Author: Congo Times

A Strategic Pivot Toward Biofuel Sovereignty When Somdia, the agro-industrial arm of the French Castel conglomerate, unveils its first Congolese distillery in June 2025, officials in Brazzaville will trumpet more than just a new factory. With a rated output of fifty cubic metres a day, the Nkayi complex is designed to deliver over six million litres of anhydrous ethanol a year—outstripping the country’s current consumption estimated by the Ministry of Energy at 5.5 million litres. In a region where refined petroleum imports drain scarce foreign currency and expose governments to price shocks, the symbolism of converting local molasses into a…

A Calculated Advance into Africa’s Newest Nation When Joshua Oigara assumed the helm of Stanbic Bank Kenya & South Sudan late in 2022, he inherited what insiders describe as “the Group’s most complex market.” A decade after independence, South Sudan remains a frontier economy where 90 percent of public revenue is tethered to crude exports, security remains brittle, and the domestic currency gyrates between official and parallel‐market rates. Yet, buoyed by Standard Bank Group’s pan-African mandate and a pick-up in peace-building momentum, Oigara has quietly doubled down on Juba. The strategic intent, he told private investors in Nairobi this spring,…

Abuja as an Arena of Continental Ambitions The stately silhouette of the Abuja International Conference Centre offered an apt theatre for Afreximbank’s thirty-second Annual Meetings, an event that has evolved into a de facto summit on the political economy of the continent. Over six thousand delegates filed past meticulous security cordons, among them five heads of state, twenty-three trade ministers and an eclectic retinue of financiers, policy wonks and journalists. Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, opening the proceedings, declared that “Abuja must be remembered as the place where Africa moved from declarations to delivery,” a flourish that captured both the soaring…

Vindoulou’s uneasy calm after the chimneys went cold From the river road that skirts the suburb of Vindoulou, the corrugated rooftops of the Metssa Congo plant now look deceptively benign. The furnaces that once smelted automotive batteries have been silent since June 2024, when the Ministry of the Environment ordered an immediate suspension citing an “established risk to human health and the environment.” Yet the metallic taste lingering in the air reminds inhabitants that industrial quietude does not equate to safety. In the words of community leader Cyrille Traoré Ndembi, “we know that we have been poisoned.” His assertion is…

A ribbon-cutting that echoes far beyond Nkayi When the red ribbon is finally severed in Nkayi on 27 June, the gesture will resonate well beyond the vast cane fields of the Bouenza valley. Somdia, the agro-industrial arm of France’s Castel Group, is inaugurating the Republic of Congo’s very first ethanol distillery: a €23 million facility capable of producing 6 million litres per year, nominally outstripping the nation’s current demand. To local officials the plant represents a tangible break with chronic dependency on imported alcohol; to regional observers it illustrates a wider contest for industrial self-reliance in Central Africa. Vertical integration…

Abuja as a Diplomatic Showcase of Continental Finance The Nigerian capital has seldom lacked grand geopolitical theatre, yet the influx of more than six thousand delegates for Afreximbank’s thirty-second annual meetings transforms Abuja into a veritable agora of pan-African finance. A procession of ten heads of state, senior ministers and corporate heavyweights underscores the bank’s newfound centrality to the continent’s growth narrative. The selected theme, “Building the Future on Decades of Resilience”, resonates with a diplomatic audience acutely aware that resilience without structural transformation offers only rhetorical comfort. A Decade of Exponential Balance-Sheet Growth When Professor Benedict Oramah assumed the…

Cartography of abundance and neglect Satellite imagery of the Congo Basin still evokes Joseph Conrad’s fabled green heart of Africa, yet the statistical portrait sketched by the CIA World Factbook, the World Bank and the African Development Bank reveals a state that has the footprint of a middle-income exporter and the development indicators of a low-income agrarian society. Stretching over 342,000 square kilometres and dotted by a mere 6.1 million inhabitants, the Republic of the Congo sits on a coastline that grants it maritime access few landlocked neighbours enjoy, but the port of Pointe-Noire struggles with chronic congestion (World Bank,…

A Symbolic Reunion of Old Allies When Brigadier-General Francis Chakauya led twenty-two Zimbabwean officers across the manicured parade ground of Brazzaville’s Marien-Ngouabi Military Academy in late June, it was more than an academic courtesy call. The Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe forged a battlefield fraternity during the Second Congo War, when Harare deployed combat aircraft and elite troops to buttress former president Laurent-Désiré Kabila (International Crisis Group, 2001). Two decades later, the leitmotif is pedagogy rather than firepower, yet the political message endures: Southern and Central Africa intend to write their defence doctrine in their own lecture halls, not…

Nouakchott hosts CGLU Africa against backdrop of rapid urbanisation Mauritania’s windswept capital is more often associated with desert trade routes than with continental diplomacy, yet on 27–28 June it becomes the fulcrum of Africa’s municipal conversation. The 33rd Executive Committee of United Cities and Local Governments of Africa (CGLU Africa) gathers representatives from all five sub-regions to examine the organisation’s trajectory at a time when the United Nations projects that 950 million Africans will inhabit urban spaces by 2050 (UN-Habitat 2023). Hosting the meeting allows Nouakchott’s regional president Fatimetou Abdel Malick not merely to chair the agenda but to underscore…

A celebration choreographed for reassurance Under a merciless June sun, the esplanade of Brazzaville’s President Alphonse Massamba-Débat Stadium became a theatre of precisely timed salutes and impeccably aligned epaulettes. The 64th anniversary of the Forces Armées Congolaises (FAC) and the National Gendarmerie offered choreography that, in the words of Defence Minister Charles Richard Mondjo, was designed to project “honour, devotion and rigorous protection.” Spectators saw a sixteen-member sample of the Force Publique decorated for merit, yet diplomats present quietly noted that the medal ceremony, though sincere, also served as a morale boost ahead of an election season already casting a…