As your own source notes, France does not control the policy of either of the two separate CFA franc zones, but does have preferential access to resources resulting from the deal setting up the currency arrangement, which is the actual benefit it gets from the deal.
Isn't it very common for a currency to be pegged to another, though? Dozens of currencies are pegged to the EUR or USD, and the two CFA francs are not very different, except that the French treasury is legally bound to guarantee free convertibility between CFA franc and euro, unlike say the US federal reserve with Cuban peso.
Yes, it is common. There are even countries that officially adopting a currency they do not control, e.g. Croatia uing the euro. But this has the very real drawbacks that the previous comments mentioned.
> It's their own national bank which buys and sells tons of Euros to keep the exchange rate stable.
The two CFA franc zones have zone central banks (which aren't exclusively controlled by countries in the respective zone, since France has a seat on each), it's not individual national central banks issuing currency or managing the peg.
That's nonsense. Zimbabwe (like the famous Weimar republic, by the way) had a extreme fall in the real productive capacity of the economy (1). Inflation was going to happen nevertheless the monetary policy they adopted.
>Food production halved in the 1990s as a result of [Mugabe's] decision to strip white farmers of their land and hand it to members of the black population who, in many cases, had no farming experience.
As your own source notes, France does not control the policy of either of the two separate CFA franc zones, but does have preferential access to resources resulting from the deal setting up the currency arrangement, which is the actual benefit it gets from the deal.