Author: Congo Times

Ceremony in Tié-Tié Marks a Milestone A humid mid-morning sun filtered through the stained-glass windows of Saint-Jean Bosco parish in Tié-Tié on 30 July 2025, yet the atmosphere in the nave felt unmistakably electric. Family members, municipal officials and representatives of civil society filled the benches to applaud 95 young women and men who had just completed the second cohort of the Programme de Formation et d’Insertion Professionnelle (FIP). The initiative, financed by the European Union and the Agence française de développement and implemented by the NGO ESSOR and the Association des jeunes pour l’innovation au développement, aims at providing…

FECOFOOT Confirms 13 September Kick-Off At the headquarters of the Fédération congolaise de football, the Executive Committee met club presidents on 6 September 2025 and endorsed 13 September as the non-negotiable opening day of the 2025-2026 Ligue 1 campaign. After more than a year without top-flight action, the announcement sounded like a starting whistle for athletes, coaches and supporters alike. “We have written, and we await the reply. If the stadiums are not opened on 13 September, we shall draw all the lessons and consequences,” stated federation president Jean-Guy Blaise Mayolas during the brief yet charged meeting. The determination to…

Dialogue in the French Capital Reignites National Cohesion The gilded hall of the Palais des Glaces rarely resonates with such fervent patriotism. Yet on 13 September it became the epicentre of a carefully curated “citizen encounter” bringing together several hundred Congolese expatriates, senior embassy staff and, above all, Rodrigue Malanda-Samba, head of the Presidential Political Department. Flanked by Minister-Counsellor Armand Rémy Balloud-Tabawe and diaspora adviser Larissa Ondzie Ongogni, he unfolded a discourse whose leitmotif—union—echoed throughout the proceedings, setting a tone of dialogue rather than diatribe. Historical Memory Anchors the Search for Unity In his opening remarks, the adviser recalled that…

Opposition unity takes shape before the 2026 vote Forty delegates gathered on 14 September, some physically in Brazzaville and others connected by videoconference, to give institutional flesh to the Rassemblement des forces du changement (RFC). Three months after an interim steering committee was announced, the coalition has opted for a durable hierarchy intended to survive the intense pre-electoral season stretching to March 2026. The atmosphere inside the hall was described as studious rather than euphoric, a sign, participants argued, of the gravity of the task. Several speakers recalled that the country’s next presidential election will take place under the 2015…

Grassroots Empowerment Drives Disability Inclusion On an overcast Monday in the Mpila district of Brazzaville, the courtyard of Handicap Humanité (H2O) resonated with restrained excitement. Twenty-two young mothers and women living with disabilities—many of them survivors of gender-based violence—took delivery of the second cohort of equipment funded by the Kotonga project, an initiative whose very name, in Lingala, evokes the idea of “breaking free”. For these Congolese citizens, economic liberation is no longer an abstraction but a tangible ambition sealed in steel freezers, catering ovens and heavy sacks of rice. The ceremony, modest in appearance yet rich in symbolism, embodies…

A Pact That Shaped Modern Congo Brazzaville – On the occasion of the one-hundred-and-forty-fifth anniversary of the Makoko–De Brazza Treaty, scholars, diplomats and traditional dignitaries converged on the Pierre-Savorgnan-de-Brazza Memorial to revisit a foundational episode of Congolese statehood. Signed on 10 September 1880 between King Makoko Iloo I and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, the pact established a French protectorate over the Téké kingdom and laid part of the groundwork for the future Republic of Congo. While historians continue to debate its long-term implications, the treaty indisputably opened the country to broader diplomatic and commercial currents. Royal Message Emphasises the Value…

Strategic Renewal at the Nation’s Gateway For months, the hum of jet engines leaving Brazzaville was accompanied inside the terminal by an altogether less pleasant sensation: tropical humidity unchecked by failing chillers. That discomfort ended on 12 September, when the Director-General of Aérco, Marcellus Boniface Bongho, symbolically cut a ribbon inside the subterranean plant room of Maya-Maya International Airport. Flanked by engineers of the Congolese firm Régal-Congo and representatives of South Korea’s LG Electronics, he confirmed that the airport’s central air-conditioning network—crippled by corrosion and recurrent water leaks—had been fully renovated and was once again operational. The resuscitation of the…

A distinguished voice emerges in Congolese education research The auditorium of Marien-Ngouabi University in Brazzaville fell into an attentive silence on 12 September as Reine Mervine Gankama defended her master’s thesis in quantitative economics. Entitled “The Weight of Socio-demographic and Extra-school Factors on School Dropout in Congo,” the 150-page study earned the highest honours—16/20 with unanimous congratulations—underscoring both its scientific depth and its social relevance. Presiding over the panel, lecturer Samba Bruno praised a “methodologically impeccable and socially resonant contribution,” while the two other jurors, Mavoungou Soula Ulrich and supervisor M’Piayi Auguste, echoed the sentiment. In a national context where…

UNESCO leadership showdown grips two hemispheres Few elections at a UN agency have so vividly dramatised the global rebalancing of influence as the campaign for UNESCO’s next Director-General. On one side stands Firmin Edouard Matoko, a Congolese national who has spent thirty-five years within the organisation; on the other, Egypt’s Khaled El-Enany, archaeologist and former minister of antiquities. What might appear as a simple bureaucratic succession has become, in the words of Le Continent Magazine, “an opposition of substance between reformist universalism and organised regional diplomacy”. Chronology of a contested nomination Contrary to insinuations that Brazzaville hesitated, the Congolese dossier…

Brazzaville Workshop Signals a Data-Driven Turn In a modest conference room overlooking the Congo River, a cohort of thirty officials from the Directorate-General for Public Procurement Control (DGCMP) gathered between 12 and 14 September 2025 to scrutinise a thick technical report. The document distils twelve months of nationwide data collection on public contracts, an exercise carried out under the Accelerating Institutional Governance and Reforms Programme, better known by its French acronym PAGIR. Opening the session, DGCMP Director-General Joel Ikama Ngatse framed the moment in unequivocal terms. “Reliable figures are the bedrock of credible governance,” he affirmed, insisting that the draft…