The public and private sectors were certainly under the same thinking cap or wavelength of reasoning when they once more met at the Commercial city of Douala barely two weeks after meeting at the same venue within the framework of the Cameroon Business Forum.

At the initiative of the office in charge of upgrading Cameroon’s business enterprises, the Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, Louis Paul Motaze, took off two days during which he and representatives of the private sector concerted in a bid to reinforce the synergy between the two actors in order to attain the country’s development objectives.

In effect, faced with the present dispensation on the international scene characterised by constant and persistent drop in oil prices and other raw material and the new programmed commitment between the European Union and African and Caribbean nations within the framework of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), it became necessary to prepare the ground for local industries and companies to enable them face the tides.

The drop in the price of oil by 46 per down to around 40 dollars a barrel and other export crops by 5.1 per cent between 2014 and 2015 with timber prices falling by 21 per cent, cotton by 17 per cent, Robusta coffee by 14 per cent, aluminium by 11 per cent and rubber by 8 per cent have all sent dangerous signals as indicated by the 6 per cent drop in export revenue.

The situation is feared to worsen in the course of the year especially with the country’s security crisis exacerbated by the Boko Haram insurgency. The effect is already being felt in the export sector and local industries need to sit up. This is appearing to be an emergency especially as some locally made products are already facing stiff competition from products coming in from Asia. The country is being used as a dumping ground for cheap and incidentally low quality products.

The influx of Asian goods is just a tip of the iceberg of what may happen or will obviously occur when the frontiers of competition are finally opened to European goods in the name of EPA. Barely five months from now, precisely in August, this is expected to happen and the question in every mind remains; how prepared are our industries? How many of them do exist? What is the quality of their performance? Shall they be ready for the competition?

Of course, these questions ought to be answered by the private and public sectors, the latter simply acting as facilitator. The major challenge for government, because it is equally carrying its own share of the load; is to fast track the execution of major projects, notably those in the energy sector. These projects, according to Motaze are already at the doors of maturity and will lead to a drop in the cost of production.

Energy being the nerve centre of industrial development, one of the major challenges now is to resolve and very quickly too, the problem of power transmission. SONATREL has already been created; good news indeed, but we are told that it will fully go operational in three years. The good news however is that ENEO has launched a campaign to disconnect all irregular connections in a bid to boost energy production. This is one of the stop gap measures, but several others need to be taken in order not to be caught up by time.