Author: Congo Times

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…

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,…