Commentary by someone learning to see beyond the textbook
When I first read the article, I paused midway and reread the opening lines. Not because the language was dense—it wasn’t. It was because something more difficult was being challenged: my economic conditioning.
In class, we’re told that currencies operate on trust. That gold is outdated. That fiat money is a more “efficient” system. But this piece made me ask: efficient for whom?
We learn that the world moved on from the gold standard in 1971, as if that was a natural evolution—like humans walking upright. But it wasn’t nature. It was policy. A single speech turned money from a claim on value to a declaration of power. And somehow, the world adjusted. Quietly.
That’s what struck me most: how easily narratives become norms. A dollar is “valuable” not because it contains anything but because we all agree not to disagree. Meanwhile, in countries like Burkina Faso, actual value—in the form of gold—sits underground, extracted and exported, while local communities remain locked out of the wealth loop.
There’s something deeply unsettling about that.
In Burkina Faso, gold is not a metaphor. It’s a daily reality. People mine it with their hands, their tools, their labor. And yet, somehow, the shiny paper backed by nothing gets more respect in global markets than the mineral that built entire civilizations.
The article doesn’t just point this out—it dissects it. It exposes the architecture of a system designed to siphon value from the Global South while exporting the illusion of prosperity. I’ve read about post-colonialism in theory. This felt like post-colonialism in real-time.
What hit me hardest was the phrase: “currency is control.” It made me think about how many economic relationships are disguised as “trade” when they’re actually asymmetric dependencies. Countries rich in resources are poor in purchasing power. Why? Because they have to sell what they already own to get access to paper someone else prints. That’s not just inefficient. It’s absurd.
We’re taught to analyze systems, compare GDPs, debate inflation targets. But this article made me realize how often the data hides the design. We normalize the fact that 80% of Burkina Faso’s exports come from gold, yet the majority of its citizens live in poverty. We call it “bad governance” or “lack of capacity,” but maybe the real issue is a value extraction model that rewards disconnection.
And when someone challenges it—when a country tries to build a local refinery or nationalize a mine—the international system pushes back. Suddenly, they’re “unstable.” They’re “risking investor confidence.” But nobody questions the imbalance that made those decisions necessary in the first place.
It’s like trying to fix a leaking pipe and being told not to disturb the plumbing.
What inspired me most was the idea of gold-backed digital currencies. It combines two things I rarely see in the same sentence: trust and technology.
Gold has historical trust. It doesn’t disappear overnight like a central bank’s promise. But it’s been trapped in old systems—heavy, physical, exclusive. By digitizing access to gold, the article argues, people can reclaim not just wealth but autonomy. A farmer in Burkina Faso owning a fraction of a gram through their phone? That’s not crypto hype. That’s real-world empowerment.
Most papers I’ve read on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) focus on surveillance or programmability. This is different. This isn’t about more control. It’s about less dependency. It’s about bridging the physical and the digital to close the gap between labor and liquidity.
I started thinking: What if we studied this version of economics more? Not just supply and demand curves, but the politics of valuation. The story behind why we value a currency, not just how.
Of course, there are risks. The dollar’s network effects are massive. Alternatives often collapse under pressure—political, financial, even military. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth building.
Systems don’t last because they’re perfect. They last because the cost of replacing them is high. But if the cost of keeping them is higher—lost opportunity, perpetual debt, resource drain—then change becomes not just likely, but necessary.
That’s what I took from this article.
I used to think of economics as a neutral science. But it’s not. It’s a battleground of ideas—some loud, some deliberately silenced.
This article gave me permission to question what I’ve been taught to trust. It reminded me that real value doesn’t lie in promises printed on paper, but in the hands of those who create, extract, build.
And maybe the future of money isn’t about choosing between the dollar or the yuan.
Maybe it’s about reclaiming the right to define value on our own terms.
About Author: –
Mamadou Kwidjim Toure, a Global Finance Expert and Philanthropist Pen down his thoughts on Burkina. Foreign powers are trying to destabilize what they call the “second poorest country in the world”, but maybe it’s not as poor as we believe. For more such articles follow mamadou
