Challenges to the Implementation of Regional Integration in ECCAS with Respect to the Free Movement of Persons and Goods

As part of the community’s goals to develop and promote the culture of human integration, the establishment of ECCAS in 1983 was accompanied by an enabling Protocol (Annex VII, ECCAS Treaty) on free movement of persons and goods within the Central African region, with the vision to fully integrate in years to come. The movement of persons and goods without restriction constitute a major lynchpin towards market integration most especially as People are carriers of goods, consumers’ services, technologies, businesses and knowledge and can effectively tear down policy-induced barriers to trade carrying assets. Despite these benefits and mindful of the spirit enshrined in the aforementioned protocol, the mobility of persons and goods within ECCAS remains a challenging venture. This article, therefore, aims at exposing some fundamental challenges that impede the free circulation of goods and nationals of ECCAS’s Member States within the region. Pooling data largely from secondary sources and through a descriptive approach of data analysis, this study argues that the ECCAS’s protocol on free movement of persons and goods is not effectively implemented due to poor infrastructural and communication links within the region; ethnic divide; political instability; the rise of nationalism; hostile relations; rivalry/enmity between central African heads of state; and regular roadblocks within and across national borders. In this guise, it is categorically imperative for ECCAS’s member states to recognize the fact that the above highlighted challenges constitute an indication to deal with them most especially as free movement of persons and goods represents major pillars upon which integration is based.