Author: Congo Times

Brazzaville stages Francophone business diplomacy The 2025 Rencontre des Entrepreneurs Francophones, convened under the patronage of President Denis Sassou Nguesso, gathered more than three thousand executives and policy-makers in Brazzaville. The forum’s purpose—nurturing South-South commercial partnerships within a French-speaking space exceeding 320 million consumers—accorded Congo-Brazzaville an opportunity to position itself as a logistical gateway between the Gulf of Guinea and the continental hinterland. In that setting, Africa Global Logistics, a subsidiary of the MSC Group operating in forty-seven African states, unveiled an aggregated investment envelope approaching one billion euros for the port of Pointe-Noire for the 2009–2027 period, thereby sealing…

A strategic announcement amid Brazzaville’s business diplomacy Three thousand entrepreneurs, financiers and policymakers converged on Brazzaville for the fifth edition of the Rencontre des entrepreneurs francophones at the end of June, an event that increasingly doubles as a stage for economic statecraft. Within this setting, Africa Global Logistics, the rebranded successor of Bolloré Africa Logistics, revealed that its cumulative outlay at the port of Pointe-Noire will approach one billion euros by 2027 (Africa Global Logistics press release, 28 June 2024). The timing was not incidental: the Congolese authorities are keen to translate diplomatic visibility into concrete capital flows to diversify…

Contextualising Congo’s Human Capital Challenge In the geopolitical conversation on Central Africa, Congo-Brazzaville is often framed through the prism of hydrocarbons. Yet the leadership in Brazzaville has, for several years, placed equal rhetorical and financial weight on a less visible asset: the demographic dividend represented by the country’s 4.5 million inhabitants, sixty per cent of whom are under thirty (World Bank, 2023). The National Development Plan 2022-2026 explicitly calls for a “knowledge-based diversification” designed to buttress macro-economic resilience as global demand for oil enters uncertain terrain. Within that plan, the university system is identified as a strategic hinge between social…

A leadership transition with continental resonance The annual general meeting of Afreximbank shareholders in Abuja closed with an announcement that reverberated far beyond the conference hall. Dr George Elombi, the Cameroonian jurist who joined the institution nearly three decades ago, was confirmed as the Bank’s fourth President, succeeding Professor Benedict Oramah in September. Delegates from 51 member states broke into sustained applause, acknowledging both Elombi’s long service and the symbolism of seeing a Central African figure at the helm of an organisation whose early leadership was dominated by West and North African technocrats (Afreximbank communiqué, 28 June 2025). Cameroon’s carefully…

Brazzaville’s Development Workshop Takes Stock On a humid afternoon in late June, the conference hall of the Cadre de concertation des organisations non gouvernementales de développement (CCOD) resonated less with rhetoric than with spreadsheets and performance indicators. The closing ceremony of the EU-financed Programme de renforcement des capacités (Precap-CCOD) marked the end of forty-two months of methodical training that touched five urban centres—Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, Dolisie, Djambala and Ouesso. In the measured words of CCOD board chair Dominique Matondo, “tangible progress is now visible on the ground,” an assessment echoed by the EU Delegation in Kinshasa, which called the project “a…

Brazzaville’s Continuity in Blue Helmets Deployment On the broad esplanade of the Kintélé Concord Stadium, a measured choreography of salutes and flag exchanges formalised the hand-over of the Republic of Congo’s eleventh Formed Police Unit to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic. The ceremony, presided over by Minister of National Defence Charles Richard Mondjo, completed an operation that reinforces Brazzaville’s reputation as a predictable provider of security public goods in Central Africa. Over the past decade the Congolese flag has become a familiar sight in Bangui, Berbérati and Bouar. According to UN Peacekeeping statistics…

Ceremonial accreditation signals durable multilateral engagement In a measured but symbolically resonant ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 27 June, Foreign Minister Jean-Claude Gakosso accepted the letters of credence of Dr Vincent Dossou Sodjinou, the newly appointed resident representative of the World Health Organization in the Republic of Congo. The protocol moment echoed Brazzaville’s historic status as African headquarters of the WHO and confirmed the Sassou Nguesso administration’s stated preference for pragmatic, multilateral solutions to health challenges (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Congo, 2024). “The Republic of Congo remains fully committed to the WHO as…

Strategic industrial diversification in Bouenza Province When President Denis Sassou Nguesso cut the ceremonial ribbon at N’Kayi on 27 June he was inaugurating more than a production line; he was testing the credibility of Congo-Brazzaville’s latest pledge to convert comparative agricultural advantage into industrial leverage. The Bouenza province, historically known for its vast sugar plantations managed by Société Agricole de Raffinage Industriel du Sucre du Congo (SARIS), now hosts the country’s first food-grade ethanol plant. In the words of Industry Minister Parfait Mboulou, the facility is expected to reduce the nation’s dependence on imported spirits “by at least forty percent…

Historical threads shaping contemporary governance The Republic of Congo emerged from the mosaic of French Equatorial Africa in 1960 with high hopes and limited institutional experience. Cycles of single-party rule, ideological realignments and two civil wars in the 1990s left deep administrative scars but also forged a political class keenly aware of the costs of fragmentation. Diplomatic archives in Brazzaville emphasise that the 2003 peace accord, followed by the 2017 ceasefire in Pool Department, cemented a modus vivendi that still underpins national coherence. President Denis Sassou Nguesso, now in his fourth constitutional mandate, is often portrayed as a pole of…

From Provocative Meme to Strategic Question The viral photomontages that recently circulated on Central African social networks, depicting Pointe-Noire’s Boulevard Charles de Gaulle under a pristine coat of snow, might have been conceived as light-hearted satire. Yet their very implausibility has sparked a serious conversation within diplomatic and scientific circles: what if a comparable disruption—whether snowfall or another climatic anomaly—were to strike the Republic of Congo? In geopolitical terms, the exercise is less meteorological fantasy than a stress test of national preparedness, a prospect first broached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2022 regional report, which…