Paul Tasong, CEMAC Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Policy, talks on the economies of the sub-region and relations with IMF.

Since her arrival in Cameroon, Mrs Christine Lagarde has been insisting on integration as a way out of economic hardship. What is the situation within CEMAC at moment?

Regional integration is definitely one of the key solutions which we can envisage to help us as a community come out of the current economic difficulties following the bad world prices of our main source of revenue which is oil. With the downturn in oil prices at the level of the world market, economies of the sub-region which have depended 60 to 70 per cent on oil should look even more than they have done in the past towards enhancing regional integration as a solution.

As of today, we have intra-regional trade accounting just for 3 per cent of our global economic exchanges. We think improving this alone could be a solution. This, without undermining extending our trade routes to our giant neighbours like Nigeria (180 million inhabitants), the Democratic Republic of Congo (about 70-80 million inhabitants). Coupled with a large market of the CEMAC region of (45-50 million inhabitants), would give us a large market of over 300 consumers.

But the free movement of goods and persons, one of the issues of integration, has almost always failed. Where are we with it today?

We continue to push on that file which is a key component of integration. If you want to promote trade among nations, there is no way it can work without first the movement of persons. There must be persons at the beginning of goods and there must be persons at the end of goods. This therefore constitutes one of the key challenges of our sub region. The current security and economic context has even made this challenge bigger because the countries that dragged their feet up till now feel a little bit more unsafe.

At the level of the CEMAC commission, we are taking the file very seriously. The movement of people is just one of the four types of movements in the context of regional integration. We have the movement of persons which is key but we also have the movement of goods, we have movement of capital and movement of services. Banks and other services are mobile within the sub region. We intend, as concerns services, to move up one rung of the ladder to enhance the integration. We want to ensure that knowledge is shared within the community to ensure that professionals within their different areas of competence are able to move within the sub region.

But why has genuine integration been so difficult to achieve within CEMAC when we all know its importance to the development of the sub region?

You know regional integration is the brainchild of politicians. When you talk of politicians within the context of a State, you are talking about sovereignty. Regional integration is born by sovereign States. Despite the fact that the States decide to drop a little bit of their sovereignty for the regional body, the same States at the same time turn around and become jealous of the powers they willingly accepted to let go for the regional body. It is all about governments’ willingness and ability to implement decisions which they took for the common being of the region.

Do you think the IMF can be of any help to enhance the integration drive within CEMAC?

Definitely IMF helps to seeing us take further strides of regional integration. IMF understands more than anyone else that together we are much stronger. And this applies even more so to the context of the CEMAC sub region. We are six micro economies. If you look at the global GDP of the entire CEMAC sub region, it is virtually nothing compared to the GDP of one of our two key neighbours-Nigeria.

So, CEMAC with only 45 million inhabitants, CEMAC with only about FCFA 30,000 billion of GDP is just nothing. As someone said, you walk alone and you may walk fast, but if you walk together, you definitely can go far. The input of IMF is to continue to remind sovereign States who are the owners of CEMAC that the way forward is to stick together, pull resources, share the natural resources and walk together so that we can cover a long distance.