With paper bills so rancid even lepers hate to touch them, French-speaking West Africa got down to serious money-laundering yesterday, in a massive, eight-country campaign to retire more than 1 billion euros (US$1.22 billion) worth of decaying currency seen as much as vectors of disease as units of exchange.
The cash campaign -- already putting revamped, virgin bills 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 thumbs and forefingers.
"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 bills 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 sewer ran open nearby.
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. As of yesterday, West Africans have until Dec. 31 to turn in the old bills for new ones. From Jan. 1, only the new bills and coins are legal tender.
Of the eight countries affected, seven are former French colonies: Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, 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 percent. 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 Ivory Coast.
The thefts left reported millions of CFA (millions of euros/dollars) in illegal limbo.
The Dakar, Senegal-based Central Bank of West Africa, which handles the currency, refused to comment 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 bills -- with revised designs but the same brightly colored themes of African art and animals -- sport shiny strips to discourage faking.
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