When Prime Minister Anatole Collinet Makosso stepped to the podium of the National Assembly on June 22, 2026, he carried a familiar promise. His government’s action plan, known by its French acronym PAG, was meant to map the road ahead for Congo-Brazzaville.
The blueprint, drawn from President Denis Sassou Nguesso’s re-election platform, covers the 2026-2031 term. It is built around ten priorities, six broad axes and twenty stated missions. The packaging looked new. The substance, critics say, did not.
A Plan Sourced From the Presidential Campaign
For analyst Benjamin Bilombot Bitadys, the document offered little that voters had not heard before. He frames the PAG as a direct extension of the program on which Sassou Nguesso secured another mandate, rather than a fresh diagnosis of the country’s troubles.
The slogans, he notes, have rotated through the years with reassuring ease. “New hope,” “path to the future,” “the march toward development.” Each phrase has lit up banners and broadcasts. Each, in his reading, has carried more rhythm than result.
That continuity matters because it sets expectations. A program rooted in a campaign tends to defend a record rather than question it. For an electorate weary of repetition, the wording itself becomes a signal of what to expect next.
The Missing Scorecard
Bitadys reserves his sharpest point for what the plan leaves out. The previous five-year cycle, he recalls, was sold to the public as “twelve battles.” So a simple question follows the new launch: how many of those twelve battles were actually won?
The PAG, in his account, sidesteps that reckoning. There is no public accounting, no ledger of victories and defeats laid before the citizens who were promised them. The new “twenty missions,” he suggests, function as a layer of paint over an unanswered audit.
People do not need a commissioned report to draw up the other list, he argues. The shortfalls are lived daily. Water and electricity remain unreliable. Schools, roads and jobs fall short of the pledges that once filled official speeches across the departments.
The grievances run further still. Scholarships and pensions, recurring fuel shortages, hospitals under strain, and inflation that thins household budgets all feature in his indictment. To this he adds financial mismanagement, and the persistent grip of clan loyalty over public life.
Clientelism, nepotism and corruption complete the picture he paints. None of these, in his view, is addressed by simply renaming the agenda. A list of missions, however long, does not substitute for an honest assessment of the battles already fought.
Old Tools, New Term
Beneath the policy critique sits a question of method. Bitadys contends that the development challenge facing Congo-Brazzaville cannot be met “with the tools of the past.” The framing is deliberate, and it points less at documents than at people.
He names the configuration directly: a Sassou-Makosso-Yoka triptych, surrounded by the same governmental figures who steered the prior term. The continuity of personnel, in his telling, undercuts the promise of renewal that any new plan implies.
The image he chooses is blunt. The same actors, he writes, return “with big clogs,” a phrase that in French signals an approach so obvious it fools no one. For him, the staging of novelty cannot disguise the familiarity of the cast.
Why the Framing Resonates
The strength of the critique lies in its structure rather than in any single charge. By setting “twenty missions” against “twelve battles,” Bitadys turns the government’s own vocabulary into a measuring stick. The numbers invite comparison the plan would rather avoid.
That rhetorical move keeps the burden of proof on the authorities. A program presented without a balance sheet asks for trust at the very moment trust is contested. Naming the gap, the analyst implies, is the first step toward demanding it be closed.
It is worth noting the limits of the exercise. The piece is an opinion from a single commentator, not an official audit, and the government has its own reading of its record. Readers weighing the claims should treat them as argument, not verdict.
Still, the column captures a sentiment that extends beyond one writer. After years of ambitious labels, parts of the public measure plans by outcomes rather than wording. The PAG now enters that climate of patience worn thin.
What Comes Next
The real test of the 2026-2031 program will not be its launch but its delivery. Twenty missions can become twenty achievements or twenty more slogans. Which path prevails will shape how the next term is judged.
For now, the debate opened by Bitadys frames the stakes plainly. A new term has begun with familiar language and familiar faces. Whether it ends with a scorecard worth showing remains, for the moment, an open question. (Congopage)