Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, has given his full support for calls to have a single African currency adding that a digital one would be ideal. His statement was addressed to journalists during the African Union summit in Kigali, Rwanda.

The summit saw 44 countries sign a deal to institute the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). “A single African currency was the natural next step,” Ramaphosa believes.

Although South Africa did not sign on the AfCFTA deal on Wednesday, as Ramaphosa still needs to get approval from domestic stakeholders, he went on to say: “Business people said doesn’t this beg for a single currency, and in my book it certainly does.”

Ramaphosa added that while previous proposals for a single African currency have been linked to ‘the Afro’ name as the name for the currency, he was not sure what the currency might look like and there are possibilities it may not take a physical form.

“We will begin to interface with the idea and notion of a single currency, possibly even a digital currency, and it’s possible that a digital currency will precede a real single currency,” Ramaphosa said.

The proposal of a single African currency was first suggested in 1991, with the Abuja Treaty, which laid out the establishment of the African Economic Community. Since then, African leaders have resisted the move to have a single African currency, sighting economic sovereignty as the reason. Ramaphosa, however, believes that this is changing.

“It may take time, it may take years, but it’s interesting that something that we never spoke about in the past, we are now talking about. Because people always had a sense of sovereignty around their own currency, feeling that their currency is about their sovereignty, their nationhood, but people are now thinking beyond the borders of their own nation.”

His sentiments come at a time when cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have gained popularity in the past few years especially in countries such as South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, and both the private and the public sector are waking up to the benefits of cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology.