ECOWAS Council of Ministers Chairman, Nigeria’s Geoffrey Onyeama, has said that achieving the ECOWAS Single Currency by year 2020 will be a challenge.
Mr. Onyeama said this while responding to questions from newsmen at the end of the 54th Ordinary Session of the ECOWAS of Heads of State and Government in Abuja on Saturday.
The Council of Ministers chairman, who is Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs Minister, said that there were certain criteria that needed to be fulfilled for a region to achieve single currency, and which were not yet fully addressed.
He said, “There is a roadmap, the convergence criteria that have to be satisfied before we can really get to the stage of a single currency.
“In ECOWAS, we have a group of countries that in essence almost have a single currency mechanism in place and we have other countries that have their own currencies and being able to align all these is going to take some time.
“It will be a challenge to achieve the single currency by 2020 but all the efforts are being made,” he said.
Onyeama said however that the central bank governors, finance ministers and experts in the region were working towards ensuring that the set timeline was achieved.
“The political will is there and it is really a question to see whether the economic and fiscal realities will converge with the political aspirations,” he said.