Delay in enacting cooperative law hampers CIGS

The Director of the Limbe-based Martin Luther Memorial Foundation, LUKMEF, Christian Tanyi, has stated that the delay by the Cameroon Government to enact a law to enable Common Initiative Groups, CIGs, transformed themselves into cooperative societies, as demanded by the OHADA Law, has been hampering the progress of the CIGs.

Tanyi was speaking on September 22 in Limbe at the launching of a two-day workshop of some 30 participants representing 30 different NGOs and CIGS from the Northwest and Southwest Regions that called on Government to speed up the procedure of enacting and promulgating into law a draft law to guarantee the transformation of CIGs in Cameroon to full fledge cooperatives.

Given that most international financial donors and sponsors, as Tanyi said, deal more with cooperative societies which are judged to have a more credible status and a more transparent way of managing finances, Government’s delay has been of grave concern to many CIGS in Cameroon.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, MINADER, had, before 2010, been in charge of registering cooperative societies in Cameroon.

In 2010, the Cameroon Government signed an OHADA Law which requested that all CIGS needed to be transformed into cooperative societies in order that these new entities can have the status to better function as business entities with a wider opportunity to make more profits from their activities.

But the Fako Divisional Delegate of MINADER, Charles Monono, told the press that since 2010 that the Government signed the convention, they stopped registering cooperatives pending when the Government will pass the new law requiring them to transform CIGS to cooperatives.

“What we are all expecting is that the law gets ratified by the National Assembly and then we will go ahead to register cooperatives under the OHADA law prescriptions,” Monono said.

“The Ministry of Agriculture is not particularly keen on CIGs these days because we are following the law for cooperatives to benefit from MINADER,” Monono said.

Monono went further to indicate that there are even cooperative societies in Ghana which own huge shares in chocolate companies in the UK. “This is better because it helps to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor,” he added.

The inability of the CIGS in Cameroon to transform themselves to cooperatives to benefit from better opportunities such as their counterparts in other OHADA law countries such as Ghana was just one of the reasons why LUKMEF, in collaboration with other NGOS, organised the Limbe workshop.

“Basically, what we are doing is to promote good governance around the cooperative registration process under the OHADA Convention which Cameroon signed in 2010,” Tanyi said.

Tanyi said the training was the first step in a project that is going to last for ten months and shall assist CIGS to do their registration in a more transparent manner void of any interference from corrupt middlemen.

He stated that the current project was prompted by the fact that the Cameroon Government has failed twice to respect two deadlines it had set in a bid to meet up with the OHADA Convention demands of ratifying the law to guarantee the formation of cooperatives in Cameroon.

“We also noticed that the local poor who have been trying to register as cooperatives have also been subject to exploitation by middlemen.” “The LUKMEF project is co-sponsored by the PASC-the Civil Society Support Programme funded by the European Union and LUKMEF Cameroon,” Tanyi revealed.

The First Assistant SDO of Fako, Vincent Nafongo, acknowledged the delay on the side of Government in coming up with a legislation to guarantee the transformation of CIGS into cooperatives. He, nevertheless, re-assured participants to be patient and remain hopeful for, as he said, “Government’s machinery grinds slowly but surely.”

He also acknowledged that Government has already set up 10 cooperative registries in the 10 regions of the country and also trained registrars that will handle the process when the law will be enacted and ratified.