In a measured but unsparing address to the press in Brazzaville on 5 June, Mathias Dzon, president of the Alliance for the Republic and Democracy (ARD) and a former finance minister, turned the spotlight on what he described as the deepening hardship of ordinary Congolese and on a set of public-finance and sovereignty questions that, in his telling, the authorities of the Republic of the Congo have failed to confront. His intervention, delivered with the cadence of a man who once sat at the centre of the state’s accounts, sought less to score rhetorical points than to frame a broader argument about how the country is governed and how its future obligations are being mortgaged.
A Country Living Through “Extreme Hardship”
Dzon opened by cataloguing the daily privations he attributes to current policy. He spoke of shortages of water, electricity and fuel, of an eroding purchasing power, and of food prices that, in his account, have climbed beyond the reach of many households. To these he added what he called an explosion in morbidity and mortality and a climate of political violence, summarising the whole as a state of “extreme hardship” (galère extrême) borne by his compatriots. The phrasing was deliberate: by gathering disparate grievances under a single expression, the ARD leader sought to convey not a list of isolated failings but a generalised condition, one that he insists demands a political reckoning rather than technocratic reassurance.
Reading the Debt: Between the Useful and the Unproductive
The most substantial portion of his remarks concerned the public debt, a subject on which his former tenure at the Ministry of Finance lends him a particular authority. Dzon placed the stock of public debt at 8,500 billion CFA francs in 2024, a figure he said amounts to roughly 99 percent of gross domestic product. Such a ratio, were it confirmed, would situate the Republic of the Congo among the more heavily indebted economies of the Central African region, with evident implications for its room for manoeuvre within the monetary framework that binds it to its CEMAC partners.
Rather than treating indebtedness as an undifferentiated evil, the ARD leader drew a distinction that has long animated debates among economists. He separated what he termed “good debt,” contracted to finance productive investment whose returns can service the borrowing, from “bad debt,” incurred to cover unproductive expenditure that leaves no durable asset behind. His concern, he made clear, centred on the country’s recourse to international bond issuance, and on the suspicion that too large a share of the proceeds has financed the latter rather than the former. The argument is subtle but consequential, for it shifts the question from the volume of borrowing to its quality, and invites scrutiny of how loans are deployed once raised.
The Passport as Commodity
From macroeconomics Dzon moved to a grievance of a more immediate, almost tactile kind: the issuance of passports. He charged that certain officials had, in his words, “transformed the Congolese passport into an exceedingly rare commodity that they sell at a premium.” The accusation, brief but pointed, touches on a service whose dysfunction is felt acutely by citizens and travellers, and it served to anchor his wider critique in an experience that many in his audience would recognise. By casting a routine administrative document as an object of speculation, he sought to illustrate how governance failures translate into private burdens.
Sovereignty and the 2027 Visa-Free Horizon
The ARD reserved a firm objection for the government’s stated intention to abolish visa requirements for African nationals from 1 January 2027. Where proponents of such measures tend to invoke continental integration and the free movement of people, Dzon framed the policy as a hazard. The decision, he warned, “constitutes a grave infringement of national sovereignty and of public security.” His opposition rests less on hostility to openness than on a conviction that the state’s capacity to monitor entry and protect its citizens must precede any relaxation of controls, and that the proposed timetable presumes institutional readiness the country does not yet possess.
Taken together, the four strands of his address, the social emergency, the contours of the debt, the trade in passports and the visa question, formed a coherent indictment of priorities. Whether the government will engage these claims on their merits or contest the figures behind them remains to be seen; the ARD leader, for his part, appeared intent on ensuring that the debate is conducted in public, and on terms he has helped to set (adiac-congo.com).
