The East African Community Secretariat has urged people to ignore reports on social media on the unveiling of a common currency for the region.
The secretariat indicated that the process of introducing the new currency is still ongoing.
“The EAC Secretariat wishes to inform all our stakeholders that the partner States' journey to a single currency is still a work in progress. Kindly ignore any rumours circulating in social media on the unveiling of new banknotes for the region,” the secretariat said on X.
Media personality Larry Madowo said a fake Twitter (X) account got a grey government checkmark and announced a fake new East African currency.
"The real account of the East African Community now has to clean up a mess they didn't create,” he said.
Twitter introduced additional gold and grey checkmarks used by Verified Organisations and government-affiliated accounts. Twitter claims that the changes to verification are required to "reduce fraudulent accounts and bots".
The gold checkmark indicates that the account is an official organisation account through Verified Organisations.
The grey checkmark indicates that an account represents a government/multilateral organisation or a government/multilateral official.
EAC partner States are harmonising critical policies and putting in place the requisite institutions to attain a single currency for the region by 2024 as outlined in the EAC Monetary Union Protocol.
EAMI would later be transformed into the East African Central Bank which would issue a single currency.
The major benefits of a monetary union are the reduction in transaction costs, economies of international reserves, the elimination of exchange rate risk and region-wide price harmonisation.
On the other hand, the costs of a monetary union are related to the loss of sovereignty over monetary and exchange rate policy, especially in the case of asymmetry shocks that make the same monetary policy inappropriate for all member countries of a monetary union.
In a monetary union, member countries lose unilateral control over instruments (monetary policy instruments and exchange rate policy) that may be crucial in dealing with country-specific macroeconomic shocks.
A new currency will be attractive if it is more stable in terms of better maintaining its purchasing power than the currencies it replaces.
This may come from a strong institutional framework within the monetary union, achieving more discipline over fiscal policies and insulating the regional central bank from pressures to provide monetary financing.
