October 25 is Central African Regional Integration Day. Few people know or observe this holiday because the citizens of Africa's poorest and most conflict-prone region have little to celebrate.

The Organization of African Unity, the predecessor of the African Union (AU), established the African Economic Community (AEC) when its member states signed the Abuja Treaty in 1991. The AEC is based on the premise that regional integration solves all manner of ills: trade imbalances and barriers, social disunity, cross-border tensions and poor living standards. Name it and regional integration will fix it.

In the places where it has happened, regional integration has helped kickstart moribund economies and enhance regional security. Not every region, however, can boast impressive results. Implementing neighborly ties is more difficult than the authors of the Abuja Treaty anticipated. Central Africa has barely implemented it at all. Without question, this is the continent's least cohesive region.

Central Africa lagging

"Central Africa is definitely lagging behind the rest of the continent when it comes to regional integration, especially compared to the EAC [East African Community] and SADC [Southern African Development Community]," commented Chofor Che, a Cameroonian academic and analyst for AfricanLiberty.org, a Lagos-based think-tank.

David Smith, Director of South Africa-based media firm Okapi Consulting and an expert on the region, offers a few examples of the area's disunion. "If there was any sort of integration with neighbors, there would be daily flights between regional capitals," he said. "There are not. There is no highway of any note between them either."

Instability forced the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (or CEMAC from its French name), one of Central Africa's two main regional organizations, to move its headquarters from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), to Libreville, Gabon, last March. This relocation is an apt metaphor for the failure of regional integration itself, Smith observes. "CAR is a shell of a state - a phantom administration [that] has virtually nothing to offer its citizens, even less to offer the neighbors," he said.

It was not always this bad. One of the first regional organizations established on the continent was Central African. Afrique Équatoriale Française (French Equatorial Africa), formed in 1910, was a federation of France's holdings in the area, comprising Cameroon, Chad, CAR, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. Post-independence, this close relationship continued under the Central African Economic and Customs Union (or UDEAC after its French initials), which in 1994 became the CEMAC, although only fully ratified in 1999.

The same five nations make up CEMAC today, with the addition of Equatorial Guinea. Thanks to its efforts to implement free trade and visa-free areas, it remains the most progressive regional grouping in Central Africa, although it has another major competitor, the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), which is much broader in geographical scope, if not necessarily in ambition. Although the two organizations are ostensibly supposed to work together, in practice communication between them is poor. The rival commissions are known to squabble over who should take the lead on regional issues.

Overlapping functions

All six CEMAC countries are also part of the larger 10-member ECCAS, with Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and São Tomé and Príncipe. There is significant overlap between the functions and objectives of the two organizations. Both CEMAC and ECCAS are working, in theory, toward the creation of a common market; both attempt to rationalize customs and create a common trade policy toward third-party countries, which they desperately need. (Intra-regional trade accounts for just 1.2 percent of ECCAS member states' exports, according to 2009 African Development Bank figures.) A third regional organization, the Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries (or CEPGL after its French initials), is made up of Burundi, DRC and Rwanda and is primarily focused on post-conflict reconstruction.

This alphabet soup of regional organizations (and the various and separate environmental, business and water management organizations that are not mentioned) is, of course, part of the problem: little to no coordination exists between them, despite repeated promises by heads of state and the commissions themselves to rationalize the relationship between CEMAC and ECCAS. "The region has an uncoordinated plan of action with several institutions like ECCAS and CEMAC with no well defined agenda," Che said. "Member states are still suspicious of one another. For instance, Equatorial Guinea has a booming oil industry and fears Cameroonians will migrate massively to the country and render their citizens jobless."

For Che, the solution lies in consolidating the alphabet soup and going slowly, with member states taking responsibility for themselves before assuming regional duties. "The region needs to merge ECCAS and CEMAC and have well defined roles, especially who takes charge of curbing the conflict," he said. "Member states must then curb custom duties and taxes within before thinking of having a common market. Trade barriers between member states need to be dismantled."

Smith agrees, again emphasizing that regional integration is difficult as long as individual countries remain so weak. He also raises concerns about Central African nations meddling in each other's affairs, again using CAR as an example: "[The Republic of Congo President] Denis Sassou-Nguesso, for reasons of his own, has been paying most of the bills of the CAR administration over the past year, while [Chad President] Idriss Deby decides for the most part who is or isn't in charge in Bangui - a very perverted sort of regional integration."

Impediment to progress

Angela Meyer, a researcher with the Organization for International Dialogue and Conflict Management in Vienna, is an expert on the issue, having written several academic papers on security and integration in the region. She identifies seven impediments to progress when it comes to regional integration in Central Africa: the Central African states are, on the whole, exceedingly poor, states regularly fail to pay their membership dues, leaders lack political will to realize and implement joint decisions, the region is unstable and conflict-prone, states harbor widely divergent interests thanks to their heterogeneity, the two major regional organizations, ECCAS and CEMAC, compete to lead integration, with little clarity on who is ultimately responsible for driving progress and a lead nation to drive the integration agenda, in the mould of South Africa for SADC and Nigeria for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), is lacking.

None of the problems identified by Meyer are insurmountable. Together, however, they form a daunting barrier to genuine integration. But all is not lost. Central Africa has a few things going in its favor, which could one day provide a springboard for genuine, mutually beneficial unity. Its location, for one thing: as the only region to border every other region, it is the crossroads of Africa. It should be the hub linking most intra-continental trade.

Another is the single currency shared by the CEMAC countries, the Central African CFA franc, which is supported by a single central bank (BEAC, the Banque des États de l'Afrique Centrale). BEAC is also responsible for setting monetary policy for all member countries. This puts the region ahead of its continental competitors: SADC and the EAC are a long way from implementing single currencies of their own. Nonetheless, neither of the more advanced regional groups would accept the control that France continues to wield over the currency and the bank: the former colonial master demands storing 65 percent of BEAC's foreign reserves in a French Treasury account. Indeed, weaning the region off its unhealthily dependent relationship with France may be one of the most important reasons why the area needs to integrate properly.

Ultimately, the biggest problem for all the regional organizations with a presence in Central Africa - apart from their sheer number - is that a regional body can be only as effective as the sum of its parts, i.e. its member countries. In Central Africa, those parts do not add up to much.

"Yes, in unity there is strength, but there is much to fix, or more correctly, create at home first," Smith concludes. It is hard to disagree. CA

(This article first appeared in Africa in Fact, the journal of Good Governance Africa, and has been edited for space)