What CEMAC is and how it works

The franc, and the bank that issues it

The Central African CFA franc is the common money of the member states, and one institution issues it. The Bank of Central African States was created on 22 November 1972 in place of the Central Bank of the States of Equatorial Africa and Cameroon, and it moved its head office from Paris to Yaoundé on 1 January 1977. Its notes and coin are legal tender across the territory of the Community. The West African CFA franc is a different currency, of a different union and a different central bank, and it carries a different code.

Both are fixed to the euro at 655.957 to one, and both have been since 1 January 1999. Before that they were fixed to the French franc, and the parity changed on 12 January 1994 from 1 CFA franc to 0.02 French francs down to 1 CFA franc to 0.01. Two months after that devaluation, on 16 March 1994, the heads of state met at N'Djamena and signed the treaty establishing the Community. It entered into force in June 1999.

The monetary arrangement carries an obligation the western zone no longer has. The Bank of Central African States deposits at least half of the members' foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury, which in return guarantees the currency's convertibility without limit. The equivalent obligation on the west African central bank ended with the agreement signed on 21 December 2019. The central African one stands.

The customs union came first

The treaty of 1994 reorganised an arrangement rather than beginning one. The Equatorial Customs Union was created on 29 June 1959 by four signatories, Cameroon acceded in 1961, and the treaty signed at Brazzaville on 8 December 1964 turned it into the Customs and Economic Union of Central Africa. Equatorial Guinea acceded on 24 August 1983 and entered the central bank on 1 January 1985. What the 1994 treaty made is that customs arrangement with a monetary one set beside it, under a single roof: an Economic Union of Central Africa and a Monetary Union of Central Africa, named as two unions in article 2 of the treaty itself.

One institution to a capital

The Community's own seat is at Bangui. Its Parliament sits at Malabo, fixed there by an additional act of 25 June 1999 and written into article 2 of the convention that governs it, whose third paragraph makes the Parliament's working language the language of the treaty. Its Court of Justice sits at N'Djamena, fixed by article 3 of the convention of 30 January 2009, and the judicial chamber is made of judges presented one by each member state and appointed by the Conference of Heads of State for six years, renewable once. The central bank is at Yaoundé. The securities exchange was placed at Libreville by a summit decision of 14 December 2000.

How the posts inside those institutions are shared has changed once, and the change is dated. On 1 February 1973 a conference at Fort-Lamy, the town now called N'Djamena, designated the country of the central bank's seat and divided the senior posts between the member states. On 17 January 2010 the heads of state, meeting at Bangui, replaced that consensus with rotation in alphabetical order of the member states across every institution, organ and specialised institution of the Community, on mandates of five years that cannot be renewed. A decision of 25 July 2012 then barred the country hosting an institution's seat from holding that institution's senior post.

What the member states share, and what they do not

French is an official language of every member state, and it is the working language of the Parliament. The records hold more than French alone: English is official in Cameroon, Spanish and Portuguese in Equatorial Guinea, Arabic in Chad and Sango in the Central African Republic. Equatorial Guinea is the late arrival in both halves of the arrangement, joining the customs union in 1983 and the central bank in 1985.

The Community adopted a flag and a logo on 21 July 2000, by two regulations passed the same day. The regulation describes the flag's ground as yellow, the colour it takes to be common to the member states' flags, and the logo as dominantly green, described the same way.

Where the group ends

Every member also belongs to the Economic Community of Central African States, and that body is the wider one. Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and São Tomé and Príncipe belong to it and not to this one. A reader asking which countries make up central Africa therefore gets two answers, and what separates them is the franc.

Movement of people is the later half of the arrangement. The customs union dates from 1959 and the common currency from 1972, and the instrument establishing free movement of persons and goods for nationals of the Community was signed by all the member states in October 2017. What the catalogue records is the instrument and its date, not how any given border applies it.