When Prime Minister Anatole Collinet Makosso stepped before the National Assembly on 22 June 2026 to unveil the government’s action programme (PAG) for the 2026-2031 term, the document arrived clothed in the familiar architecture of Congolese statecraft: ten priorities, six strategic axes and twenty so-called missions. Yet for analyst Benjamin Bilombot Bitadys, writing in Congopage, the elaborate scaffolding conceals a more uncomfortable reality. The programme, he contends, is less a blueprint for the future than a careful repackaging of commitments already made, and largely unmet, during the preceding five years.
A Programme Drawn From a Familiar Well
The PAG, Bitadys observes, is explicitly derived from the manifesto on which President Denis Sassou Nguesso secured his latest mandate. That genealogy matters. In a political culture the analyst describes as long accustomed to resonant but hollow slogans, “new hope,” “the path to the future,” “the march towards development”, the launch of yet another ambitious framework invites scepticism rather than enthusiasm. There is, in his blunt formulation, nothing new under the Congo-Brazzaville sun.
The choice of vocabulary is itself revealing. Where the previous term spoke of “twelve battles” to be waged on behalf of the nation, the new programme prefers the language of “twenty missions.” For Bitadys, the substitution is more cosmetic than substantive. The reframing, he suggests, performs a quiet rhetorical function: by recasting struggles as missions, the government shifts attention away from outcomes and towards intentions, from what has been achieved to what is once again merely promised.
The Reckoning That Never Came
At the heart of the analyst’s critique lies an absence. Makosso, he writes, sidestepped the question of the balance sheet entirely. How many of the twelve battles announced for the previous term were actually won? The programme offers no audit, no accounting, no candid measure of success against the benchmarks the executive itself once set.
The citizens, Bitadys argues, can supply the missing ledger from lived experience. He enumerates a catalogue of unresolved grievances that reads as an indictment of the era now ending: water and electricity supply, schools and roads, employment and student grants, pensions and recurrent fuel shortages, hospitals and inflation. To these material failures he adds a register of governance pathologies, financial mismanagement, clannishness, clientelism, nepotism and corruption, that he treats not as incidental failings but as structural features of the system under review.
The rhetorical force of the passage rests on a simple juxtaposition. On one side stands an official programme rich in numbered priorities and strategic axes; on the other, a population whose daily encounters with shortage and dysfunction constitute, in the analyst’s view, the only bilan that genuinely counts. The gap between the two is precisely what the new lexicon of missions is designed to obscure.
Old Tools for a New Term
If the diagnosis is severe, the prognosis Bitadys offers is bleaker still. One cannot, he insists, meet the development challenge of Congo-Brazzaville with the instruments of the past. His objection is not merely to the content of the programme but to the configuration of power that will be charged with delivering it.
The analyst points to what he calls the Sassou-Makosso-Yoka triptych, a leadership nucleus surrounded by largely the same governmental figures who presided over the term now drawing to a close. Their return, he writes with pointed imagery, comes “with heavy boots”, a phrase that conveys both the weight of accumulated incumbency and the bluntness with which continuity is being presented as renewal. The implication is that personnel, as much as programme, determines outcomes, and that a cast unchanged in its essentials is unlikely to produce results that diverge from those already recorded.
Continuity Dressed as Renewal
What emerges from Bitadys’s reading is a portrait of a political system fluent in the grammar of reform yet resistant to its substance. The migration from battles to missions, the silence on the previous term’s results, the persistence of the same governing figures: each element, taken individually, might pass as routine. Assembled, they form what the analyst presents as a coherent pattern in which the appearance of forward motion substitutes for the fact of it.
His commentary stops short of forecasting how the 2026-2031 programme will ultimately fare, and it draws its authority from interpretation rather than prophecy. But the question it leaves suspended over the National Assembly’s deliberations is unmistakable. If the missions of the new term are the battles of the old one under a different name, and if the absence of any reckoning makes it impossible to know which battles were won, then the central promise of the PAG, that the coming five years will differ meaningfully from the last, remains, in Bitadys’s account, asserted rather than demonstrated. For a citizenry that has learned to measure governance by the steadiness of its water and the brightness of its lights, that distinction is far from academic.
