Author: Congo Times

Independence Festivities as a Catalyst for Public Health Each August, Congo-Brazzaville’s Independence commemorations provide a moment of collective reflection on nation-building. This year, the festivities acquired a distinctly public-health dimension with the launch of Lipanda ya Mboka—literally “Freedom of the Nation”—a promotional eye-care campaign initiated by the non-governmental organisation Œil Droit, Œil Gauche (ODG). The programme, which runs from 6 to 31 August in Brazzaville, offers ophthalmic consultations and prescription spectacles at markedly reduced prices, aligning patriotic celebration with the pragmatic objective of expanding access to essential health services. A Silent Epidemic of Preventable Visual Impairment The campaign arrives against…

A Congolese Board Game as Soft-Power Vector When the Pointe-Noire start-up KB Publishing lifted the lid on Lissolo 2.0 earlier this month, seasoned observers of Central African politics immediately detected more than a simple parlour pastime. The upgraded board game, furnished with 1 200 meticulously curated questions and a Ludo-inspired map of Congo’s twelve departments, arrives at a moment when Brazzaville is seeking to widen the spectrum of its international narrative beyond hydrocarbons and timber. In that respect, the project dovetails neatly with the national cultural industries roadmap outlined in President Denis Sassou Nguesso’s programme Le Chemin d’Avenir, which lists…

A Firm Reminder from the Prefect of Likouala Under the humid dawn light of Impfondo’s main square, Prefect Jean Pascal Koumba raised the tricolour and, in measured tones, invited his departmental directors to remain physically and morally present at their desks. His admonition, delivered during the weekly flag-hoisting ceremony, was more than a ritual lecture. It was a carefully timed reminder that the credibility of local governance often rests on simple assiduity. According to dispatches from the Agence Congolaise d’Information, a non-negligible number of senior civil servants have decamped to Brazzaville or Pointe-Noire, leaving junior staff to navigate budgets, payrolls…

Geography as the First Negotiator Diplomatic textbooks often begin with the axiom that geography negotiates long before diplomats do. In the Republic of the Congo this maxim is almost literal. Hemmed by five neighbours and fronting the Atlantic Ocean, the country sits astride trade corridors linking the Gulf of Guinea to the heart of the continent. The 342,000-square-kilometre landmass is nearly seventy per cent rainforest, conferring both ecological prestige and logistical complexity. Mount Nabemba, at 1,020 metres, may not rank among Africa’s highest summits, yet its symbolism is potent; it crowns the northern Sangha region, a zone eyed by investors…

A Theatre Becomes a Diplomatic Sounding Board The velvet-lined balconies of the Teatro Teresa Carreño, more accustomed to Verdi arias than to policy discourse, reverberated last weekend with an unusual symphony of press badges and simultaneous-translation headsets. At the invitation of Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 120 journalists representing more than fifty national press unions assembled for the inaugural “Voces del Nuevo Mundo” forum, an initiative openly framed as a response to what Caracas describes as a “global communication siege” (Ministerio del Poder Popular para Relaciones Exteriores). Foreign Minister Yván Eduardo Gil Pinto, opening the proceedings, depicted the meeting as…

Grassroots Football and Nation-Building On the compact, sun-baked grounds of Brazzaville’s fifth district, the fifteenth edition of the Ouenzé Lisanga tournament has again confirmed that football remains one of the Republic of Congo’s most effective vectors of soft power. Conceived by Deputy Juste Désiré Mondelé and carried by local associations, the competition assembles sixteen amateur squads for three weeks of spirited play. Beneath the exuberant dribbles and percussion of vuvuzelas lies a deliberate political choice: using sport to cultivate a sense of shared destiny among youths whose demographic weight—over 60 % of the national population—is both a promise and a…

A Crisis That Tested the Pulse of Congo’s Flagship Hospital For more than a year the corridors of the Centre Hospitalier et Universitaire de Brazzaville, the largest referral facility in the Republic of Congo, echoed with more than the usual clinical alarms. Intermittent strikes, postponed surgeries and administrative gridlock had strained both morale and budgets. Matters reached a critical point on 25 July 2025, when an extraordinary general assembly of the inter-union coalition issued a twelve-point ultimatum that included, in unusually blunt terms, a seventy-two-hour demand for the resignation of Professor Thierry Raoul Alexis Gombet, the hospital’s director-general. The standoff…

A Transcontinental Midwife in Pointe-Noire When Marion Daron arrived in Congo-Brazzaville ten years ago as the spouse of a petroleum engineer, she carried in her luggage a French midwifery diploma and experience gathered in London’s National Health Service and a mission hospital in the Philippines. Five births on three continents later, the idea of structuring that itinerant expertise into a service for other families in motion took shape. In September 2023 she registered Naissances Nomades in Pointe-Noire, the country’s economic capital, with the stated purpose of “making every posting a safe place to give life.” The company deploys prenatal classes…

A Strategic Forum for National Human Capital Five days at the beginning of August turned the Palais des Congrès in Brazzaville into a bustling agora where recent secondary-school graduates, parents and institutional partners weighed academic possibilities for the 2025–2026 cycle. The Salon de l’Information et de l’Orientation des Bacheliers, convened under the authority of Minister of Higher Education Prof. Delphine Édith Emmanuel, has become a fixed point on Congo-Brazzaville’s education calendar, mirroring similar guidance fairs in Dakar and Abidjan that seek to stem regional skills gaps (UNESCO Institute for Statistics). The stakes are high: roughly sixty-four percent of Congolese aged…

A Strategic Signature in Brazzaville The signing ceremony of 5 August in the marble-lined hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs drew a modest but symbolically dense audience of diplomats and senior civil servants. Minister of International Cooperation and Public-Private Partnerships Denis Christel Sassou Nguesso and Japanese Ambassador Hidetoshi Ogawa affixed their signatures to a document that had been negotiated for close to two years with the Japan International Cooperation Agency. The accord, described by the Congolese minister as “an engineering manual for shared prosperity”, frames future missions, the legal status of Japanese experts, and the financial channels through which…