Author: Congo Times

Final Honours for a Congo-Brazzaville Stalwart Before dawn broke on 25 June, Brazzaville’s broad avenues were already lined with Republican Guards in full dress, awaiting the cortège of the late Minister of State Martin Mbéri. His passing on 5 June, at eighty-four, had triggered an official mourning period marked by carefully choreographed rites (Agence Congolaise d’Information). At the Palais des Congrès, President Denis Sassou Nguesso, flanked by First Lady Antoinette and senior cabinet members, presided over a national homage that blended military precision with personal emotion. The Head of State inscribed in the condolence book a line that resonated beyond…

A discreet arrival on the Congo River Well before dawn broke over the Brazzaville corniches in early May, a familiar yet long-absent figure stepped off an Air France connection from Paris. Bertin Béa, once vice-president of the Central African party Kwa Na Kwa and adviser to former president François Bozizé, slipped through Maya-Maya Airport with little ceremony. Congolese immigration, accustomed to hosting regional political interlocutors, processed him swiftly, reflecting the government’s preference for quiet facilitation over headline-grabbing fanfare. Officially he travels on a private passport, yet his agenda has already drawn the discreet curiosity of foreign missions posted along the…

Continental Reverberations and the Brazzaville Imperative Each 31 July, the International Day of the African Woman invites a rhetorical celebration of female agency. Yet in Brazzaville’s policy corridors and in the informal markets that lace the Congo River, the conversation is increasingly pragmatic. The continent’s demographic dividend is tilting female—over fifty per cent of sub-Saharan Africans are women—and their economic muscle is already visible in sectors as diverse as fintech, agro-processing and off-grid energy. The Congolese government’s National Development Plan 2022-2026, which places diversification at the centre of macroeconomic resilience, explicitly recognises that the targets cannot be met without women-led…

A silent hydrographic emergency in Niari Well before the rains swell the riverbeds of southern Congo, debris already throttles the Yordane’s flow. Discarded timber, plastic detritus and invasive vegetation form embankments that divert currents into adjacent settlements, accelerating erosion and flooding. Hydrologists dispatched by the University of Brazzaville warned in 2021 that sedimentation in the Niari basin had reached “a critical threshold compromising biodiversity corridors” (University of Brazzaville 2021). Yet municipal budgets remain insufficient even to service refuse collection, let alone undertake riparian engineering. Against this backdrop, the Passia neighbourhood’s initiative to remove embâcles by pirogue assumes the magnitude of…

Historic jurisdiction ushers a new era for continental justice By ruling on 26 June that it is competent to adjudicate Democratic Republic of Congo v. Rwanda, the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights moved beyond its traditional remit of individual petitions. Justice Rafaa Ben Achour’s measured declaration—“the Court rejects the objection to jurisdiction”—signals an institutional maturation that many African legal scholars had long advocated. According to Dr. Solomon Dersso, former chair of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the Court has “stepped onto terrain it was ultimately designed to occupy, but had so far avoided” (Al Jazeera,…

Economic Francophonie Summit Arrives in Brazzaville In late June 2025 the Grand Hôtel de Kintélé, an ultra-modern complex on the outskirts of Brazzaville, will be converted into a laboratory of francophone capitalism. More than 2 800 delegates, representing 73 French-speaking economies and a consumer pool now estimated at 320 million people, are expected to converge on the Congolese capital for the fifth Rencontre des entreprises francophones. The event, held under the patronage of President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, is marketed as “more comfortable, more accessible, more inspiring”—a superlative-laden promise that underscores both ambition and anxiety in equal measure. Congo’s Soft-Power Calculus and…

Luanda Summit Signals a Strategic Recalibration When senior executives from Caterpillar, Bechtel and Google Cloud stepped off their flights in Luanda this week, few doubted that the Angolan capital had become a discreet laboratory for the Biden administration’s attempt to marry commerce and diplomacy. The summit, co-convened by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and Angola’s Ministry of Economy, yielded memoranda of understanding worth a declared 4.2 billion dollars, according to U.S. Embassy officials. While far from legally binding, the figure dwarfs Washington’s bilateral aid to Angola last year, underscoring an ideological pivot first signalled in the 2022 Partnership for…

World Bank Diagnosis Points to a Delicate Recovery Released on 26 June, the World Bank’s 2025 Economic Update offers a cautiously upbeat narrative: Gabon’s real GDP expanded by 2.9 % in 2024, reversing the anaemic 1.5 % recorded a year earlier (World Bank 2025). The rebound, the report notes, stems chiefly from a 4 % uptick in crude output after unplanned maintenance in 2023 and the resumption of stalled public-works contracts financed under the Plan d’Accélération de la Transformation. Yet Bank economists are swift to stress that per-capita income continues to retreat in real terms, given population growth of roughly…

A Global Wake-Up Call Resonates on the Congo River When Minister Ingrid Olga Ghislaine Ebouka Babackas stood before a compact audience in Brazzaville on 24 June, the International Day of the Seafarer had rarely felt so local. The United Nations-endorsed commemoration, carrying this year’s slogan “My ship, a harassment-free zone,” provided both cover and catalyst for the Republic of Congo to elevate a maritime labour issue often eclipsed by piracy and climate debates. Her declaration that tolerance for shipboard harassment must now be “absolutely zero” was striking in a region where legalistic proclamations regularly sink beneath the weight of enforcement…

A Symbolic Evening in Montreuil Reopens Brazzaville’s Historical File The velvet-draped hall of the Espace Royal in Montreuil rarely hosts events that fuse memory with strategy, yet the recent dinner convened by the Maison de la Mémoire Africaine and the Normandy Consular Corps deliberately blurred that distinction. Under the banner “Brazzaville, the Great Forgotten Capital”, more than one hundred diplomats, investors and creatives exchanged views over a menu expressly designed to evoke Congo River staples. The organiser, historian-entrepreneur Marcellin Mounzeo-Ngoyo, opened the evening with a reminder that memory, when curated, is an instrument of power. “We do not excavate the…