It is almost one week since Cameroon’s lone oil refinery went up in smoke and the scale of the destruction is now obvious to everybody. SONARA will be out of business for at least three years and the government will have to come up with a huge chunk of money if it must have its largest ATM up and running again.

Rebuilding SONARA will require more than USD 20 billion and the government does not have that money in its coffers right now. SONARA has an insurance policy, but that will not kick in until cost adjusters and other agents complete their investigations.

This is indeed bad news for the cash-strapped and corrupt government that has been treating SONARA as its piggy bank, with government officials always sending helicopters to pick up raw cash from the oil refinery when a financial squeeze is staring the government in the face.

This has been the government’s modus operandi for decades. But this is gradually coming to an end, as state corporations keep on sliding into financial challenges. The Southern Cameroons crisis has robbed the Yaounde government of its vital sources of revenue.

CDC and PAMOL have gone under and it will take billions of dollars to set them back on track. Preliminary meetings with multilateral donors like the World Bank and the African Development Bank Group have not yielded much as state-owned corporations in the English-speaking regions of the country will need billions for them to get back into operation and they are really not good businesses for investors, at least for now.

It should be mentioned that a few months ago, the Board of Directors of the African Development Bank Group had approved a loan in favor of the Yaounde government for the construction of the ring road in the Northwest region. The World Bank had also approved its own share of the money, but both institutions had to put every on hold as the military situation in the region spiralled out of control.

The government’s military violence and its scorch earth policy in the two English-speaking regions of the country are gradually coming back to bite it. Its penchant for violence has robbed the country of vital resources that could help give the Central African nation’s development efforts a shot in the arm.

Cameroon is teetering on the brink of a human rights catastrophe in a cultural and linguistic conflict that has already killed more than 3,000 people. A government campaign against the country’s English-speaking minority has devolved into an armed conflict between security forces and over 10 armed secessionist groups. This situation might only get worse if urgent actions are not taken by the international community. 

The Southern Cameroons crisis that started a protest by teachers and lawyers has been allowed to tailspin into chaos and this is really sucking energy and oxygen out of the country’s economy.

The government’s ability to attract investors to the country has been diminished by the senseless killings and human rights violations taking place in the country. Rebuilding SONARA will be an uphill climb, as investors have very low appetite for Cameroon’s debt.

The burden of rebuilding the country’s lone refinery has been placed on the fragile and aging shoulders of the country’s Prime Minister, Dion Ngute, who is currently suffering from insomnia. He thought his only challenge was the Southern Cameroons crisis, but the sticky situation born of the explosion in the country’s lone oil refinery is robbing Mr. Ngute of his sleep. It is also dumping a lot of age on him.  

Ever since the fire gutted the refinery, Prime Minister Ngute, has been working the phones and holding countless meetings. Raising USD 20 billion has become a nightmare to Mr.  Ngute who understands that the government he leads lacks credibility and confidence of bilateral and multilateral donors.

Very few people will actually invest in an unstable environment. The Yaounde government is very much aware of that and this explains why it has been shouting since last week that the explosion that reduced SONARA to rubble was a case of force majeure and not sabotage as claimed by separatists who have been hellbent on bringing the facility to its knees.

If the government admits that rebels are to blame for SONARA’s meltdown, then it would lose the race for resources to rebuild the bedeviled refinery that is still threatening to throw up more fire.

On Monday, huge fires were reported where the refinery’s reservoirs are located. It took firefighters and officials of the facility three hours to figure out what was happening. SONARA seems to have been jinxed and its woes will not be over anytime soon.

The initial fire that occurred last Friday had gutted the atmospheric distillation unit which is a key component of the facility. Indeed, that is where the oil refining process starts and engineers working for the refinery have indicated that it will take a very long time to rebuild the facility which has been delivering “golden eggs” to the corrupt and irresponsible Yaounde government. 

Several meetings have been going on at the Presidency, but it is the panic at the Prime Minister’s Office that is attracting attention. Dion Ngute is losing sleep. The SONARA meltdown is putting his leadership qualities through their paces.

