Author: Patrick Kabasele

A delicate year-end as salary arrears stir discontent Only a few days before the traditional Christmas break, tension rippled through Congo-Brazzaville’s classrooms. Community teachers, already pillars of the public system, warned that they could down tools unless several months of unpaid study grants were released. The ultimatum, arriving amid seasonal examinations, threatened to interrupt the learning trajectory of hundreds of thousands of pupils and to strain families preparing for the festivities. The Ombudsman’s office launches a preventive mission Sensing the urgency, the Mediator of the Republic, Valère Gabriel Eteka-Yemet, dispatched on 17 December a high-level team led by his legal…

Academic Triumph Behind Bars The iron gates of Brazzaville’s Maison d’arrêt et de correction momentarily receded into the background on 20 September, as the courtyard filled with applause rather than the familiar clank of cell doors. Nineteen detainees, including fourteen candidates for the Baccalauréat d’enseignement général, received official certificates attesting their success in the June 2025 state examinations. Their achievements crown a pedagogical programme launched in 2017 that has progressively turned the penitentiary into an unexpected, if modest, centre of learning. This year’s results—ten passes out of eleven entrants for the Certificat d’études primaires élémentaires, ten out of ten at…