Mitterrand privately reassured African leaders against a devaluation already decided.

Evidence

On 31 July, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, Omar Bongo, Blaise Compaoré and Abdou Diouf rushed to the Élysée. They asked François Mitterrand to intervene to prevent the devaluation. Their French host reassured them… when in fact the decision to devalue had already been taken! This is what the former minister Michel Roussin states in his memoirs: ‘In July 1992, the first attempt [at devaluation] failed dramatically. However, the dossier was technically mature, the entourage of the Minister of Cooperation at the time, Marcel Debarge, was favourable, as was that of President Mitterrand. But there was no preliminary consultation with the African leaders.’ Treasury officials worked for several months ‘in great secrecy on various post-devaluation scenarios’, according to the journalists Antoine Glaser and Stephen Smith. — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 209 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

After 17 hours of discussion behind closed doors, the African leaders threw in the towel and on the evening of 11 January, at 8.50 PM, the Cameroonian finance minister, Antoine Ntsimi, under the supervision of Michel Roussin and Michel Camdessus, announced to the media that at 12 AM on 12 January a CFA franc would have been exchanged for 0.01 French francs instead of the previous 0.02. … This blatantly untruthful text fooled no one in Africa. Antoine Glaser and Stephen Smith explain how the representatives of the IMF and the World Bank did not hesitate to pull out ‘personal’ dossiers on some African leaders to bring them to heel. We can therefore understand why the African leaders left Dakar on 11 January 1994 without greeting their French counterparts. — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 211 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Meanwhile, rumours began to spread in the region that a devaluation of the CEMAC CFA franc was inevitable and imminent. Under pressure, the CEMAC’s heads of state finally surrendered on 23 December 2016 during a summit held in Yaoundé on the initiative of Paris and the IMF. Michel Sapin, France’s finance minister, and his compatriot Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, were there. The meeting was very tense. The president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, posed several embarrassing questions to the French representatives. ‘Why does the French Treasury guarantee no longer apply whenever we have a problem?’, he asked in essence. He didn’t get an answer. At the end of the summit, the heads of state declared, in a statement prepared by Paris, that they had come to the conclusion that a ‘readjustment of the current monetary parity’ with the euro was not necessary. Thus they implied that the risk of a devaluation had effectively existed, although this was not the case. The idea of a monetary adjustment had actually been spread by Paris only to make the ‘IMF pill’ more digestible for the African heads of state and public opinion. In their final statement, the leaders stated that they had decided ‘to start and conclude bilateral negotiations with the IMF in the near future’. The photo taken at the end of the summit is worth a thousand words: in it, you can clearly see the six heads of state physically placed between Michel Sapin and Christine Lagarde. — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 238 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: France takes unilateral devaluation decisions affecting the CFA without informing African states in advance.; France had already decided to devalue while reassuring African leaders it would not — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 209; Paris devalued the French franc unilaterally without consulting African states (+2 more)

Related

• France had already decided to devalue while reassuring African leaders it would not (similarity 0.92)
• Paris fabricated devaluation rumors to force African states into accepting IMF programmes. (similarity 0.92)
• France takes unilateral devaluation decisions affecting the CFA without informing African states in advance. (similarity 0.91)
• The 1994 devaluation was imposed under covert intimidation of African leaders. (similarity 0.91)
• France blocks AfDB support to pressure African states toward IMF programs (similarity 0.90)
• Paris fabricated a devaluation scare to force IMF involvement on CEMAC (similarity 0.89)
• African states bore French franc devaluations without being consulted, violating the monetary agreements. (similarity 0.89)
• Paris devalued the French franc unilaterally without consulting African states (similarity 0.88)
• African leaders and researchers were sidelined while France and allied presidents dictated policy (similarity 0.87)
• The 1994 devaluation was decided under French and IMF supervision in Dakar (similarity 0.85)
• The 1994 devaluation tripled French financial advantages while shifting blame to the IMF. (similarity 0.83)
• The 1980s debt crisis triggered IMF demands for CFA devaluation (similarity 0.80)
• France’s guarantee is backed by pooled African reserves and French central bank seats (similarity 0.80)
• France granted African states nominal monetary rights while denying them in practice (similarity 0.79)
• The CFA franc’s fixed peg forced colonies to absorb French devaluations helplessly (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• France had already decided to devalue while reassuring African leaders it would not #corroborates (0.95) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 209
• The 1994 devaluation was imposed under covert intimidation of African leaders. #corroborates (0.85) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 211
• Paris fabricated devaluation rumors to force African states into accepting IMF programmes. #corroborates (0.80) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 238
• Paris devalued the French franc unilaterally without consulting African states #expands (0.60)