Author: Congo Times

A ceremony that transcended club protocol The closing days of June saw the manicured lawns of the Saint-Germain golf course hosting a gathering markedly more geopolitical than its bucolic setting might suggest. At first sight the hand-over of the Poissy Doyen Lions Club presidency from Deve Maboungou to Hervé Courbot appeared to be the routine end of a twelve-month associative mandate. Yet the event subtly showcased the expanding reach of diaspora soft power, an increasingly scrutinised phenomenon by French and African diplomats alike. In a brief but pointed allocution, Maboungou praised his colleagues’ “solidarity and altruism”, words that resonate with…

Global commemoration, national soul-searching On 26 June, as the United Nations marked the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Consortium of Associations for the Promotion of Democratic Governance and the Rule of Law, better known by its French acronym Capged, released a statement that travelled swiftly through Brazzaville’s diplomatic circles. The five-member platform, which includes the Observatoire Congolais des Droits de l’Homme and the Groupe des Femmes pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme, asserted that the frequency of torture in police custody and pre-trial detention had reached what it termed “worrying proportions”. The communiqué landed in…

Strategic consensus around a maturing digital agenda The ordinary budgetary session of the Agence de Développement de l’Économie Numérique (ADEN) convened in Brazzaville on 26 June delivered a pragmatic yet ambitious set of instruments designed to translate presidential directives on digital modernisation into measurable programmes. By simultaneously validating its organic statutes, 2025 budget envelope and a granular activity matrix, the agency has insulated its roadmap from the fiscal uncertainties that often curtail policy continuity across Central Africa. Chairman Ghislain Ebalé reminded the board that “the digital economy is a non-negotiable vector of inclusive growth,” echoing President Denis Sassou Nguesso’s own…

Antananarivo becomes the continent’s debt observatory For three days in late June the volcanic highlands of Madagascar hosted an unusually frank conversation about money. Governors of central banks, chief executives from Abidjan to Addis Ababa and policy advisers convened under the auspices of the Club des Dirigeants de Banques et Établissements de Crédit d’Afrique. Their stated purpose was austere—“The management of public borrowing in Africa: challenges and solutions proposed by banks and central banks”—yet the atmosphere was anything but technocratic. Rising debt servicing costs have turned the subject into an urgent geopolitical matter, and delegates knew that their diagnosis could…

Diplomatic Significance of the Pointe-Noire Consultations In the Atlantic port city that handles over 80 percent of Congo-Brazzaville’s crude exports, the Municipal Hall of Pointe-Noire momentarily became a miniature multilateral arena. From 26 to 27 June, the Rencontre pour la Paix et les Droits de l’Homme (RPDH), with municipal backing, hosted a consultative roundtable on the country’s prospective after-oil horizon. While the meeting unfolded under the banner of civil-society engagement, its attendee list—senior officials from the Ministries of Hydrocarbons, Economy and Environment, representatives of SNPC, executives from Chevron and Perenco, alongside envoys of the European Union delegation—testified to its strategic…

A continental conversation expands beyond Abidjan What began five years ago as a Côte d’Ivoire-based round-table has now matured into a full-fledged diplomatic forum, capable of attracting over 2 500 delegates and more than fifty national flags. Held in Cotonou on 24–25 June, the fifth Cyber Africa Forum (CAF) revolved around the notion of digital ecosystem resilience, a theme that resonates with the accelerated uptake of cloud services, mobile payments and artificial intelligence throughout the continent. According to the organisers, the move from Abidjan to the Beninese capital aimed to showcase the forum’s pan-African vocation while honouring Benin’s steady rise…

A flagship campus at a delicate juncture Few institutions in Central Africa carry the symbolic weight of Université Marien-Ngouabi, heir to the 1971 National University of the Congo and alma mater of much of the nation’s technocracy. Its 30,000 students and nearly 2,000 academic and administrative staff make it a bellwether for social sentiment in Brazzaville. On 26 June 2025, at the Bayardelle complex overlooking the Congo River, the inter-union college convened to review the implementation of compromises reached six months earlier. Union leaders acknowledged progress on pedagogical equipment and infrastructure but underlined that salary arrears – notably those for…

Kintélé Emerges as Francophone Business Hub For three days in late June 2025 the new conference complex on the banks of the Djiri River became the epicentre of Francophone economic diplomacy. More than one thousand delegates from some forty countries converged on Kintélé for the fifth Rencontre des entrepreneurs francophones, a gathering orchestrated by the Alliance des patronats francophones in partnership with the Congolese employers’ union, Unicongo. According to local organisers, the summit generated over a dozen memoranda of understanding worth an estimated 320 million dollars, although exact figures remain to be audited (Jeune Afrique, 2 July 2025). The choice…

Digitalisation and Financial Inclusion in Congo-Brazzaville A decade ago the Republic of Congo’s commercial arteries still pulsed predominantly with cash, yet today mobile-money penetration has surpassed forty percent of adult users according to the latest figures from the Central Bank of Central African States (BEAC, 2023). The government’s National Development Plan underscores digitisation as a catalyst for inclusive growth, projecting that electronic transactions could represent twenty percent of retail payments before 2030. These ambitions resonate with continental trends: the African Development Bank estimates that the digital economy could add nearly three percent to Central Africa’s GDP within five years (AfDB,…

Fresh Budgetary Injection Signals Continuity of Macroeconomic Reforms With discreet efficiency, senators meeting in Brazzaville on 25 June authorised the ratification of a financing agreement that had been negotiated for months by the Ministry of Finance and World Bank officials. The Development Policy Financing operation releases CFAF 46.3 billion—roughly €70.6 million—into the national treasury, the third such instalment since 2022. Speaking on the floor of the upper house, Finance Minister Rigobert Roger Andely argued that the envelope will “consolidate fiscal buffers without undermining the debt-stabilisation trajectory”. His language echoed the Bank’s own assessment that prudent budgetary management is pivotal for…