So does the EU though. This doesn't seem like an especially great plus point for the Euro, given the QE (money printing) on a truly vast scale carried out by Mario "whatever it takes to save the euro" Draghi and likely to be continued by his successor.
Basically the eurozone stays unified by having local governments borrow money from the ECB, which is willing to engage in apparently unlimited bond purchases to ensure yields stay low and pro-EU governments stay in power. This amounts to massive wealth transfers from (primarily) Germany to the rest of the eurozone for purely political reasons. Germany is willing to tolerate this because of its past: German national pride has been transferred nearly wholesale to the EU's desired future nation of "Europe". Would African nations tolerate the same? Seems very dubious.
Maybe Africa will show us what a more equitable power distribution looks like? I’d love for them to try. But I would predict that it would be vastly beneficial for capital flowing into that African union to have a stable currency. People with money usually don’t want their capital to evaporate for frivolous reasons.
GDP is an iffy measure for Ireland though.
And it has been just a couple of decades. Over the long run, stable currencies usually outperform their capricious rivals. Mostly because investors want stability, and so they flock to places where it is present.
There are numerous examples of countries with their own currency doing well, or doing very very poorly. But there are few examples of countries doing very badly _because_ they adopted a union currency.
Imagine Alabama stating they’ll quit the US dollar and get their own alabamians or something - it might go great, it might go badly, but you sure know it would be risky. And investors by and large wouldn’t like that.
Countries that pegged their currency to the euro, or outright started using it got measurably better than the one that didn’t.
Counties that had “troubles because of the euro” would have most definitely had them even without, but the problem would have surfaced much later, when the damage would have been done.
It’s just so easy to solve economy problems with devaluing a currency and most, especially populist governments just can’t help themselves but do it, ending in huge nation wide catastrophes - see a lot of latin america, pre-euro ex-ussr countries etc.
Having a stable currency is just vital to the long term health of a country, and the euro has certainly helped with that immensely. It does remove a tool from a government’s toolbox, but a dangerous one that I wouldn’t trust most of them to use anyway.
As for Africa, with the amount of financial education the populace has at large, I would presume a stable currency would do wonders to their economies long term, at least for several generations ahead.
A bit oversimplified but very accessible source of info for geopolitical economic stuff like this would be VisualPolitik youtube channel.