I'll start with Romania, since it was adopted more than a hundred years before Chad's. Although the flag was made mostly official in 1848, the colors have been associated with the Romanian people for centuries before, and tricolors using them were in a horizontal orientation were around as well, before it was switched to this:
Officially the colors are cobalt blue, chrome yellow, and vermilion red.
The colors have represented the Romanian people for centuries. At least that's what they say. Just who the Romanian people are is fodder for much debate, a debate that's been charged with politics for decades. The main theory (that seems sound enough considering the evidence) states that the Dacians and their Roman occupiers got together after the nominal control of Rome faded from the Carpathian Mountain lowlands where the Dacians lived.
The Carpathians are a boomerang shaped range, so large that train trips over them, from Bucharest to Istanbul (or Sofia) take at least 30 hours. The Dacians lived mostly on the inner part of the boomerang, and were an Indo-European people speaking a language closely related to Thracian. Thrace is the chunk of land Turkey holds onto in Europe, where Istanbul is, and borders Greece. Their language is rare and could be closing in on extinction.
The main theory states that after the Romans withdrew, many of the sentries and soldiers stuck around and started families, and that that activity started before the year 300 CE. By the 1500s, we start to see the first written record of a group of people occupying the same area as the Dacians calling themselves "citizens of Rome", or, Romanian.
The facts mostly support this theory. The competing theory states that a group of Latin speakers pushed north and settled the Carpathian basin later in history, a few centuries before that 1500s reference to a place calling itself Romania. This theory is not supported by some of the facts: writings from the times show no migrations north; and the Romanian language seems to have had a Slavic buffer between itself and the Goths (a Germanic people), something that would have been impossible if they'd come from the south.
It may help to know where this competing theory came from. It was the Magyars, the Hungarians.
This makes sense once you look at the history. The Magyars were the last ethnic group to descend from the northern forests and settle in Europe, absolutely terrorizing central and eastern Europe. They claim the Carpathian basin as a homeland, and that the Romanians were encroaching on their territorial heartland. Hungary and Romania have bickered over this for decades, but more so since the end of WWI, when the Austro-Hungarian empire, after losing, had to cede the Carpathian basin to the newly-tripled-in-size country of Romania.
I don't know. You can tell that Dacian lived in that area for many centuries, having battled Rome. The Magyar are well known for being Johnny-come-latelys to Europe in the 700s, and all they did for two-hundred years was maraud. They were vicious nomads. They never teach us that cool stuff in school. Transylvania and Vlad the Impaler (the source for Dracula) are Magyar entities, but in a crazy antagonistic region that we call Romania today, but was at one point called Hungary.
All I'm saying is that Hungary has political reasons for pushing a competing theory about the origins of the Romanian people.
And, this post has gone wildly off the tracks.
It's actually quite sad that there's so little good stuff easily available to researchers like me about the central African landlocked country of Chad.
Here's Chad's flag, differing from Romania's in that the blue is darker, officially indigo:
Chad is the site of great numbers of humans moving to the wetlands around the lake for which the country is named, Lake Chad, in about 7000 BCE. In fact, throughout human history Chad has been a place near and dear to humans. Historian and anthropologists believe that's due to the lake.
In the language, "Chad" means "large expanse of water", or, uh, "lake". But, as recently as 5000 BCE the body of water is today being called Mega-Lake Chad, and it, along with a pair of other great lakes, covered more area than today's Caspian Sea.
Fast forward to the last century BCE and powerful kingdoms grew in Chad controlling the Sahara Desert traffic. Fast forward again, to 1920, when France conquers and colonizes them, leaving in 1960. Since then the government's been a mess, coups and corruption, with a few people getting very rich off of their petroleum reserves.
It's considered a failed state today.
They've asked the UN to do something about the relative closeness of their flag's resemblance to Romania's, only to have the President of Romania flatly state that they have no plans to make any changes to their banner.
That that conversation even came up makes me smirk.
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