But it's not a tax all the same, and referring to it as such is misleading at best.
There are economic positives and negatives to pegging a west African currency to one that is stable.
Not sure there are that many negatives to trade with the Eurozone, especially since this requires a trade agreement with the EU.
Trade involves more than just the exchange of goods. There is investment, an expertise exchange both ways, and as so often stated in the context of Brexit, a European market is something it would be crazy to turn up noses at.
Overall, in a volatile region it is probably best to try to prevent economic chaos that might happen with a very weak local currency from contributing to the already existing problems.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti
France has been proactive in cancelling debt since 1947. Quite correctly, France considers pumping billions into a country beset by a culture of public corruption would not be a good idea. Millions and millions of dollars in aid simply disappeared under the Duvaliers. The Duvalier regime's greed accounted for 40% of Haitian national debt by the time they were overthrown.
The British government after 1833 gave compensation from the Treasury to British slaveholders in the Caribbean once slavery was abolished.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_Trade_War
As a result, there are now wealthy families all around the UK still indirectly enjoying the proceeds of slavery where it has been passed on to them. Dr Draper said: "There was a feeding frenzy around the compensation." A John Austin, for instance, owned 415 slaves, and got compensation of £20,511, a sum worth nearly £17m today. And there were many who received far more.
Academics from UCL, including Dr Draper, spent three years drawing together 46,000 records of compensation given to British slave-owners into an internet database to be launched for public use on Wednesday. But he emphasised that the claims set to be unveiled were not just from rich families but included many "very ordinary men and women" and covered the entire spectrum of society.
Dr Draper added that the database's findings may have implications for the "reparations debate". Barbados is currently leading the way in calling for reparations from former colonial powers for the injustices suffered by slaves and their families.
Among those revealed to have benefited from slavery are ancestors of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, former minister Douglas Hogg, authors Graham Greene and George Orwell, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the new chairman of the Arts Council, Peter Bazalgette. Other prominent names which feature in the records include scions of one of the nation's oldest banking families, the Barings, and the second Earl of Harewood, Henry Lascelles, an ancestor of the Queen's cousin. Some families used the money to invest in the railways and other aspects of the industrial revolution; others bought or maintained their country houses, and some used the money for philanthropy. George Orwell's great-grandfather, Charles Blair, received £4,442, equal to £3m today, for the 218 slaves he owned.
The British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that owned slaves for the loss of their "property" when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. This figure represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual spending budget and, in today's terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn
I have ancestors on my paternal grandmother's side who laughed all the way to the bank as a result of this.
The concept of compensation for slaveholding plantation owners was not a purely French idea.
Nor was the concept of imposing debt on a newly independent sovereign state in order to compensate private individuals one that caused much distress to British governments.
In this case, land that was originally stolen from Irish landowners from the 1600s on and granted to loyal Britons who rented it out to Irish farmers had to be bought back by individual farmers under the terms of various Land Acts in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th, with repayments squeezed from a poor state under the terms of the Anglo Irish Treaty, which was imposed under threat of renewed scorched earth warfare.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_Trade_War
The Anglo-Irish Trade War (also called the Economic War) was a retaliatory trade war between the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom from 1932 to 1938.[1] The Irish Government refused to continue reimbursing Britain with land annuities from financial loans granted to Irish tenant farmers to enable them to purchase lands under the Irish Land Acts in the late nineteenth century, a provision which had been part of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. This resulted in the imposition of unilateral trade restrictions by both countries, causing severe damage to the Irish economy.
And let us not forget the Irish famine of the mid 19th century when food was exported by landowners while peasants starved or emigrated in droves, because the wheels of commerce must grind on, or so went the accepted wisdom of the times.
Obv the idea of sticking to its guns and tightening the noose was not something the British government was averse to.