Amid the increment of aid, return of cultural artifacts during the colonial wars, and the troops he kept in the Sahel to fight Jihadist militants, Emmanuel Macron continues to become unpopular in his colonies and had since received vicious messages from protesters, which in turn have come to discredit him towards the failures of Francophone African countries.
Inferencing from the anti-colonial and post-colonial periods, France and Belgium together, took some iron-fisted measures and extraordinary decisions that were tantamount to the miseries of history. One of them was the deployment of France’s FrancAfrique. Unlike France, Britain had little interest in the affairs of both political and economic in her West African colonies after the Second World War. They had several politically inflicted wounds to heal in Europe and scorns of economic hardships to settle at home. France, though humiliated in Indochina and Algeria were determined to reclaim their global superpower status, at least through the ascendancy of politics and the dawns of socio-economy decadence in Africa. But the flames of American and the Soviet Union’s Cold War was still being fueled; burning some parts of African colonies through socialists and communists’ frictions among the nuclear masters.
France saw an opportunity; to help the United States topple Socialist/Communist regimes in the African region. As a result, they were subscribed to the CIA’s methods, such as assassinations, guerilla warfare, rebel insurgence, poisoning, and bloody military interventions. Just to maintain their blueprint in the African soil, and to continue bearing her long historical accolade as the distorter and manipulator of the European peace and balance of power. FranceAfrique was quickly mounted to keep the colonies in check.
Features of the FrancAfrique
Without risk analysis, France went all out to shake both her African colonies and that of Belgium. They featured first, the African Cell, created by Jacques Foccart, which involved a committee that comprised the President of France and his closest advisors responsible for making policy decisions on African countries. This program was secretly fixed into French business networks and their secret services without the consent of the French Parliament, to oversee the day-to-day running of the French colonies. This gave France the single veto power on all the decisions that steered the colonies through the post-colonial era.
Secondly, they featured in the Franc Zone; a currency union that pegged, most Francophone countries to the formal French currency, French Franc. The Pegged, also known as Pegged Exchange Rate is where a currency value is fixed or pegged by a monetary authority against the value of another currency. The type of Exchange Regime used by France was the Fixed Exchange Rate where a country sets the value of its home currency directly proportional to the value of another currency or commodity. France established the CFA Franc in 1945 as a colonial currency to be used in all her African colonies (Central African CFA franc and the West African CFA franc) and continued to peg it to their French Franc. The commodity pegged was gold, which was abundant in the West African colonies. That was the controlling monetary policy for the Francophone countries; it determined their labor market, financial market development, capital mobility, and inflation rate. And it was run by their Central banks in France and in West Africa, giving them the economic monopoly on their colonies. The French colonies, though doing well in the economic market than the British colonies, 65% of the financial reserves would be saved and controlled by French banks.
See also: Coups in West Africa; Why the People are Celebrating
Another feature used with the FrancAfrique was the concept of Cooperation or the Post Independent Relationship; sets of accords which was used to promote the French language, culture and to secure markets for French goods. Through these accords, France was able to establish political, economic, military, and cultural ties with the colonies; brandishing themselves as the guarantor of peace and stability in the region. As a result, France would craft an oligarchic style of presidencies, which would divide the French colonies into Rebel forces, ethnic insurgence, sectarian politics, and religious conflicts. The explosions of these upheavals have been brutal.
They also launched Intervention Policies, which resulted in 122 military interventions in Africa from the 1960s through to the 1990s. countries like Benin, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, DR Congo, Djibouti, Togo, and others will all experience France’s series of military operations in their territories. They were toppling unfavorable African leaders, killing and oppressing their remnants through civil wars, and orchestrating ethnic conflicts. The arming of rebels, training of juntas, and the use of weapons became common activities in the Francophone African countries, breeding more rebels and juntas, vulnerable for coups and secessionist activities.
Personal networks between French and African leaders were central in the FrancAfrique strategy. Through interpersonal family and friends’ relations, France established state-to-state friendships which were less under public scrutiny. As a result, personal gains were tantamount to the governance of French colonies. It descended to party politics, state-sponsored military actions, governance for specific interest groups, and economic manipulations at expense of the toils of the people. Parties and special interest groups received funding for EIF oil companies that bred elitism and discrimination among the ethnic tribes within the colonies.
After the Cold War
After the Cold war, America cut all serious military ties in Africa. In 1993, France was locked in the political and economic integration to the European Union. The IMF and the UN had put most of the African countries into the Highly Indebted-Poor countries status through several aids and were still demoralized through several bloodshed conflicts which made them unattractive for global ambitions, culminating in France’s domestic blunders home and global power policy failures abroad. Total failure was sealed in 1994 when they were unable to intervene in the Rwanda genocide of which Macron will apologize in 2021. Besides, the pivotal actors of the FracAfrique; Jacques Foccart, Jean Christophe Mitterrand, Charles Pasqua, and the members of the EIF oil companies had all died.
The spontaneity of these occurrences coupled with economic constraint and political scrutiny at home would strike the FrancAfrique with an incredible weakness, which during the start of the 21st century, shall put the Francophone African countries into blunders.
This was followed by harsher policies from France towards her formal colonies, the more they try, the more they explode. The more they collaborate the more the disintegration. Yet, through economic and political liberalism, France intended to leverage the neo-colonial programs to linger the colonies towards her shields again. They deployed the Abidjan Doctrine which internationalized the economic dependency of the African countries by seeking agreement from IMF before being eligible for French aid. The remnants of the FrancAfrique policies are the rebels, juntas, military-trained groups, secessionists, political elites, economic manipulators, instabilities, and high rates of insecurities in the Francophone African countries.
The political and economic structures, especially in West Africa are haphazardly arranged in the French colonies. As such, those who continued to rig and exploit the system did it at their own risk, since France was no longer the Cold War superpower. The people had suffered long turmoil of poverty, oppression, bloodshed, terrorist attacks, corruption, and colonial bondage. In turning things around, Macron has to bear the consequence of what is happening and what is to come in his colonies