Author: Congo Times

Global Benchmark Rally Sparks Limited Regional Contagion Brent futures vaulted from 83 to nearly 97 US dollars per barrel in the two trading sessions that followed Iran’s symbolic drone strike on Israeli territory in mid-April, reflecting traders’ traditional risk premium whenever the Strait of Hormuz is mentioned. Yet West and Central African spot cargos largely sidestepped the spike, a reality noticed by Cameroonian import planners as early as the 48-hour post-incident window (Bloomberg). Fiscal Buffering Under Yaoundé’s 2024 Budget Architecture Finance Minister Louis Paul Motaze reminded the National Assembly that the 2024 finance law pencilled in an oil reference price…

Washington’s July Invitation and the Optics of Selective Engagement Few diplomatic signals travel faster than an invitation to the White House. According to reporting from Africa Intelligence corroborated by senior congressional aides, President Donald Trump intends to receive five African heads of state in Washington from 9 to 11 July. The guest list, still confidential, is said to balance regional representation with political affinity. For the administration, the meeting is presented as proof that Africa has not been relegated to the periphery of U.S. grand strategy, despite a perception in some quarters that the continent has slipped beneath the radar…

Shifting Sands in Multilateral Finance The delicate architecture of African development finance has rarely been under such acute scrutiny. In recent months, creditor committees dominated by members of the Paris Club and large bilateral lenders have encouraged Ghana and Zambia to suspend payments to two hybrid multilateral institutions, the African Export-Import Bank and the Trade and Development Bank. In doing so, they are asking the two sovereigns to rank these banks alongside hedge funds and bondholders rather than together with the World Bank or the African Development Bank. The signal is stark: the convention of preferred creditor status, long considered…

A Coastal City as Diplomatic Metaphor For seven June days, the Atlantic-facing city of Agadir transcended its reputation as a tourism hub to become a laboratory of African leadership. From 23 to 29 June 2025, the inaugural EPIK Leaders Summer Academy gathered forty carefully selected participants from sixteen African states, together with 160 Moroccan peers observing the public sessions. The choice of venue was deliberately political. Located in the Souss-Massa region, Agadir sits at the intersection of Morocco’s southern provinces and West Africa’s commercial arteries, a geography that illustrates Rabat’s doctrine of South-South cooperation under the African Union’s Agenda 2063…

Setting the scene for a new phase of accountability Inside the marble halls of Brazzaville’s Palais des congrès, the Economy, Finance and Budgetary Control Committee of the National Assembly has shifted from drafting statutes to scrutinising their real-time outcomes. By launching an awareness campaign on 1 July, the committee signalled that the era in which fiscal incentives were renewed almost automatically is drawing to a close. Deputies Thierry Hobié and Paul Matombé reminded executives from a dozen beneficiary companies that tax holidays are not a one-way favour but a contractual exchange whose currency is domestic employment. Investment charters and the…

An Overdue Response to a Persistent Power Deficit Some 600 million Africans still endure evenings lit by kerosene or phone flashlights, a statistic that belies the continent’s ambition for inclusive growth. According to the International Energy Agency, reaching universal access by 2030 would require connecting close to 80 million people each year, a tempo no region has ever sustained. With Africa contributing only three percent of global electricity output while hosting seventeen percent of its population, the shortfall constrains everything from cold-chain vaccines to microprocessor assembly lines (International Energy Agency, 2022). Conventional grids anchored in hydropower and gas are expanding,…

Congo Basin stewardship and historical commitments Long before multilateral climate negotiations became fashionable, Brazzaville enshrined environmental stewardship at the very center of its national narrative. The 1981 proclamation of an annual Tree Day by President Denis Sassou Nguesso signaled an unambiguous intention to align socio-economic development with ecological resilience, at a time when most of Central Africa still viewed forests primarily as timber reserves. Over the ensuing decades this presidential impulse crystallised into a constitutional obligation to safeguard the Congo Basin, the planet’s second-largest tropical lung after Amazonia, whose forty-million-hectare canopy sequesters an estimated three years of global fossil-fuel emissions…

A Demographic Pivot With Diplomatic Resonance With more than one million Congolese citizens between twenty and thirty-nine years of age, Brazzaville occupies a delicate position on the continental chessboard. Its youthful cohort, accounting for roughly thirty per cent of the total population, represents both promise and pressure. From recent African Development Bank briefings to UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report, interlocutors uniformly concur that states failing to harness this demographic dividend will encounter social tension and lost growth. By convening high-level ‘assises’ on 1 July, Prime Minister Anatole Collinet Makosso placed Congo in a camp of nations that prefer anticipatory governance…

Historic Weight of the Timber Sector Few sectors embody the economic and diplomatic identity of the Republic of Congo as vividly as timber. Wood products represent roughly 7 % of national GDP and a quarter of non-oil export revenue, providing direct employment to more than 20 000 people according to the World Bank (2023). Brazzaville’s partners, from Beijing to Brussels, see in the dense Congolese rainforest not only a source of precious hardwoods but also a carbon sink of global relevance. Such dual significance explains why each administrative decision on concessions immediately echoes through chambers of commerce, development banks and…

Brazzaville June Floods Challenge Urban Preparedness At dawn on 14 June, an unusually intense cloudburst brought nearly a month’s worth of precipitation over Brazzaville within a few hours, overwhelming drainage canals in the northern arrondissements of Talangaï and Mfilou. According to preliminary data compiled by the Ministry of Social Affairs, seven lives were lost, 6 800 households were rendered homeless and roughly 28 075 citizens found themselves in urgent need of shelter, potable water and medical assistance. Engineers from the National Institute of Geography have since confirmed that several culverts had already approached their design limits after earlier seasonal showers,…