Author: Congo Times

A calibrated verdict with regional resonance On 26 June the Tribunal of First Instance in Impfondo, capital of Likouala, imposed three-year imprisonment on one defendant and two-year terms on his accomplices for offences related to the trafficking of a panther skin, claws and a sizeable cache of giant pangolin scales. The court simultaneously levied fines and civil damages amounting to four million CFA francs, a figure that, while significant in local economic terms, remains proportionate to precedents recorded in similar cases in Owando and Dolisie according to data compiled by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Observers from the Projet d’Appui à…

Ceremony at the Palais des Congrès Under the frescoed dome of Brazzaville’s Palais des Congrès, President Denis Sassou Nguesso affixed the green-trimmed sash of the Grand-Croix upon Professor Théophile Obenga on 25 July 2025. Diplomats, cabinet members and academics applauded the elevation, which places the 89-year-old historian in the small circle of Congolese citizens bearing the Republic’s highest civil honour. Observers present noted the President’s assertion that “in venerating scholarship we cement the moral foundations of the state,” a line that resonated across local media (La Semaine Africaine, 26 July 2025). A Scholar’s Trajectory from Mbaya to the Sorbonne Born…

Diplomatic Calendar Marks a Valedictory Visit It was a carefully choreographed moment on 24 July in Brazzaville when Maurizio Cascioli, whose tenure as resident director of the French Development Agency is drawing to a close, stepped once more into the marbled corridors of the Ministry of Environment, Sustainable Development and the Congo Basin. Minister Arlette Soudan-Nonault, long a public advocate of Congo’s climate diplomacy, received the envoy with a cordiality that belied the gravity of their agenda. The session, officially a farewell courtesy call, doubled as a strategic checkpoint in the Republic of Congo’s still-nascent but fast-evolving climate-adaptation drive (Les…

A courtroom verdict reverberates through Likouala The recent ruling of the Court of First Instance in Impfondo, capital of the remote Likouala department, would normally have attracted only modest local attention. Instead, the sentencing of three offenders—Jodel Mouandola, Arel Ebouzi and Parfait Mbekele—to terms ranging from two to three years of imprisonment has circulated swiftly through diplomatic briefings and environmental platforms alike. The men were apprehended in late May in flagrante delicto with a leopard pelt, four giant pangolin claws and a sizeable cache of pangolin scales, contraband that regional investigators have come to recognise as a lucrative micro-commodity on…

A Pan-African Diplomatic Overture With the next election for the helm of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization still two years away, Congo-Brazzaville has elected to break the usual tempo of late-stage lobbying. Since 21 July Foreign Minister Jean-Claude Gakosso has threaded a southern arc from Luanda to Port-Louis, bearing personal letters from President Denis Sassou Nguesso and cultivating an early consensus around the candidacy of Firmin Édouard Matoko. The itinerary, intentionally publicised by both host governments and the Congolese press, underscores Brazzaville’s aspiration to frame the bid as a continental rather than merely national project (Congolese MFA…

A Southern African Overture Sets the Tone By the time Foreign Minister Jean-Claude Gakosso’s aircraft touched down in Port-Louis on 25 July, Brazzaville’s southern African swing had visited Luanda, Windhoek, Gaborone and Maputo before closing in Mauritius. Each stop combined protocol courtesy with sharp electoral arithmetic: twenty-six African votes sit on UNESCO’s Executive Board, and a first movement in the south was deemed pivotal to shaping a pan-African consensus. According to communiqués from the Angolan presidency and the Mauritian State House, heads of state received sealed letters from President Denis Sassou Nguesso urging colleagues to elevate African agency within multilateral…

Continental stakes of UNESCO leadership race Leadership contests at UNESCO rarely capture popular imagination, yet for the diplomatic corps they can herald shifts in influence over education, culture and science agendas. The 2025 election for Director-General is no exception. Brazzaville’s endorsement of Firmin Édouard Matoko, a former UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Priority Africa and External Relations, positions the Republic of the Congo to vie for a post traditionally dominated by nations from the global North or the larger emerging economies (UNESCO Executive Board records 2021). For many African chancelleries, the prospect of an experienced continental insider at the organisation’s apex…

Opening Kick-off for Congolese Aspirations The midsummer window of European preliminary rounds may appear routine to seasoned diplomats, yet for the Republic of Congo the latest fixtures represented another stage for projecting national vitality. With Brazzaville’s domestic league still in inter-season recalibration, attention turned to a constellation of expatriate talents whose boots carried both personal ambition and a measure of collective symbolism. Their performances, observed by scouts, corporate sponsors and embassy staff alike, echoed the government’s articulation of sport as a vector of influence articulated by President Denis Sassou Nguesso in several public addresses. The current cohort operates across diverse…

A geography of abundance yet logistical hurdles Straddling the Equator, the Republic of Congo stretches from the wild Atlantic littoral to the dense upland forests that define Central Africa’s carbon lungs. Hydrological giants—the Congo and the Ogooué basins—bestow navigable corridors and untapped hydro-electric promise, yet the very luxuriance of rainforest topography complicates overland connectivity. The national road grid covers barely half of neighbouring Gabon’s density, an imbalance frequently cited by regional planners as the prime bottleneck for inland agricultural exchanges (African Development Bank 2023). Nevertheless, recent dredging of the riverine channel linking Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire reinforces a multimodal spine meant…

Equatorial Coordinates and Regional Interfaces Straddling the equator on Africa’s western flank, the Republic of the Congo commands an area of almost 342,000 km², sharing land frontiers with Gabon, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Angolan enclave of Cabinda. Its 160-kilometre Atlantic façade, modest in length yet vital in consequence, anchors the nation to global maritime trade routes and underpins its diplomatic outreach within the Gulf of Guinea coastal architecture (African Development Bank 2023). The capital, Brazzaville, perched on the right bank of the Congo River and facing Kinshasa across Malebo Pool, forms…