Africa must rethink its monetary policy framework and back its currencies with their abundant natural resources to liberate the continent from debt, Professor Yegande Ihmotep Paul Alagidede, has suggested.Like Switzerland and Saudi Arabia which backed their currencies with gold and oil, Africa must pursue same to protect their currencies from speculations from Western countries and from the current Western-inspired monetary system.Prof.
Alagidede, who is the Bank of Ghana (BoG) Chair in Finance and Economics and Professor of Finance at the Wits Business School, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, stated this at a lecture at the University of Ghana in Accra on Tuesday.He said African countries must move beyond western monetary frameworks and adopt a new currency model guided by indigenous values, productive resources and modern technological systems such as block chain.The inaugural lecture for the Bank of Ghana (BoG) Chair in Finance and Economics at the University of Ghana was organised by the University of Ghana Department of Economics, University of Ghana Business School and BoG.Speaking on the topic "From Cowries to Crypto: A Long Arc of Monetary Policy in Africa," Prof.
Alagidede said the adoption of Western-inspired fiat monetary systems across Africa had weakened the continent's currencies and entrenched economic dependency.He noted that African currencies such as the cedi, naira, and franc had become vulnerable to external shocks due to their disconnection from the continent's resource base.According to Prof.
Alagidede inflation in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Egypt was driven not by excess demand but by structural inefficiencies, including poor logistics, reliance on imports and exposure to geopolitical shocks.As a solution, he proposed a new paradigm called Metanomics, a fusion of ancestral African monetary systems and modern digital technologies, such as blockchain and algorithmic lending.He said at the heart of the paradigm was the Resource-Based Monetary Sovereignty and Endogenous Resource-Backed Currency (RBMS-ERBC) model, which placed the creation of money to real, measurable assets like gold, cocoa, solar energy and labour.Prof.