Prime Minister Ngute has to address so many issues, including the thorny Southern Cameroons crisis that has given the government a very bad name.  But for now, he seems to be focused on SONARA. The government is out of cash and it needs other means to replenish its resources.

It is based on this that the Prime Minister is looking at the possibility of sending a high-level delegation to Abidjan to have discussions with the African Development Bank, the continent’s premier development finance institution that is capable of granting Cameroon an emergency loan of about USD 1 billion through its soft arm window.

The continent’s surest conduit for the channeling of investment finance has the experience of granting Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Under Stress (HIPCUS) like Cameroon low interest loans with little or no conditionalities. That is why the Yaounde government is seeing the African Development Bank (AfDB) as the institution that will grant it a bailout.

The African Development Group will next week hold its Annual Meetings in Malabo where it will be seeking a capital increase and an African Development Fund replenishment. If this is achieved, Cameroon will surely be one of the first countries to benefit from the replenishment.

That is why Prime Minister Ngute will also dispatch a huge delegation headed by the country’s Minister of Plan and Regional Development who doubles as the African Development Bank Group’s Governor to Malabo to have talks with AfDB officials. The minister will be meeting with the AfDB President who is open to lending Cameroon a helping hand.

There are also plans to send another delegation to Washington D.C. to have discussions with World Bank authorities. The discussions will focus on loans and grants that will enable the beleaguered government to rebuild the collapsed refinery.

But the discussions in Washington will be very tough as America might influence the World Bank’s decision. World Bank loans and grants to Cameroon might come with conditionaities that might border on the cessation of hostilities in the two English-speaking regions of the country.

Currently, the government has been discussing with the French government through unofficial channels. The French are willing to provide some financial infusion as they have been the primary beneficiaries of Cameroon’s oil. They are however concerned about the hostilities in the country and the current political climate is worrisome to them.

The jailing of Cameroon’s leading opposition leader, Professor Maurice Kamto, the presumed winner of last year’s presidential election, has attracted  condemnation from rights groups across the world.

France is concerned about its own image and it is gradually distancing itself from the Biya regime that has become a lightning for controversy, especially as the majority of EU countries are insisting that the Yaounde government must hold an inclusive dialogue with Southern Cameroons. They are also calling for the release of Professor Kamto who is considered by the EU as a prisoner of conscience.    

The government of Cameroon is no longer at ease. It has a lot on its plate and with its resources dwindling, it is clear that it might soon be down on its luck. This is more disturbing as its former allies are all jumping ship. EU countries have become very vocal about the government’s authoritarian nature.

 America and Canada are breathing down the government’s neck and this is rattling the fragile government which needs more friends at this time. The end seems to be near and the rantings from Yaounde are no longer cutting ice with anybody.

The Yaounde government still has a choice. It must stop conducting itself as a rogue state. It should embrace the idea of an inclusive dialogue, release all political prisoners, including all Southern Cameroonians arrested within the framework of the armed conflict that has left thousands of Cameroonians dead, and grant general amnesty to all Cameroonians living abroad as a means of reducing the pressured that is gradually destroying it.

If it continues to conduct itself as it has done over the last three years, it must be ready to face the worst and even donors and investors will not come to its aide when the chips go down. The ball is in its court!

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai at the Global Headquarters in the United Kingdom and Kingsley Betek in Malabo for the African Development Bank Group’s Annual Meetings.

As announced earlier by Business in Cameroon, President Paul Biya issued a presidential order May 29, amending and supplementing certain provisions of the 2019 Finance Act.

The new Act provides for an increase by XAF361.5 billion in State Budget from XAF4,850.5 billion to XAF5,212 billion. Of the amount, XAF121.5 billion will come from domestic resources (including XAF56 billion in oil revenues and XAF24.5 billion in tax revenues) and XAF240 from loans (including XAF188 billion in external loans).

Since growth projections have not been revised upwards, the new 2019 budget is expected to slightly increase the tax burden and widen the budget deficit compared to previous budget forecasts. The challenge now is to be able to maintain deficit below 2% of GDP as foreseen by the ECF program with the IMF.

