replace the CFA franc in the West African union by 2020 – a timeline swiftly dismissed as unrealistic by observers and indefinitely postponed under the pretext of the Covid crisis. Many viewed this as an effort by Paris and Abidjan to preempt the Anglophone bloc. In 2021, ECOWAS revisited the eco with a roadmap targeting 2027, but technical progress remains elusive, and the proposed convergence criteria appear unattainable for most of the union’s member states.

Beneath the rhetoric of pan-African solidarity, deep divisions persist. In Senegal, the new government oscillates between working within the existing system and pursuing a clean break. The AES bloc leans towards sub-regional integration without abandoning the principle of a common currency. However, this would leave Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali – three of the world’s poorest nations – exposed to competition from the CFA or the proposed eco. There are also sharp disparities among African economies: between Sahelian countries, with their single dry season, and coastal states, which have two; and between semi-industrialised nations like Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire and their neighbours, dependent on primary commodity exports. Current debates over the future of the CFA, moreover, reflect an ongoing economic transition in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent oil discoveries off the coast of Senegal and promising explorations in Niger are transforming these nations into strategic commodity exporters. This shift could exacerbate the mismatched economic cycles within the franc zone and challenge the principle of pooled reserves. Countries like Senegal, once beneficiaries of the system, now stand to become net contributors and may resist sharing what they previously relied on.

The currency’s apparent stability masks a volatile reality. Regional rivalries, meanwhile, are being inflamed by geopolitical tensions. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Fed’s interest-rate hikes, the euro’s depreciation against the dollar has worsened the dollar-denominated debt burdens of franc zone countries. Given the CFA zone’s persistent trade deficits, the franc’s stability hinges on regular foreign exchange inflows from its strongest members – Côte d’Ivoire in the West and, in Central Africa, the small oil producers, whose surpluses remain vulnerable to fluctuations in world prices. Diverging priorities among West African states have until now provided a reprieve for Paris. ‘Anyone even slightly familiar with West African issues will agree’, Le Monde’s correspondent observed in 1964, perhaps never imagining that the franc zone would endure for nearly 80 years, ‘that Côte d’Ivoire’s independence was won far more against Dakar than against Paris.’ ‘With the possible exception of Conakry,’ he continued, ‘this applies across West Africa: Nouakchott against Rabat and Dakar, Dakar and Bamako against each other, Lomé against Accra, while Cotonou, Niamey, and Ouagadougou are still trying, with varying success, to win theirs from Abidjan.’ As France retreats, it is perhaps inevitable that these rivalries should return to the fore.

Read on: Rahmane Idrissa, ‘Mapping the Sahel’, NLR 132.