Author: Emmanuel Mbemba

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…

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…

Economic Francophonie Summit Arrives in Brazzaville In late June 2025 the Grand Hôtel de Kintélé, an ultra-modern complex on the outskirts of Brazzaville, will be converted into a laboratory of francophone capitalism. More than 2 800 delegates, representing 73 French-speaking economies and a consumer pool now estimated at 320 million people, are expected to converge on the Congolese capital for the fifth Rencontre des entreprises francophones. The event, held under the patronage of President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, is marketed as “more comfortable, more accessible, more inspiring”—a superlative-laden promise that underscores both ambition and anxiety in equal measure. Congo’s Soft-Power Calculus and…

Luanda Summit Signals a Strategic Recalibration When senior executives from Caterpillar, Bechtel and Google Cloud stepped off their flights in Luanda this week, few doubted that the Angolan capital had become a discreet laboratory for the Biden administration’s attempt to marry commerce and diplomacy. The summit, co-convened by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and Angola’s Ministry of Economy, yielded memoranda of understanding worth a declared 4.2 billion dollars, according to U.S. Embassy officials. While far from legally binding, the figure dwarfs Washington’s bilateral aid to Angola last year, underscoring an ideological pivot first signalled in the 2022 Partnership for…

World Bank Diagnosis Points to a Delicate Recovery Released on 26 June, the World Bank’s 2025 Economic Update offers a cautiously upbeat narrative: Gabon’s real GDP expanded by 2.9 % in 2024, reversing the anaemic 1.5 % recorded a year earlier (World Bank 2025). The rebound, the report notes, stems chiefly from a 4 % uptick in crude output after unplanned maintenance in 2023 and the resumption of stalled public-works contracts financed under the Plan d’Accélération de la Transformation. Yet Bank economists are swift to stress that per-capita income continues to retreat in real terms, given population growth of roughly…

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…

Smaller Cheques, Louder Claims of Stability Shareholders of the National Office of Telecommunications of Burkina Faso (ONATEL S.A.) woke up to a mixed message this summer: the company’s board approved a 12.887-billion-FCFA net dividend for the 2024 fiscal year, to be distributed on 21 July 2025. At 189.52 FCFA per share, that cheque is 29 percent lighter than last year’s 266.44 FCFA, even as the operator proclaimed “solid fundamentals in a challenging macroeconomic environment” (ONATEL 2024 Annual Report). The contradiction is more apparent than real, executives argue, citing the need to preserve cash for spectrum renewals and 4G densification. Earnings…

Demographic dividend collides with a data vacuum In the corridors of many foreign ministries, Central Africa is still too often discussed through the prism of security or extractive commodities. Yet the region’s demographic profile is quietly altering its economic narrative. More than sixty per cent of citizens in the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Rwanda and their neighbours are below twenty-five, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA 2022). Until recently, however, decision-makers lacked granular insight into how this youth bulge earns, spends and aspires. The market-research firm Target has attempted to fill that void,…

Diplomatic Courtship Revived in Brazzaville When the Italian delegation, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Edmondo Cirielli, landed in Brazzaville in late May, the choreography felt familiar. Rome has multiplied such missions since its 2022 “Mattei Plan” sought to re-anchor Italian diplomacy in Africa. Yet the Business Forum 2025 marked the first bilateral platform entirely co-designed with Congolese trade bodies since the oil-centric accords of the early 2000s. Congolese Minister of International Cooperation Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso framed the event as a pivot from extractive dependence toward diversified, high-value chains. Italian envoys reciprocated with the mantra of “co-development”, a term that, in…

Luanda Sets the Stage for a Continental Reality Check The marble halls of Luanda’s Talatona Convention Center reverberated this week with a familiar mantra: Africa must trade more with itself. Addressing the opening plenary of the US-Africa Business Summit, African Union Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf warned that the continent’s intra-African trade hovers around a modest 18 percent—far below Europe’s 60 percent or Asia’s 50 percent (UNCTAD, 2023). His prescription was unequivocal: remove tariff walls, streamline visas and accelerate the African Continental Free Trade Area, AfCFTA. AfCFTA’s Promises Meet Ground-Level Complexities Since its launch in 2021, the AfCFTA has been…