5 Francs United Kingdom - King George V

The Democratic Republic of Congo issued this piece in 1999 under the name "Banque Centrale du Congo" — a designation the institution had only just reclaimed after decades as the Banque du Zaïre, following Mobutu's fall in 1997 and Laurent-Désiré Kabila's renaming of the country itself. The George V denomination belongs to a broader series of foreign monarch tributes struck for the collector market rather than domestic circulation, a revenue strategy common among central African states during the late 1990s when hard currency was scarce and seigniorage from novelty issues offered a practical alternative.