I believe Nigeria and any other interested nation which may have sent delegates everywhere to discuss how to put the Eco currency together for the purpose of integrating the West African economy, should be seeking redress-financial and otherwise-from France for the hijack of the idea. Whether we have a patent or copyright or not should matter, as people have spent time on that concept.
The name was coined somehow, and these countries had gone through much trouble building consensus, and chiseling out other modalities, with a few to going live with the idea this year, only for wily old France to jump on the idea and use it as another colonial crutch to further its racist aims. Now, the currency will have to be printed in France, and tethered to the Euro, whether countries like Nigeria like it or not. France will also dictate the way everything works and every modality. It’s just like getting colonized by Britain. What an insult. It just cannot be right, can it?
Now, France is a very racist nation, even though we here don’t see it often. It is this racist attitude that leads to regular meltdowns, whereby riots cripple the nation. Those riots are often led by generations of migrants from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and some of the black African colonies like Senegal, who have been traumatized for too long in France. France never wanted to grant independence to any African country, and from what we have seen with this Eco saga, it seems true that indeed the country gave the independence goat to African countries but held on to the rope. When guys like Mawuna Koutonin write that the presidential villa in Abidjan is owned by France and that Cote D’Ivoire merely pays rent, we sometimes feel he is going over the board.
\When Mrs. Arikana Chihombori-Quao, the beautiful former African Union (AU) Ambassador to the United States spoke about this self-same issue, she was relieved of her appointment. But for once we have found confirmation that all this while, at least, France had its own people (usually white), sitting on the board of the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) in Dakar, Senegal, with veto power in their suitcases, and that 50 percent of the French Central Bank! They claim to be conceding these otherwise outrageous and utterly condescending conditions with the new move to the stolen Eco.
