Author: Congo Times

Brazzaville Becomes an Unlikely Laboratory for Land Reform Inside a stifling conference room near the banks of the Congo River, representatives of the Observatoire congolais des droits de l’homme, Forest Peoples Programme, jurists and chiefs from the Sangha and Lékoumou departments exchanged clauses rather than pleasantries. Their goal is nothing less than the first decree explicitly protecting customary land tenure since the 2022 overhaul of Congo’s Land Code, a legal lacuna long criticised by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The workshop, which opened on 26 June, is expected to distil field research, community consultations and comparative jurisprudence…

A diplomatic conversation that moved the needle Seasoned observers of Austria’s understated diplomacy were caught off guard when Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger granted a full afternoon to a Congolese ministerial troika, rather than the customary courtesy call allotted to delegations from mid-size African economies. According to interlocutors present in the Gothic splendour of the Minoritenplatz palace, the talks quickly pivoted from protocol to a frank inventory of converging interests (Austrian Foreign Ministry press release, 2024). Building bricks and mortar for a new embassy First on the agenda was Brazzaville’s long-delayed plan to open a permanent mission in Vienna, home to…

A Strategic Sector Re-enters the Diplomatic Spotlight For more than a decade the extractive sector languished at the periphery of climate discourse, caricatured as a relic of carbon modernity. Yet the sudden upsurge of demand for lithium, cobalt, rare earths and refined copper has wrenched mining back into centre stage. The International Energy Agency estimates that a net-zero pathway may quadruple mineral demand for clean energy by 2040 (IEA 2022). Consequently, embassies from Washington to Canberra are dusting off geological maps, and new alliances such as the Minerals Security Partnership seek to neutralise supply-chain fragilities that the war in Ukraine…

A surge of blue-and-yellow pennants on African flagpoles When Ukraine hoisted its flag over a modest villa on the outer ring-road of Nouakchott last December, few local observers expected more than a symbolic gesture. Yet the ceremony marked the eighth new African mission that Kyiv has opened since 2022, doubling its continental footprint in less than two years. According to figures from Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, embassies in Côte d’Ivoire, Botswana and the Republic of the Congo will follow, part of what Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba calls a “deliberate long-term pivot” (Interfax-Ukraine, 12 March 2024). The acceleration reflects a…

A remote region, a fragile health system The Sangha department, carpeted by dense equatorial forest and bordering Cameroon and the Central African Republic, sits hundreds of kilometres from Brazzaville’s decision-making heart. Public health indicators mirror this distance. According to the World Bank, maternal mortality in the Republic of Congo remains above 320 deaths per 100,000 live births and rural access to basic care lags well behind the continental average. Ouesso’s hospital of base, built in the 1980s, has long wrestled with intermittent electricity, chronic stock-outs and a tertiary referral chain weakened by riverine logistics (World Bank, 2022). The corporate cheque…

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…