Bloc dismisses fake East African common currency
EAC member countries must wait for at least another seven years before they can achieve the single currency. Photo / Edgar R Batte
What you need to know:
- Kindly ignore any rumours circulating in social media on the unveiling of new banknotes for the region,” EAC secretariat.
The secretariat of the East African Community (EAC) regional bloc has dismissed a post on X, formerly Twitter, which claimed that the bloc’s member countries have launched a common regional currency.
The post had been shared on Sunday by a fake account named “Government of East Africa.”
The account said the currency was called the East African Sheafra, a combination of the shilling of East Africa and Franc.
The account also shared an image of a fake banknote of the purported single currency.
The post has received over half a million views and was shared by some leading media outlets and online personalities in the region.
The EAC secretariat dismissed the report of a unified regional currency late on Sunday, saying the creation of a single East African currency “is still a work in progress”.
“Kindly ignore any rumours circulating in social media on the unveiling of new banknotes for the region.”
In 2013, EAC member countries set a target for a single currency by 2024.
The bloc missed the target and pushed the delivery time for the single regional currency to 2031.
Background
In 2022, when the extension of the launch of the currency was announced, the EAC secretariat reasoned that the customs union and common market protocols are not yet fully implemented.
Failure to implement the two protocols has resulted in failure to attain the third pillar, a monetary union, whose main manifestation is a common currency.
Attaining a common currency requires that all the partner states observe the macro-economic convergence criteria by 2021 of a headline inflation of 8 percent, gross public debt of 50 percent of GDP, a reserve 4.5 months of import cover and the ceiling on the overall deficit of not more than 3 percent of GDP, including grants. However, Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda have gone beyond the debt ceiling and hence a call for the extension.
Currently, the East African Legislative Assembly has passed laws to establish the East African Monetary Institute, the East African Statistics Bureau, the East African Surveillance, Compliance and Enforcement Commission, and the EAC is awaiting the establishment of the East African Financial Services Commission, all geared towards the implementation of the monetary union.
