The colonial sterling balance system extracted billions from Nigeria and Ghana to stabilize postwar Britain. The same structural premium costs Africa $74.5 billion a year in 2026. The institution being built to end it issued its governance framework this February.
The historical record is not in dispute.
In the decade following World War II, Britain was technically insolvent — sterling liabilities totaled £3,700 million while gold and dollar reserves stood at only £620 million.
The mechanism by which Britain stabilized its balance of payments and financed its postwar recovery was not the Marshall Plan alone.
It was the systematic redirection of West African foreign exchange earnings — from cocoa, groundnuts, palm oil, and tin — into London-held sterling accounts, where they sat as low-interest-bearing assets backing British monetary policy while the colonies that generated them had no vote over how those reserves were deployed.
Membership was not optional for British colonial territories.
Every pound of foreign currency earned by Nigeria, Ghana (then the Gold Coast), Sierra Leone, and The Gambia was converted into sterling and pooled at the Bank of England. Colonial governments, currency boards, and marketing boards were required to hold the vast majority of their reserves in London-denominated securities.
By mid-1953, the total sterling assets held in London by British colonies had risen to nearly £1.3 billion — more than doubling from £504 million in 1946, a period in which West Africa was among the most productive contributors to that pool.
Ghana's Cocoa Marketing Board alone sold cocoa worth £74 million in 1953 but paid Ghanaian farmers only £28 million.
The surplus — £46 million in a single year from a single commodity board — was invested in London securities. Nigeria's commodity marketing boards, regional governments, and public development corporations maintained similar structures.
The World Bank noted at independence in 1960 that Nigeria had "a history of sound financial management and ample foreign exchange reserves," with the idle funds of marketing boards and development corporations "all invested in London."
Academic research from Rutgers University has documented that Britain employed what the historian Maylis Avaro describes as "international blackmail, propaganda and economic sanctions" to prevent sterling area countries from diversifying reserves into dollars or gold.
