Author: Inonga Mbala

An attempted sale thwarted in Bouenza The dusty afternoon of 28 October 2025 had barely begun in Nkayi when officers from the Bouenza regional gendarmerie, working in tandem with specialists from the Departmental Directorate of Forestry Economy, intercepted a man carrying a small wooden cage. Inside, clinging to the bars with fragile fingers, a six-month-old Pan troglodytes troglodytes stared back at them. According to the initial report, the suspect, a Congolese national in his early forties, intended to negotiate a clandestine sale on the outskirts of the city. His arrest, carried out with logistical backing from the Wildlife Law Enforcement…

Community Concerns Trigger Swift Response When refuse piled high across the Liberty Market and adjoining neighbourhoods of Tié-Tié, residents of Pointe-Noire voiced an anxiety that transcended mere inconvenience. Their appeal reached the Directorate-General for Finance and Equipment of the National Police and Gendarmerie, whose chief, Colonel-Major Michel Innocent Peya, answered with military promptitude. In the absence of the private contractors Averda and Albayrak, whose suspension of service had left the country’s two largest cities in disarray, the DGFE deployed its freshly created Sanitation and Environmental Protection Unit, acting on the standing instruction of President Denis Sassou Nguesso to tighten the…

A strategic pact for the planet In the margins of recent multilateral climate discussions, France, supported by Germany, Norway, Belgium and the United Kingdom, announced a financial envelope of approximately US$2.5 billion dedicated to the conservation and sustainable management of the Congo Basin rainforest. The pledge, circulated in a non-paper consulted by our newsroom, seeks to consolidate disparate funding streams under a single, results-oriented architecture that gives regional governments, foremost among them the Republic of the Congo, a decisive voice in project selection. French diplomats describe the programme as a “strategic pact for the planet” that complements existing mechanisms such…

Swift interception in Bouenza At daybreak on 28 October 2025, a joint patrol of the Bouenza gendarmerie and the departmental forestry service moved discreetly through Nkayi’s peripheral market. Acting on verified intelligence shared by the Wildlife Law Enforcement Support Project (PALF), the officers apprehended a Congolese national in his forties whose satchel contained a sedated chimpanzee infant scarcely six months old. Within minutes the suspect admitted that the primate, taken two months earlier from the Kindamba woodlands, was destined for an illicit sale to a middle-man allegedly linked to buyers in neighbouring countries. His confession, confirmed by initial questioning in…

Belém set to host a decisive COP30 Belém, capital of the Brazilian state of Pará, will become the epicentre of global climate negotiations from 10 to 21 November 2025. Delegations from more than one hundred countries are expected to converge on the Amazonian city for the thirtieth Conference of the Parties, a forum tasked with steering collective action against climate change. This edition carries a particular weight: it is explicitly framed as the rendez-vous of implementation for the 2015 Paris Agreement, a pact that has guided multilateral environmental diplomacy for a decade. Sassou Nguesso’s timely arrival and diplomatic agenda Congo-Brazzaville’s…

Symbolic roots of National Tree Day From the forested banks of the Alima River, President Denis Sassou Nguesso chose Oyo, his native town, to celebrate in advance the 39th National Tree Day on 2 November. Since a presidential decree of 1984 institutionalised the event for every 6 November, successive editions have sought to turn a ceremonial planting into a civic reflex. This year’s theme—“One tree, one forest, one plantation for a flourishing Congo”—invites each citizen to see personal action as part of a collective ecological tapestry. In the words of a senior forestry adviser present in Oyo, “the seed a…

Central African Indigenous Land Rights Under the Spotlight For three intense days, from 29 to 31 October, the Congolese capital became the epicentre of a debate that has long simmered beneath the equatorial canopy. The Regional Network of Indigenous Peoples of Central Africa (Repaleac) convened experts, civil-society leaders and state observers to grapple with the most sensitive of resources: land. Participants converged in a hybrid format, combining face-to-face exchanges with remote interventions, to crystallise a Community of Practice devoted to customary land and forest rights. While the venue was Brazzaville, the stakes encompassed the entire Congo Basin, a region where…

A multilingual tome born of global demand Published in Paris by Tropiques Littéraires and immediately released in French, English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, “Green Ledger” spans 380 densely documented pages. Michel Innocent Peya—an economist by training who has become one of Central Africa’s most prolific climate writers—explains that participants at successive COPs frequently asked for accessible versions of his previous essays. The present volume, he notes, “aims to leave no reader linguistically stranded while the planet’s thermometer keeps rising.” Such editorial choice underscores both the universal scope of the climate emergency and Congo-Brazzaville’s desire to speak to a plural audience.…

Historic validation meeting in Brazzaville Under the ornate ceiling of the Ministry of Urban Sanitation, Local Development and Road Maintenance, Minister Juste Désiré Mondelé opened on 14 October 2025 an intensive workshop whose single item of business was the final validation of the Republic of Congo’s first National Sanitation Policy. Flanked by the Resident Representative of UNICEF, the country manager of the African Development Bank and the deputy-mayor of Brazzaville, Dieudonné Bantsimba, the minister framed the gathering as a turning-point: “This policy,” he observed, “is the compass by which we shall reach the Sustainable Development Goals while safeguarding the President’s…

A concerted sweep across the capital At dawn on 21 October, the usually congested Avenue de la Paix resonated not with the roar of minibuses but with the steady cadence of bulldozers and Caterpillar trucks. The logistics group of Congo-Brazzaville’s internal security forces, drawing on both police and gendarmerie personnel, initiated a sweeping operation that has already altered the visual and olfactory landscape of the capital. Piles of refuse that had become quasi-permanent features of neighbourhoods from the school of Grand Fleuve to the populous district of Talangaï were loaded onto lorries, gutters were unclogged, and stagnant water released. Security…