Did
you come to Cameroon to give an ultimatum to the Cameroon government to follow
the directives of CEMAC in terms of public finance?
 |
| Paul Tasong |
Let
me say right away and with precision that no international organization
whatsoever can give an ultimatum to a member state. This does not happen
because international organizations are not private companies. They are
organizations that are put in place, which are created by states. They are
properties of the state. They have as objectives to work for the interest of
these states. In this regard, I don’t see how an international organization can
give an ultimatum to its member state. We can, during the evaluation of
different projects which we lead for the interest of states with states,
sometimes accompanied by some of our technical partners, bring to the attention
of authorities of member states violations of rules that we notice, without
however letting these violations to be in the form of ultimatum.
What
do you intend to do to make Cameroon respect the norms of CEMAC? I am asking
because everyone who is asked to give an explanation is, of course, a bad
student in that domain.
Let’s
talk precisely about the case of Cameroon because for the moment I’m on mission
in Cameroon. I would not want to qualify Cameroon as a bad student. Not at all.
The objective is, in the first place, to transpose the directives of the
hamonised framework of management of public finances in the national
legislation of Cameroon. Even if this project did not go as quickly as we had
wanted, we are highly satisfied with the technical and political evolution.
Much technical work was done at all levels by technicians of Cameroon’s
administration. Be it at the legislative or judicial level or at the level of
the administration, much technical work was done.
The
transposition of directives in the national legislation is very advanced. Draft
texts are already available. All what is left to be done is to transmit these
draft texts to the CEMAC Commission so that we can give our notification of
conformity to these draft texts with community directives. Technical working
sessions that we have had with technicians comfort me in that the
preoccupations which are ours, and which are about the disparities between
directives and these draft projects, are known and we have no doubt that these
authorities can appropriate to themselves these technically validated
disparities and proceed to the transmission of texts for notification of
conformity.
Do
you think Cameroonian authorities received your message warmly?
Absolutely.
We have a working session with the members of government, with the first
officials of institutions such as the National Assembly, the audit chamber
which is the financial court of the judicial system in Cameroon. At the
evaluation, we have no doubt about the acquired political will of the former to
advance the reform of public finances. I should use this opportunity to recall
that Cameroon is a precursor in matters of reform in the sub-region.
First, the reforms at the level of Cameroon
compared to the sub-region have some specificities. In the first place Cameroon
has adopted its framework law, the law which regulates the financial regime of
the state even before the community directives are adopted. More so, Cameroon
is the first country to move to the execution of the budget in programme mode.
We must insist here for it is not only true for CEMAC but also for the 15
countries which use the CFA. So, even at the level of West Africa, Cameroon is
first in the passage of a budget of means to a budget of programmes. Those are
the salutary innovations at the level of Cameroon.
The
only difficulty we have is to try to transcribe all of this in the community
directives by correcting some of the technical and sometimes political
disparities that we realize between the law on financial regime and the draft
law which ought to improve, correct these disparities in the financial regime
of Cameroon. We have no doubt that from now till then, these disparities will
be corrected and that Cameroon will join the queue.
We
are not doing this in the form of an ultimatum. No! We are doing a classical
evaluation. We are making sure that the political will of authorities remain
constant and this was affirmed to me this morning [the morning of Wednesday, 25
February 2016] when the Prime Minister received me. We made an overview. We
brought to his attention the evaluation we did and he assured us once more of
the constancy and the will of the government, of authorities at the national
level, to follow up and especially fulfill their engagements made towards
CEMAC.
Finally,
what does a state win by transposing these directives?
Your
question is very pertinent. It is from there that I had to begin. We are an old
economic community (50 years) which has its achievements and difficulties. Amongst
its achievements we have the common currency, which means a common monetary
policy. A monetary policy is managed and one of the most useful instruments for
the worthy management of a monetary policy is budgetary policies. In case of an
insufficiently robust budgetary policy, the budgetary policy runs a risk of
capsizing the boat. If a country lags behind in terms of reform, in case of
difficulty in budgetary management, the repercussions will be felt at the
monetary level and will easily be exported.
So
the interest of the community is to put in place a harmonized framework of
budget management of states. The objective is to see into it that the monetary
policy remains solid enough in order to be able to finance economies as should
be done.
Now,
you probably know that we exercise at the level of the CEMAC Commission a
prerogative known as multilateral surveillance. Thus we try to see into it that
there is macroeconomic convergence of our six member states. To do this, we
should first of all make sure that we can compare public finance data. The
objective of the harmonized framework is, amongst other things, to facilitate
the comparability of public finance data given that all finance laws must be
drafted, voted and executed following the same outline.
The accounting plan of all the six
countries must respect the same nomenclature, a budgetary nomenclature of
harmonized states capable of bringing out the data on the same bases. Public
accounting must be done following the same norms – norms whose strict respect
the CEMAC Commission has the responsibility to ensure.
An
economic community does not replace the states. There is the famous principle
of subsidiarity: there are domains in which we do not intervene. But there are
domains to which the states have taken the option to delegate a small portion
of their sovereignty which therefore permits us to harmonize the different
common policies and the different sectorial policies. Once the harmonization
and missions are accomplished, there is the possibility of rapprochement of the
economies and (even because of this fact) the construction of a common market.
We
are six countries with a population of 45 million inhabitants. I often joke by
saying that we are micro-economies because it is real compared to the size of
two great neighbours of the community. In the west, our neighbour has over 200
million inhabitants, and that of the south-east nearly 80 million inhabitants.
Therefore our community of six countries with 45 million inhabitants is between
two giants. You thus understand that it is in our interest to come together so
as to be considered an actor in the world which is fast becoming a global
village.
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