Author: Congo Times

A cautious dawn for Congolese decentralisation The polished conference room of Brazzaville’s Radisson Blu did not betray the anxiety that shadows Congo’s decade-old promise of decentralisation. On 26 June the Ministry of the Interior and Decentralisation, flanked by the World Bank, assembled forty municipal treasurers, provincial finance directors and civil-society observers for what officials called a “special clinic” on domestic revenue mobilisation. The gathering follows the Bank’s 2022 diagnostic, Progress and Priorities in Decentralisation in Congo (World Bank, 2022), which concluded that despite constitutional guarantees local governments capture barely five per cent of national revenue and remain hostage to erratic…

A Curious Dawn for Customary Tenure in Central Africa When officials in Brazzaville convened civil-society actors and forest dwellers at the close of June, sceptics were quick to recall decades of stalled land reform across the Congo Basin. Yet the new draft decree on safeguarding Indigenous customary tenure, discussed behind the ochre walls of the capital’s diplomatic district, suggests a moment of rare political receptivity. The Congolese government touts its 2011 law on Indigenous peoples as the first of its kind in Africa, but the enabling regulations—those that decide how a right is exercised at the forest edge—have long remained…

Civil-society momentum reverberates through Brazzaville In late June a coalition of Congolese non-governmental organisations, spearheaded by Rencontre pour la Paix et les Droits de l’Homme and the Observatoire Congolais des Droits de l’Homme, convened in Brazzaville to deliver a blunt message to the executive: the existing forest code, though revised in 2020, remains a paper tiger without the promulgation of detailed implementing decrees. “We cannot continue to negotiate climate finance while our own statutes lack operational teeth,” argued Dieudonné Tshimanga, one of the forum’s moderators. The gathering, supported by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office through its Forest…

A budgetary needle in the Pool haystack The quietly contested vote in Kinkala on 23 June, resulting in a 2025 operating budget of 979 267 949 FCFA (about USD 1.6 million), might look parochial on paper; yet, it encapsulates the Republic of Congo’s wider struggle to translate constitutional decentralisation into credible fiscal autonomy. Local council president Michel Bouboutou Mampouya called it an “austerity budget”, a phrase that immediately raised eyebrows in Brazzaville’s Ministry of Finance, where officials have long argued that local governments must first demonstrate absorption capacity before requesting larger transfers. The arithmetic of austerity Digging beneath the headline…

Fiscal Tightrope Walking in Brazzaville The Republic of Congo is again courting the multilateral community, this time for a €70.6 million policy-based loan that the Senate endorsed on 25 June. Coming on the heels of two earlier tranches worth a combined 46 billion FCFA, the prospective facility underscores both the progress and the fragility of Brazzaville’s public-finance rehabilitation. Government data indicate that oil revenues, while still dominant, were insufficient to offset pandemic-related shocks and the lingering effects of the 2014 commodities downturn. According to the IMF’s sixth review under the Extended Credit Facility, concluded in March, public debt fell from…

Diplomacy meets forestry in Brazzaville When thirty delegates settled into a modest conference room on Boulevard Denis Sassou Nguesso, the task before them was deceptively simple: square Congo’s economic aspirations with the ecological integrity of the second-largest rainforest on earth. The multi-stakeholder forum, convened by the Congolese Observatory of Human Rights and the Rencontre pour la Paix et les Droits de l’Homme, unfolded under the discreet patronage of the United Kingdom and the technical guidance of the European NGO Fern. It was the kind of small but symbolically charged gathering that has, in recent years, become a laboratory for African…

Smaller Cheques, Louder Claims of Stability Shareholders of the National Office of Telecommunications of Burkina Faso (ONATEL S.A.) woke up to a mixed message this summer: the company’s board approved a 12.887-billion-FCFA net dividend for the 2024 fiscal year, to be distributed on 21 July 2025. At 189.52 FCFA per share, that cheque is 29 percent lighter than last year’s 266.44 FCFA, even as the operator proclaimed “solid fundamentals in a challenging macroeconomic environment” (ONATEL 2024 Annual Report). The contradiction is more apparent than real, executives argue, citing the need to preserve cash for spectrum renewals and 4G densification. Earnings…

Pointe-Noire hosts an unusual gathering on the future beyond crude The lobby of the Hôtel Elaïs, more accustomed to signing bonuses than existential debates, morphed into a vivid laboratory of ideas on 26–27 June 2025. Convened by the Rencontre pour la paix et les droits de l’homme (R.d.p.h) under the stewardship of activist-diplomat Christian Mounzéo, the conference entitled “Preparing the After-Oil Congo” brought together oil majors, river-delta communities, senior civil servants, international donors and a sprinkling of academic economists. The objective, as framed in the opening address, was less a ceremonial nod to sustainable development than a candid autopsy of…

Brazzaville’s Deluge and the Quiet Urgency of Coordination When torrential rains lashed Brazzaville in early June, the Congolese capital once again learned that hydrology respects neither geopolitical discourse nor municipal budgets. By mid-month, runoff cascading from the Massif du Chaillu had transformed the low-lying quarters of Talangaï and Mfilou into archipelagos of mud. The Ministry of Social Affairs now recognises more than 3 400 affected households and a damage inventory that ranges from collapsed retaining walls to toppled power lines. While seasonal flooding is hardly novel along the right bank of the Congo River, the breadth of this year’s impact,…

Demographic dividend collides with a data vacuum In the corridors of many foreign ministries, Central Africa is still too often discussed through the prism of security or extractive commodities. Yet the region’s demographic profile is quietly altering its economic narrative. More than sixty per cent of citizens in the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Rwanda and their neighbours are below twenty-five, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA 2022). Until recently, however, decision-makers lacked granular insight into how this youth bulge earns, spends and aspires. The market-research firm Target has attempted to fill that void,…