France Robbing Africa through the Colonial Pact
It is the colonial pact that set up the common currency for the
Francophone countries, the CFA franc, which demands that each of the
14 CFA member countries must deposit 65% (plus another 20% for
financial liabilities, making the dizzying total of 85%) of their
foreign exchange reserves in an “Operations Account” at the French
Treasury in Paris.
Nicolas Sarkozy, French President:
They have been robbing Africa since long
The African nations therefore have access to only 15% of their own
money for national development in any given year. If they are in need
of extra money, as they always are, they have to borrow from their own
65% in the French Treasury at commercial rates. And that is not all:
there is a cap on the credit extended to each member country
equivalent to 20% of their public revenue in the preceding year. So if
the countries need to borrow more than 20%, too bad; they cannot do
it. Amazingly, the final say on the CFA arrangements belongs to the
French Treasury, which invests the African countries’ money in its own
name on the Paris Bourse (the stock exchange).
It is, again, the Colonial Pact that demands that France has the first
right to buy or reject any natural resources found in the land of the
Francophone countries. So even if the African countries could get
better prices elsewhere, they cannot sell to anybody until France says
it doesn’t want to buy those natural resources.
It is again the Colonial Pact that demands that in the award of
government contracts in the African countries, French companies should
be considered first; only after that can Africans look elsewhere. It
doesn’t matter even if Africans can obtain better value for money
elsewhere, French companies come first, and most often get the
contracts. Currently, there is a case where just before the elections
in Cote d’Ivoire, the Gbagbo’s government wanted to build a third
major bridge to link the central business district (called Plateau) to
the rest of the city, from which it is separated by a lagoon. By
Colonial Pact tradition, the contract must go to a French company,
which incidentally has quoted an astronomical price – to be paid in
euros or US dollars.
Not happy, Gbagbo’s government sought a second quote from the Chinese,
who offered to build the bridge at half the price quoted by the French
Company and payment would be in cocoa beans, of which Cote d’Ivoire is
a world’s largest producer. But the French said, “non, you can’t do
that”.
Under the Defence Agreements attached to the Colonial Pact (which were
run by the French defence ministry ), Paris had the legal right to
intervene militarily in the African countries, and also to station
troops permanently in bases and military facilities in those
countries, run entirely by the French.
Overall the Colonial Pact gives the French a dominant and privileged
position over Francophone Africa?
In short, the Colonial Pact has created a legal mechanism under which
France obtains a special place in the political and economic life of
its former colonies.
This is surely a big scam instituted by the French to continue to
steal resources from Africa in order to survive. France would be poor
and worst off without this “legitimate” neo-colonial day-light
robbery.
It is time Francophone Africa wakes up to this reality that although
they claim to be independent, there is hardly anything independent
from the French. Francophone Africa is not independent, the French are
choking them and making them poor when they should have been able to
reduce poverty and improve on their infrastructure.
It is a shame that the French should be living off the meager
resources of these poor African states and this has made worse the
poverty situation in most Francophone Africa. They say they are
developed and that they eschew corruption and embrace all those nice
virtues, but behind the back, the French are really starving Africa.
It is these resources that should have been used to alleviate poverty
that has made the French what they are. This should not happen in this
day and age. What right do these French people have to decide the fate
and destiny of Africans? Why can’t Francophone Africa tell the French
to get off their back, for them to have meaningful development? WAKE
UP FRANCOPHONE AFRICA.

probably this is why the English speaking African countries dominate Africa socailly, infrastructurally and economically.even in the Africa's fastest growing economies,french speaking countries are not on the list.

France is just a pest on Africa.if i have my way i will help those french specking countries liberate themselves.France even went as far as having a permanent military base in their countries to intimidated and colonize them.that is why i will keep on hating GEJ for supporting gbagbo's removal.it was an imperialist agenda to remove gbagbo.

i can also remember that France in the past use to have a shaky relationship with Nigeria because it saw Nigeria as a dominant force and a threat to its power in west Africa.that is why west Africa has not been able to integrate well because France's influence in some of those countries.I cry for those countries.

The French Treasury is holding billions of dollars owned by the African states of the francophone nations of West and Central Africa in its own accounts and invested in the French Bourse. The Africans deposit the equivalent of 85% of their annual reserves in these accounts as a matter of post-colonial agreements and have never been given an accounting for how much the French are holding on their behalf, in what have these funds been invested, and what profit or loss there have been. The French have been acquiring and holding the national reserves of fourteen countries since 1961. Even allowing for losses and expenditures in keeping the CFA franc viable, the French are holding about at least four hundred billion dollars of African money, wholly unaccountably to the money's putative owners, the African states. the cost of massacring Ivoirians, using tanks, helicopter gunships and Special Forces were offset against the Ivory Coast money it was holding so didn't add to the budgetary problems. The killing of Africans in the Ivory Coast, Cameroons, Rwanda, Chad and the Central African Republic have never been the subject of a budget request to the French defence budget as the Office of the President deducts these from the tranche at the Treasury (which is why it has never been debated in the French National Assembly). To add insult to injury the French estimated that the French business community had lost several millions of dollars when, in the rush to leave Abidjan in 2006 when the French Army massacred 65 unarmed civilians and wounded 1,200 others, the French lost money as they feared the revenge of the Ivoirians, The French demanded that the Ouattara government which they had installed paid them compensation for these putative losses. Indeed the Ouattara government paid them twice what they said they had lost in leaving.

@horus
Wasn't Gbagbo president in 2006 not Outtara?

[flash=450,350]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6g03HItPQc[/flash]

WARNING GRAPHIC VIDEO. French Army killing unarmed Gbagbo's supporters at Hotel Ivoire
You clearly see French soldiers at 8:19 on the video

igbo2011:

@horus
Wasn't Gbagbo president in 2006 not Outtara?

Yes, Gbagbo was President in 2006. The French colonial army installed Ouattara in power this year in 2011 but it is Ivory Coast who pay the "bills" for the french military intervention, not France.