Author: Congo Times

A teenage tragedy that laid bare a systemic void The ribbon cut in Brazzaville on 19 June 2025 was more than a ceremonial gesture; it was a tacit admission of a structural blind spot that cost a 15-year-old drépanocytaire her life in 2019. Her death for lack of dialysis galvanised First Lady Antoinette Sassou Nguesso, whose Foundation Congo Assistance pledged to end the contradiction of advanced haemoglobinopathy care coexisting with an absence of renal replacement therapy. By synchronising the inauguration with the United Nations-mandated World Sickle Cell Day, Brazzaville underscored the moral urgency of marrying commemoration with concrete action (Les…

From Colonial Artery to Strategic Liability Stretched between Brazzaville on the Congo River and Pointe-Noire on the Atlantic coast, the Congo-Ocean Railway once embodied the colonial ambition to pierce the equatorial barrier and secure maritime access for French Equatorial Africa. Nearly a century later, the 512-kilometre track retains its geopolitical relevance: it remains the sole rail corridor linking the deep-water port of Pointe-Noire to the country’s administrative capital, a lifeline for manganese from Gabon and timber from the northern basin. Yet locomotives today often idle in overgrown sidings, and the once-elegant stations—some modelled on provincial French prototypes—stand chipped, leaking and…

A multilateral institution under fiscal siege When the African Group convened in Paris on 23 June, the anxiety permeating Room XI was palpable. With United Nations assessed contributions plateauing and several major donors signalling austerity, UNESCO confronts a programme budget that could contract by double-digit percentages in the next biennium, echoing the reductions already forecast in the Draft 42 C/5 document (UNESCO 2023 Programme and Budget). Edouard Matoko, the Congolese assistant director-general turned candidate to succeed Audrey Azoulay, chose that moment to speak less as a campaigner than as a diagnostician of multilateral fragility. Citing the UN Secretary-General’s recent plea…

A visit that signals renewed engagement When Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu crossed the palm-lined courtyard of WHO’s country office in Brazzaville on 24 June, the gesture was more than ceremonial. As acting regional director for Africa, he chose the Republic of Congo for his first in-country inspection since assuming office, underscoring the organisation’s resolve to remain physically present where epidemiological stakes are high and fiscal margins narrow. Conversations with national health officials revolved around the unfinished map of universal primary care laid out in the government’s 2022–2026 development plan, a document that remains aspirational without external stewardship. The symbolism of the…

A River That United Before It Divided Long before European mariners inscribed the Atlantic coast on their maps, the Kingdom of Kongo exercised a loose but recognisable sovereignty from the Atlantic estuary to the cataracts above modern-day Kinshasa. Portuguese chroniclers in the sixteenth century marvelled at the kingdom’s diplomatic sophistication, its structured tributary network and its capacity to mobilise regional trade along the great river. Archaeological evidence suggests that copper, ivory and raffia fabrics travelled widely, forging a commercial space whose cohesion owed much to the navigable lower Congo (Thornton 2020). Thus, the river was less a border than a…

A River Becomes a Border in the Scramble for Africa When European powers gathered at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 the Congo River was transformed from an artery of regional commerce into a geopolitical demarcation. French envoy Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza secured the northern bank for Paris, while King Leopold II of Belgium obtained an immense personal fief south of the current that he baptised the Congo Free State. Contemporary archival dispatches reveal that the river’s breadth was prized as a natural line of defence, sparing cartographers the burden of surveying the dense equatorial forest (French Colonial Archives, 1885). In…

Geography as Destiny for an Underpopulated State For a country that straddles the Equator, the Republic of the Congo enjoys a puzzling anonymity in global conversations. One reason is simple scale: just over five million inhabitants are expected to administer a territory of 342,000 square kilometres, most of it cloaked in dense equatorial forest or seasonally flooded swamp. European cartographers once coloured this expanse an inviting shade of empire, yet the logistical realities of the Mayombé Massif, the swampy Likouala basin and the cataract-punctuated Congo River soon tempered colonial ambitions. Those topographical hurdles remain. According to the United Nations Environment…

A Symbolic Medal with Strategic Weight In Rabat’s art-deco headquarters, Ambassador Christophe Lecourtier affixed the crimson cross of Officer of the Legion d’Honneur on Abdellatif Hammouchi, the dual-hatted chief of Morocco’s National Security (DGSN) and Territorial Surveillance (DGST). At first glance, the glittering medal looked like a simple gesture of courtesy between allies. Yet in Paris and Rabat, diplomats immediately read a deeper sub-text: the honour publicly recognises two decades of dense, operational security cooperation that has weathered cyclical diplomatic storms over visas, Western Sahara and parliamentary spats (Le Monde, 22 May 2024). From Shared Alerts to Joint Arrests French…

Congo Basin forests under diplomatic scrutiny From Yaoundé to Brussels, the 200 million hectares of humid forests stretching across Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have become a litmus test for the credibility of current climate diplomacy. The basin stores an estimated 37 billion tonnes of carbon (WRI, 2022) and shelters unparalleled biodiversity. Yet it also represents a livelihood backbone for nearly 60 million people and an export opportunity that national treasuries can ill afford to ignore. Against this delicate background, the 2017 birth of the umbrella label Fair & Precious, backed by…

A discreet Saturday reset in the Congolese capital On 21 June 2025, a subdued ceremony in Brazzaville’s fourth arrondissement signalled a fresh chapter for the Union pour la Nation, the opposition movement launched scarcely a year ago by the former banker-turned-politician Félix Guy Charles Paul Manckoundia. Away from the grand halls favoured by the ruling Parti Congolais du Travail, Manckoundia unveiled a trimmed National Executive Committee, emphasising what he termed “strategic sobriety” in a brief address relayed by local daily Les Dépêches de Brazzaville. Observers from the Centre d’Analyse et de Prospective des Politiques Africaines told Radio Congo that the…