The adjusted 2019 Finance Act confirms that Cameroon is going into debt to repay its debt. Of an increase by XAF361.5 billion in budget, XAF240 billion are loans. Yet, XAF225.57 billion of the budget is expected to service the debt. This means the extra money borrowed will almost come out to pay off an existing debt.

Current spending forecasts drop XAF14.5 billion showing monies granted to certain ministries and other public institutions will be cut. But others will receive budget reallocations as well. Beneficiaries include the ministry of public works which receives additional XAF44.06 billion, the ministry of sports and civic education (XAF44.06 billion), and the ministry of water and energy (XAF23 billion).

Amount initially granted to the defense ministry is revised downwards, narrowed by XAF13 billion. But this does not necessarily mean that the total defense budget is cut. The joint expenditure forecasts (line 65) are up by more than XAF50 billion. This budget line has often been used to finance the war.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the budget adjustment intends to “take into account the increase in expected revenues” and “fully integrate the expenditure needs related to the upcoming elections and fuel subsidies, while maintaining the overall deficit at 2% of GDP.”

The revised budget also provides for the acceleration of the implementation of externally financed investment projects that are under way on the basis of a disbursement plan, according to an IMF statement that marks the fourth review of the three-year program Cameroon signed with the Bretton Woods Institution in June 2017.

Source: Business in Cameroon

Cameroon has increased troops around its lone oil refinery, after a weekend explosion caused a shutdown of the facility. But the government denies separatist fighters were responsible and says there will be no shortages of petroleum products.

Christine Enanga, a 21-year old trying to buy cooking gas from a supplier in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, worries that in days ahead she may not be able to find the commodity.

“I came to buy four bottles of [cooking] gas,” she said, “but they told me they could not sell four, that they could only sell two because other people are buying and I know there would be serious scarcity in Cameroon.”

Drivers are also buying and stocking fuel. The scare was sparked after a storage tank exploded Saturday night at Cameroon’s only oil refinery in the town of Limbe, in the Southwest region.

The blast caused a fire that damaged parts of the refinery and shut down output. No lives were lost.

Cameroon’s Trade Minister Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana said there will be no shortages and no price increases of petroleum products.

He said Cameroon two years ago found itself in a similar difficult situation, when the national refinery shut down its doors for eight months for rehabilitation. He said shortages in supply were minimal because imports were increased without increasing prices.

He urged people to remain calm.

Rebels fighting to separate the English-speaking parts of Cameroon from the Francophone majority claimed responsibility for the explosion on social media. They said the refinery was attacked because English speakers benefit very little from the company.

Government spokesperson Rene Emmanuel Sadi said proceeds from the company are used to develop all of Cameroon and refuted claims that the explosion was perpetrated by secessionist fighters. He said early investigations indicate it was an accident.

He said details of the accident that blew up parts of the refinery will be made public soon. He added that the military has been deployed to make sure the refinery and its equipment are totally protected.

The refinery, which is almost entirely state-owned, supplies 2.2 million tons of crude a year to Cameroon and countries of the region including Togo, Nigeria, and Ghana.

Source: VOA

Cameroon’s state oil refinery declared force majeure on Saturday, after a storage tank exploded overnight, causing a fire that shut down output at its main refinery in Limbe but caused no deaths.

A letter to its partners seen by Reuters said the fire had “caused a production stoppage at all of our units for a period to be determined.”

Cameroon’s Sonara refinery, which is almost entirely state owned apart from a 4% stake held by Total, has a capacity of 2.1 million tonnes of crude a year. It serves the whole country, so any delay in getting it back up and running has the potential to cause severe fuel shortages.

A Sonara spokesman declined to comment.

On Twitter, the company wrote that “there were no deaths nor injured,” in the blast.

A project has been under way for nearly a decade to try to boost its capacity to 3.5 million tonnes, but Sonara has struggled to raise the needed finance.

Source: Reuters

The countries of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), for several months now have been suffering from a shortage of access to foreign currencies, penalizing households and businesses.

