Cameroon is the most affected country in the CEMAC sub region by the covid-19 with over 1,500 cases so far,. However, it will be the least impacted macroeconomically. Solomane Konén, the African Development Bank’s Director for the Central Africa Region has revealed recently . The country is expected to record a 3% deceleration in growth, 2.8%, and 1.4% deterioration of budget balance and the current account balance respectively.
Cameroon’s enviable projection should mainly result from the economy’s diversification and the various economic reforms introduced in recent years, under the instruction of the IMF.
The second least impacted country after Cameroon will be Gabon, with a 4.8% deceleration of growth. The third country is Chad with a 4.9% contraction, followed by Congo with 7.3%. The most seriously affected growths are those of Equatorial Guinea (-8.9%) and the Central African Republic (-7.9%).
According to Solomane Koné’s explanations, “this decrease in growth could be caused by a drop in production, given the fall in the prices of raw materials, particularly oil, of which the region is a net exporter.” As a result, the region could experience epileptic businesses and job losses.
Apart from Cameroon, all the other countries in the CEMAC zone are dependent on oil. And the fall in oil revenue as a result of Covid 19 has adversely affected the economy of the sub region. Projected revenue from petroleum products is expected to slump putting oil dependent countries at risk of not realizing their economic objectives.
The permanent secretariat of the Economic and Financial Reform Program of Cemac (Pref-Cemac) outlines two scenarios: “one which assumes that the crisis would be transient and quickly mastered, resulting in particular in a price per barrel of oil of 39, 1 dollar (transient scenario), the other predicting a rapid and large-scale spread of the crisis with, among other things, the effect of lowering the average price of a barrel of oil to 20 dollars in 2020 (pessimistic scenario) .”
According to PREF-CEMAC, in the transitional scenario, the cumulative losses of oil revenues in the Cemac zone will amount to just over 992 billion FCFA. These revenue losses from the sale of black gold will be almost tripled if the Covid-19 crisis worsens.
Concretely, according to the permanent secretariat of PREF-CEMAC, if the so-called pessimistic scenario occurs, the five oil-producing countries in the CEMAC space will lose a total envelope of CFAF 2,653.7 billion.
Moreover, the shock will not be felt in all the countries of this community space to the same extent. Equatorial Guinea, Congo, Gabon and Chad will be more severely affected by this drop in revenues, with oil often contributing, in some cases, up to 80% (compared to 25% in Cameroon, for example) to global revenues. those countries.
