Congo-Brazzaville: Too corrupt for debt relief or too indebted to fight corruption?

March 28, 2006

After a bitter fight between the World Bank’s board of directors and Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, Congo-Brazzaville was allowed to reach decision point in the HIPC program on March 9. The deal was almost held up after reports that Congo’s President Denis Sassou-Ngueso spent $300k at a New York hotel, but this scandal wasn’t enough to convince debt relief diehards that Congo wasn’t perhaps the most worthy recipient. But the IMF still seems to be of two minds. Its press release opens by declaring that Congo: “Must address serious concerns about governance and financial transparency.”
This reflects the extra demands from the Bank that Congo’s oil accounts be properly audited and other anti-corruption safeguards be put in place if the country is ever to reach HIPC completion point (when the debt relief becomes irrevocable). But two paragraphs later the Fund, which has just indicated that the government is still deeply corrupt, inexplicably justifies letting Congo through because: “Interim debt relief will increase resources available to the government to….fight corruption.”
So, which is it? Is the government so corrupt that it needs unprecedented international oversight? Or does Sassou really deep-down want to fight corruption but (despite over $1 billion in annual oil revenues), he just needs a bit more money from HIPC to finally tackle corruption within?

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1. Lawrence MacDonald Says:
   March 28th, 2006 at 5:57 pm

   Debt relief for Congo-Brazzaville continues to raise eyebrows — and hackles. U.S. Senator Dick Lugar raised the issue more than once at today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the multilateral development banks. Lugar, who is the chairman of the committee, said: “Recently, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund agreed to grant debt relief to the Republic of Congo — a country that has flouted past anti-corruption conditions.” He cited Global Witness, an NGO, saying that there is evidence that hundreds of millions of dollars are missing from Congo’s budget.

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