Italy, where a rightwing leader assumed the reins in October, and France have been locked in a war of words over Europe-bound Africans crossing the Mediterranean. The neighbours’ relations soured rapidly last month when 234 immigrants who had been turned away by Italy were rescued by a charity ship that subsequently docked in the French port of Toulon.

In the midst of the ensuing slanging match, some naughty fellow posted to social media a video in which new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Maloni brandishes a CFA franc note, charging that illegal African immigration to Europe would not have morphed into the crisis it has become, were it not for France’s neocolonialist practices in Africa.

For the uninitiated, the CFA franc was created in the 1940s and is currently a common currency in 14 countries in West and Central Africa.

In the viral video, Maloni denounces the CFA franc as “colonial money”. Holding a photograph of a child working in the bowels of a gold mine in Burkina Faso, she claims that 50% of the West African country’s export proceeds, including gold from its mines, find their way into the French Treasury. As a parting shot, she says in the video: “The solution is not to take Africans and bring them to Europe; the solution is to free Africa from certain Europeans who exploit them.”

The naughty fellow who posted the video in question omitted one crucial detail: the video is from 2019 and was not the latest salvo in the ongoing exchange between Italy and France on the thorny issue of illegal African immigration. So, we don’t know whether her views about the French being neocolonialists who are fuelling the immigration crisis haven’t evolved.

Be that as it may, Maloni should be called out for her misleading comments. She says the CFA franc is a colonial currency. This is not absolutely correct, as two of the 14 countries where it is legal tender are not former French colonies. The two outlier countries are Equatorial Guinea and Guinea Bissau, which were ruled by the Spanish and the Portuguese respectively before attaining independence.

Maloni also implies that half the export proceeds of the African countries that use the CFA franc end up in the French Treasury. Again, this is not true. The reference to 50% is probably a deliberate distortion of the arrangement whereby CFA franc zone countries deposit 50% of their reserves with the French Treasury, in exchange for the currency’s guaranteed convertibility to the euro at a fixed parity. How then would France, whose trade with the CFA franc zone countries accounts for a mere 4% of its international trade, grab half these countries’ export proceeds under this arrangement?

Several criticisms have been levelled against the CFA franc. Some – in fact, many – of these seem to hold water. However, the claim that France’s involvement in Africa is behind illegal immigration to Europe is hogwash.

We must also not lose sight of the fact that there is indeed something to recommend the CFA franc’s being pegged to the euro. For one, this makes the economies of the participating countries more resilient to macroeconomic shocks. This became quite apparent in 2020. During that Covid-19-ravaged year, the CFA franc zone countries’ economies grew by 0.3%, compared with a 1.7% contraction across sub-Saharan Africa, according to statistics from the International Monetary Fund.

The CFA franc’s being pegged to the euro also ensures the stability of the currency, which, surely, is conducive to trade and investment.

So, in my view, what needs to be done is to fix what is ugly about the arrangement. Indeed, reforms were announced in 2019 already whereby the reserves will be deposited with the West African bloc’s central bank.