Stablecoins have moved from the edge of finance to its wiring. Every month they channel more than $1trillion across networks that operate beyond traditional banks.

For Africa, their significance lies less in novelty and more in power. The flow of money determines who takes a share, who sets the rules, and who remains dependent.

At each point in the current circuit African economies surrender value and authority: in remittance fees, in trade that settles offshore, and in banking systems whose critical levers sit outside the continent.

The costs show up in the smallest acts of care. A Somali nurse goes to a remittance agent or opens an app and sends two hundred dollars home so her mother in Mogadishu can buy food, pay the landlord, and cover the month’s basic bills.

Some 185 arrive. The difference is absorbed by intermediaries in Dubai, London, and New York, none of whom live where the needs are. The same pattern holds from Dakar to Dar es Salaam. Money leaves African hands, crosses oceans, and returns thinner.

Parents pay school fees with a code on a basic handset. Shopkeepers order flour on their phones. Cousins settle small debts in seconds.

Yet a transfer from Nairobi to a supplier in Kampala or Kigali often travels through a clearing system in New York or London before it reaches a neighbour. People who live a short flight apart wait for distant ledgers to close.

These frictions do real damage. They drain margins for traders, delay wages for workers, disrupt production plans, and blunt the very regional trade that should be strengthening African economies and their leverage in the world.

They also reveal how deeply African finance is tied to external centres of control. Behind each transaction lie networks, processors, and banks that earn by mediating African value and anchoring African economies to other jurisdictions.

Stablecoins have begun to unsettle this order. They are digital tokens backed by relatively stable assets and designed for fast, transparent transfers. Value can move across borders in seconds.

Transactions can be traced through public ledgers and, when designed well, can be programmed with clear conditions. They plug into the mobile wallets that millions already use. In principle, they shorten the chain of intermediaries and keep more of the value in African hands.

Kenya’s experience with mobile money shows what can happen when trust, technology, and scale align. M-Pesa took payments out of banking halls and placed them on simple phones, until the volume it handled could be measured against half of Kenya’s gross domestic product.

Stablecoins extend that logic across borders. A trader in Lagos can pay a supplier in Nairobi without touching a European clearing bank. A worker in Johannesburg can send money to relatives in Lilongwe and watch it arrive intact in seconds rather than days.

Yet the same instruments can reproduce older hierarchies in a new form. Most stablecoins in circulation are issued in foreign jurisdictions and tied to the currency of the United States.

If those tokens become the default medium for African payments, the continent will not have escaped dependence. It will have moved from one layer of subordination to another, with even greater opacity about who controls the code, the reserves, and the legal protections.

History offers a clear warning. Colonial railways linked mines and plantations to ports, not towns to each other. Much of today’s financial plumbing replicates that extractive geometry.

Stablecoins are on their way to becoming a new architecture of settlement. The question is whether African institutions will design and govern that architecture, or whether Africans will once again travel along lines laid down elsewhere.

A different path is available. Under the African Continental Free Trade Area, states and regional institutions could sponsor a continental settlement token backed by transparent reserves and audited by independent bodies.

Such an instrument would not replace domestic currencies. It would serve as a regional rail for trade, investment, and remittances, with rules written in Africa and accountable to African publics.

The gains for households would be immediate and concrete. Lower remittance costs show up immediately in family budgets.

For Somali households, a few extra dollars each month buy food before cupboards empty, keep children in school when fees fall due, pay for medicine when a cough will not go away, and allow a small investment, perhaps a young goat that can grow into a herd.

The same logic holds for firms. When payments land quickly and predictably, firms confirm orders, pay workers on time, and keep stock moving instead of watching shelves sit empty while a transfer inches through distant ledgers.

If a wholesaler in Addis Ababa pays a supplier in Nairobi and the funds clear within minutes, workers start loading sacks that afternoon, trucks pull out of the depot before dark, and by nightfall the road is alive with traffic instead of waiting on a bank’s timetable.

Tomatoes spend less time softening in the heat. Fuel is bought when tanks are low, not when a bank clerk is ready. Drivers go home with their pay after a shift instead of waiting for the end of the week.

Paying early secures better prices and slowly builds trust that survives the next transaction. Cash returns more quickly to the business, and a shop that once scraped by begins to plan.

States can use the same instruments to rebuild authority. Stablecoins make it possible to send targeted transfers directly to citizens with a visible trail from treasury to handset.

Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty programme still relies on slow channels that leak. Families travel long distances to collect benefits or pay agents to stand in line on their behalf.

A digital token sent to a basic phone arrives in seconds. A grandmother in Tamale sees the credit before sunset, buys maize that day, and keeps a record on her handset. Auditors can follow every cedi from issuance to final use.

In South Sudan or the Central African Republic, paying clinic nurses and displaced families promptly and in full would show, in plain view, that public resources can reach those for whom they are intended.

For any of this to endure, delivery must be as serious as the vision. Tokens must rest on reserves that citizens can see and verify. Citizens need to know who issues tokens, on what terms, and how they can get their money back. The rules for issuance, redemption, and oversight belong in public law, stated plainly and applied the same way to everyone.

Regulators should begin with a few routes where large volumes already move, record every delay and breakdown, and publish that record in a form traders, reporters, and members of parliament can interrogate.

Independent auditors, civic groups, and professional bodies must have direct access to the code, the ledgers, and the complaints, not as decoration but so they can catch abuse early and force changes before bad habits harden into a new form of capture. Software may move money faster, but only transparent institutions make that speed worth trusting.

It struggled to gain traction. By contrast, the regional switch GIM-UEMOA in West Africa has made cross border payments easier among eight countries because institutions align, standards are enforced, and participants see clear value.

Payments are not a neutral technical layer. They organise daily life and confer power on those who design and operate the underlying systems. The future will belong to those who build and govern these infrastructures of settlement. Stablecoins sit where money, code, and political authority meet.

Africa missed the first industrial revolution not for lack of resources but for lack of control over the infrastructures of production, trade, and finance. The digital turn in money offers another opening.

If African states and regional bodies hesitate, others will write the rules, own the platforms, and collect the tolls. If they act with clarity and coordination, stablecoins can reduce costs, deepen regional trade, and strengthen fiscal and political capacity.

The choice is straightforward. Either Africans build and govern their own architecture of payments, or they once again leave that task to others. One course prolongs dependence. The other begins to translate sovereignty into the practical routines of everyday economic life.

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