Struck by the fall in oil prices, six countries members of the CFA franc zone are pegged to the euro by a fixed exchange rate.

In Libreville, the sun is barely rising but in front of the closed door of a money transfer agency a file has already formed.

Patrick, in his fifties, kicks his foot, says, “I have been here since 6am to send money to my son who is studying in France, I have been here yesterday … without success.”

“After 08:00, do not expect to send money,” warns the guard at the entrance of another fund transfer agency in Gabon. “And if you travel to Europe and want to buy the euro, it’s the same thing, you have to get up at dawn.”

“Since the middle of 2018, we have difficulties to obtain foreign currency and in recent months the situation is going from bad to worse,” said Deputy Secretary General of the Group of Employers of Cameroon (Gicam), Vincent Kouete.

According to a survey conducted in the first quarter of 2019, 71% of Gicam’s businesses consider this difficulty of access to foreign currencies to be a major concern.

In the past, to obtain foreign currency from their banks, “companies had to count between two and three days, today there is a month and a half of waiting!”, Mourns Mr. Kouete. The costs have also jumped. Previously “0.1% to 0.3% bank charges are now around 7 to 10%”.

Importers, who are finding it increasingly difficult to pay their foreign suppliers on time, “are forced to revise their prices upward in hopes of maintaining their margins,” says the manager.

Monetary Measures

In 2014, the fall in oil prices, the main provider of currency in the area, plunged the states of Cemac into a deep crisis.

Foreign exchange reserves held by the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), which serve in particular to guarantee the CFA-euro franc bond, have collapsed, leaving the specter of a devaluation.
And, according to the economist Ndongo Samba Sylla, co-author of the book “The invisible weapon of Françafrique, a history of the CFA franc”, Paris, instead of “playing its role of insurer, pushed the States of the Cemac to go through the box IMF “.

In 2017, the International Monetary Fund concluded reform assistance programs with four of the six countries in the zone (Gabon, Chad, Cameroon and Central Africa).

The funds released by the IMF, and the rise in oil prices from 2017, were intended to reinflate foreign exchange reserves. But “these are not reconstituted as quickly as hoped,” observes Ruben Nizard, specialist sub-Saharan Africa Coface insurer.

However, fixed parity with the euro is statutorily guaranteed by deposits of foreign exchange reserves of the member countries, so “the zone is obliged to adopt restrictive monetary measures”, analyzes Mr. Sylla.

Foreign Currency Nightmare

To cope with and increase the level of reserves, “the BEAC hardened the conditions for obtaining foreign currency for banks”, refusing the demands “so that our customers can pay their foreign suppliers”, assures the head of a bank from Gabon to AFP, confirming information from local media.

On the contrary, the institution points to the responsibility of commercial banks, which would hold foreign currencies abroad but “would also seek the assistance of the Central Bank”.

A behavior, admittedly forbidden, but largely tolerated until then. “With the crisis, we applied more strictly the exchange regulations, which was not always rigorously,” says a BEAC analyst, on condition of anonymity.

But banks are not alone. “It is also the States but especially the exporting companies and especially mining that do not repatriate as they should the currencies from the Central Bank,” says another official at the BEAC.

Restrictive monetary policy or behavior of economic actors, “in the meantime, it is the people who pay,” denounced Mr. Sylla.

AFP

Muyenge Trouble, a mainly agrarian village with a once dynamic farming population on the leeward side of Mount Cameroon, is one of the many communities ensnared by the violence that has swept through Cameroon’s English-speaking regions since 2017. Tassa Tassa Paulinus used to live there. But the life of this middle-aged plantain farmer has been turned upside down ever since he was forced to flee his home in November with his five-year-old daughter, trekking through dangerous bush paths to the relative safety of Muyuka, a town over 30 kilometres away.

“I could no longer live in Muyenge as it had become a veritable ‘red zone’. The Amba Boys [armed separatists] of the Ambazonia Defence Forces made life very difficult. They kept demanding money from me,” Tassa explains. The farmer says he could have paid them for ‘protection’ if he had been able to sell his produce. But since the fighting between government forces and militant separatists began, the traders who used to frequent Muyenge Trouble have stayed away; they want to avoid running into lethal clashes and they don’t want to negotiate their way through the checkpoints mounted by rebel fighters in the area.

