Professor and researcher Cheikh Oumar Diagne underlined the importance of money in the construction of African economic sovereignty at the dedication ceremony of his book “Pensing the Money at the Service of Pan-Africanism”. According to him, the currency should not be a subject reserved to economists or university amphitheatres alone, but a question of society, discussed by all, including under the tree of speech. “They have no real meaning in the present context”, he declared. He criticized in particular the Community standard of public debt, set at 70% of GDP, compared with the 60% set by the European Union. According to him, “reporting the public debt to GDP is a methodological error, because GDP includes values created by foreign and national actors, not representing exclusively the wealth of the State”. Cheikh Oumar Diagne has proposed a new approach to public debt which he calls “smart debt” or “intelligent debt”. It is not a question of concentrating on numerical thresholds but on the conditions and aims of indebtedness: “where to borrow, how to borrow, when to borrow and why”. In addition, the author considers that “inflation is not a problem in itself, but a lever that the State can use to support the economy, as has been done in Europe to alleviate the burden of public debt”.
Cheikh Oumar Diagne nous parle de: “Thinking the currency at the service of Pan-Africanism”
