The 15-nation West African bloc ECOWAS told regional leaders Tuesday that the finish of establishing a unmarried currency amid their economies inwards 2020 had failed.
"The roadmap has non been implemented vigorously," Marcel de Souza, president of the ECOWAS Commission, told a summit inwards Niamey, the working capital missive of the alphabet of Niger.
"We cannot deed to the unmarried currency inwards 2020," he said.
Four goals had been laid downward for introducing a unmarried currency merely "there are non the results to match," de Souza said.
"From 2012 to 2016, none of our countries has been able to persistently uphold the prime number criteria inwards the programme for macro-economic convergence," he said.
The summit aims at assessing progress towards a unmarried regional currency thirty years afterward the finish was outset sketched.
ECOWAS -- the Economic Community of West African US -- was laid inwards 1975.
Today it comprises Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone as well as Togo, which together bring 300 i chiliad m inhabitants.
Tuesday's proclamation came afterward a string of revisions as well as postponements to the monetary integration conception over the years.
In 2013, ECOWAS tasked Niger as well as Republic of Ghana with "coordinating" the single-currency campaign, as well as inwards 2014, a "task force" was laid to furnish them with guidance.
But De Souza listed a publish of setbacks, including failures to harmonise monetary policies betwixt the viii currencies used past times ECOWAS economies, as well as to laid a "monetary institute" -- a forerunner of a mutual key bank.
Eight ECOWAS countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal as well as Togo) jointly utilisation the CFA franc.
They are moored to the unmarried European currency as well as are gathered inwards an organisation called the West African Monetary Union, or WAMU.
But the vii other ECOWAS countries bring their ain currencies, none of them freely convertible with themselves.
Presidents Mahamadou Isoufou of Niger, Alassane Ouattara of Ivory Coast, Nana Akufo Ado of Ghana, Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria as well as Faure Gnassingbe of Togo took purpose inwards the summit.
AFP