“At one point in time, I harvested over 400 bunches of plantain from my farm, but no buyers came. They all got rotten. A week later, the Amba Boys came for more money. I had to leave,” says Tassa, who has not seen his wife since she was kidnapped by the Amba Boys last September.

Away from Muyuka, which is 27 kilometres away from Buea (the capital of the Southwest Region, which, along with the Northwest Region, is where the so-called ‘Anglophone crisis’ is taking place), Martin Ekoke Sona is another farmer who has seen his dreams go up in smoke due to the conflict. The 30-year-old had been planning to set up a large yam plantation. “I had planned to cultivate yam on a large scale. But just before the farmland was due to be cleared, a school in the area was razed to the ground in an arson attack. That forced me to abort the project,” recalls Sona, who lost about half a million CFA francs (US$862) in the process.

At the time, Sona had just completed a six-month intensive entrepreneurship programme sponsored by the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and other partners. He feels frustrated that he hasn’t been able to utilise his new-found skills due to the conflict. “I now do yam seed multiplication, and I can barely produce 300 seeds in six months. If we were in peace time, I could produce 1,000 or more yam seeds over the same period.”

Food crisis on the horizon?

In the Northwest and Southwest Regions, where as much as 70 per cent of the population is involved in agriculture, ordinary people are now facing crop failure, food insecurity and job losses thanks to a conflict that started in October 2016 when English-speaking lawyers began protesting the appointment of French-speaking judges to their courts.

A few other frustrated groups, among them teachers, later joined in peaceful rallies.

Initially, protestors were calling for an end to decades of under-investment and government policies which they felt discriminated against the country’s English-speaking regions. However, the government of President Paul Biya (Cameroon’s ruler since 1982) responded to the protests with force, pushing many moderates to get behind separatists calling for an independent state they want to call ‘Ambazonia’.

To date, over 1,000 people have been killed in the fighting, according to local human rights groups, while the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that insecurity and violence in these two regions have uprooted 437,000 people from their homes and forced over 32,000 to seek refuge in neighbouring Nigeria. An estimated four million people have been affected by the conflict.

With no peace agreement or inclusive national dialogue in sight, the possibility of the conflict ending soon becomes more elusive with each passing day. The uptick in violence, which started in September 2017, has scared people away from their fields, restricted population movements and limited access to markets, thereby exacerbating the population’s vulnerability to acute food insecurity.

According to United Nations Resident Humanitarian Coordinator for Cameroon, Allegra Baiocchi, hundreds of thousands of people in Cameroon need urgent assistance and protection. “Attacks against civilians have increased and many conflict-affected people are surviving in harsh conditions without humanitarian assistance due to the dramatic underfunding of the response [Humanitarian Response Plan]. Cameroon today can no longer be a forgotten crisis; it needs to be high on our agenda,” Baiocchi said in a press release in January.

The severity and magnitude of the situation is such that the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, estimates that 1.4 million people in Northwest, Southwest and West regions will face stressed (Phase 2) levels of acute food insecurity between March and May this year. In addition, nearly 486,000 people – approximately seven per cent of the three regions’ total population – will face crisis (Phase 3) conditions during the same period. Phase 5, which is catastrophe and/or famine, is the highest level of acute food insecurity.

Professor Ernest L. Molua, a renowned agro-economist and Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Buea tells Equal Times that abandoned farmlands, the persistent harassment of those farmers who decide not to flee, abandoned field crops and stolen harvests have all contributed to low production levels and a shortfall in market supply. “This has led to a 4-5 per cent growth in staple food prices.” An average bunch of plantain for example, which previously sold at CFA2,500 (US$4.3) now sells at between CFA3,000 (US$5) and CFA3,500 (US$6).

He continues: “These increasing prices are seen as attractive by traders in the western flank of the Littoral Region who divert supplies away from the food markets in Douala [Cameroon’s economic capital, which is situated in the Littoral Region] to towns deemed safe in the neighbouring Southwest Region.”

