20 Rupees Fifth Anniversary Seychelles Monetary Authority

The Seychelles Monetary Authority was established in 1978, the year after independence from Britain, to replace the East African Currency Board arrangement that had governed the islands' money supply as part of a regional system. Its fifth anniversary in 1983 prompted this commemorative issue — one of several from the early independence period as the young nation built the apparatus of a sovereign financial system. The SMA itself was shortly thereafter reconstituted as the Central Bank of Seychelles in 1983, making this coin a marker of an institution already mid-transition at the moment of striking.