Minister Yoka,
I write to you not as a secretariat, but as a colleague — one of fifty-four ministers who signs the same painful cheque every year. Africa buys USD 709 bn of goods annually, and USD 620 bn of it leaves this continent. Some of that money is yours, some of it is mine, and almost none of it needs to go where it goes.
What is fixed — and what is yours to change
Two kinds of statement sit in this document, and they carry different weight. The continental spine is fixed: USD 709 bn of total imports; USD 620 bn sourced off-continent; approximately USD 89 bn traded within Africa; USD 136.75 bn of measured government procurement inside an estimated USD 207 bn that our governments influence. Those figures are measured, reconciled and not on the table. Everything else — the product bundle proposed for Republic of the Congo — is Draft 1: a first pass drawn from your country’s productive-capacity audit, printed precisely so that you can correct it.
Why Republic of the Congo is in this room
The Republic of the Congo's strongest endowment for continental supply is its tropical hardwood: approximately 22.4 million hectares of forest covering some 65 per cent of land area, roughly a quarter of Congo Basin log production, and okoumé and sapelli species commanding premium markets. That endowment is complemented by the deepwater Port of Pointe-Noire — Congo is coastal, a real advantage over many Central African peers — which has handled more than 1 million TEU per year since 2022 and gives direct coastal access that landlocked timber economies lack. Processing already exists rather than being merely planned: ITTO recorded approximately 303,000 cubic metres of sawnwood production and about 222,000 cubic metres of sawnwood exports in 2020, and the log-export ban under Forest Code Law 33-2020, reinforced by the CEMAC decision effective 2023, legally mandates domestic transformation. The honest constraint is equally clear: under 1 per cent of Congolese timber currently goes to other African countries, with exports overwhelmingly directed to China, Asia and the European Union; secondary processing at approximately 29,000 cubic metres of veneer and 8,000 cubic metres of plywood in 2020 is thin and has fallen; and unreliable power, a decrepit railway and poorly connected northern forests stand between the endowment and the port.
The instrument — two layers, both required
Pre-allocation. The African Union pre-allocates 25-year supply rights per product category to designated African producers. That is the fairness layer — the reason every member state, including those still rebuilding, holds a bundle at all.
Match-or-Release. When any of our governments procures, the designated continental supplier is shown the open-market quote and must match it on price, quality, warranty and service in a single window — or release the buyer instantly, no penalty, no delay. I have called it the Cell Phone Test: nobody in this room is asked to buy a worse phone. This is a right to match, never a right to exclude. Your procurement autonomy is untouched, and there is no pooled purchasing, no central buyer, no buyers’ club.
What I ask of you
One hour, and your pen. Mark what is wrong: the lines that do not belong to Republic of the Congo, the capability this draft understates, the buyer it misreads. The response instrument at the end of this document takes a minute to complete, and Draft 2 will show, line by line, which member state asked for each change. Your correction is not an objection to the method — it is the method.