“We can no longer sell our cocoa”

In Cameroon, cash crops have felt the brunt of the conflict’s impact on agriculture. The Southwest Region represents 45 per cent of total national cocoa production while the Northwest Region represents 70 per cent of total national arabica coffee production. In both regions, farming and post-harvest operations of these cash crops have been reduced to a bare minimum.

Che Divine, a cocoa farmer in the Mbonge area, west of Cameroon, tells Equal Times the production process has become more difficult since fighting began. “We are compelled to pay CFA30,000 (US$52) to the Amba Boys during each harvest. And the harvest has been poor because we don’t treat the cocoa trees well due to the lack of chemicals.”

Esapa Patrick Enyong, president of the Southwest Farmers’ Cooperative Union, which unites over 10 cooperatives, confirms that the agricultural sector has taken a turn for the worse: “Things are very slow at the moment because of the crisis. We are making huge losses as we can no longer sell our cocoa directly at the port in Douala.”

The situation is so bad that during the 2017/18 cocoa season, the Southwest Region lost its first place as the country’s biggest cocoa producer to the Centre Region, passing from 45.45 per cent of the national production to 32 per cent, causing a production deficit of 43,000 tons.

The Cameroon Employers’ Union, GICAM, reports that in 2018 the country lost CFA56 billion (US$96 million), 20 per cent in relative terms, in cocoa and coffee export revenues due to the crisis. Some 210,000 cocoa farmers in the Southwest Region alone were affected, causing farmers to lose as much as CFA35 billion (US$60 million) in income.

Another major hurdle to cocoa production has been the transportation of cocoa beans from production basins to the port city of Douala for export. Armed separatists have sabotaged various road networks and have even hijacked and burnt truckloads of cocoa from licensed buying agents (who they consider to be in cahoots with the government). The country’s National Cocoa and Coffee Board registered a stockpile of 7,212 tons of cocoa in the 2016/17 cocoa season, a figure that increased to 27,159 tons in 2017/18.

Cameroon Development Corporation

But if there is one entity that has been dealt the biggest blow by the conflict, it is the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), an agro-industrial parastatal group that grows, processes and markets tropical export crops such rubber, banana and palm oil. It is the second highest employer after the government civil service, with a workforce of over 22,000 employees.

Armed separatists have ground processing mills to a halt. Warehouses have been set ablaze and labourers have been chased out of plantations, some have even had their fingers butchered.

Of CDC’s 29 production sites across the country, 12 have been shut down, 10 are partially functioning while only seven are fully operational. The company’s precarious financial situation has caused job loss for 6,124 employees, while 5,805 more jobs could be lost as the conflict persists, representing 70 per cent of CDC’s workforce.

Franklin Ngoni Njie, the general manager of CDC, says CFA 29.6 billion (US$51 million) is needed to get the company back on its feet, “but insecurity remains a huge hindrance to the accomplishment of this goal.” He fears the CDC may collapse without an urgent intervention.

This is the fate that has befallen previously notable companies such as the parapublic agro-industrial company Pamol Plantations. Many small to medium-scale farmers in the affected regions have also been badly hit. Mkong Cynthia Jeh, a graduate teaching assistant of agricultural economics and agribusiness at the University of Buea says the current state of affairs has also had a huge, negative impact on foreign exchange. “The cash crops can no longer be produced and exported as before the crisis. It will require huge amounts of money to get back to normal when the fighting stops.”

Culled from Equal Times

Cameroon’s new petroleum code is seeking to improve upstream production and revenues amid greater regional competition and major political troubles.

The national assembly has approved a new and expanded petroleum code. It must now be ratified by President Paul Biya in the next 15 days in order for it to enter into law.

Although Cameroon’s new petroleum code has not been made public yet, Interfax Natural Gas Insight understands it contains several provisions aimed principally at boosting hydrocarbon production, government revenues and local content. The majority of the changes appears geared towards rekindling investor interest and is being introduced against…

Source: Interfax Global Energy