With paper bills so rancid even lepers hate to touch them, French-speaking West Africa gets down to serious money-laundering on Wednesday: a massive, eight-country campaign to retire more than one billion dollars’ worth of decaying currency seen as much as vectors of disease as units of exchange.
The cash campaign — already putting revamped, virgin notes into circulation — aims to replace bills in circulation since 1992 that officials of the African Financial Community (CFA) say are deteriorating beyond use and ripe for counterfeiting.
Not to mention smelly.
”The old ones, they are just disgusting,” merchant Mohammed Hussein said at his wood-shelf store front in Dakar, grimacing at a dank note sagging limply between his pinched thumb and forefinger.
”Ninety-five percent of people who fall sick are because of filthy money,” Hussein said, pulling out a bottle of liquid soap he keeps under the counter for every post-purchase scrub-down.
”You take a bill, you send it to a lab for analysis, you’re going to find three million germs,” he added, lathering.
In a nearby market, fish vendor Oumy Diouf protested that she tries her best to keep the notes clean.
”But sometimes our hands get wet and then we have to take money from the client,” she explained, with suspiciously bloated fish piled on the floor around her, the hacking blade of an employee sending fish scales flying. A open sewer is situated next to her shop.
Diouf smiled apologetically and handed a customer a fish — followed by a fish-wet note in change.
The unloved banknotes will soon be a thing of the past. From Wednesday, West Africans have until December 31 to turn in the old notes for new ones. From January 1, only the new notes and coins will be legal tender.
Of the eight countries affected, seven are former French colonies: Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Benin and Togo, plus the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau.
Economists credit their common currency — which predated Europe’s shared euro currency by decades — with helping promote trade and keep inflation to a developing-world success of 2 to 3%.
Its value — just over 500 francs to the US dollar, and 600 to the euro — is pegged to the euro, the exchange rate guaranteed by France.
By some accounts, the switch was prompted in part by a series of big-money bank robberies in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire.
The thefts left reported millions of CFA in illegal limbo.
The Dakar, Senegal-based Central Bank of West Africa, which handles the currency, refused comments on whether the heists prompted the currency overhaul.
Bank officials have said only that the change is meant to get rid of dirty money, literally and figuratively.
Counterfeiting since 2000 has been so rife that some merchants refuse to take the largest notes in the old-style currency.
The new notes — with revised designs but the same brightly colored themes of African art and animals — sport shiny strips to discourage faking.
And the new bills are pristinely new, for now.
”I like to hold on to the new notes when I get some, because they are the only new things that I can get,” said Ibrahima Faye, a leper begging for a living on a mat outside a Dakar bakery.
”When I buy something, I use the old notes, and try to hold on to the new ones,” Faye said, fanning himself.
Conscious of public phobias, some lepers here — the disease remains common in parts of West Africa where treatment is not made affordable — carry bowls so donors can avoid putting alms directly in their palms.
Despite the stigma, leprosy can only be transmitted by prolonged skin contact — not by cash-and-carry transactions, Maria Cheng, a spokesperson with the World Health Organisation’s infectious diseases branch, said in Geneva, Switzerland.
And why is this lucre so filthy?
Credit cards, electronic banking and even rapid check-cashing have yet to gain much of a foothold in West Africa, helping make it a cash-only society — and putting more demand, and dirt, sweat, cooking oil, and germs, on the notes.
Manual labour is more prevalent, too — so notes pass from fields and fishing boats to markets like Diouf’s.
”It’s not very nice,” customer Alima Seck said, wincing a little, receiving her fish, collecting her change. – Sapa-AP
Associated Press reporter Nafi Diouf contributed to this report in Dakar. – Sapa-AP