Congolese billionaire Paul Obambi wants a century-old price tool back to fix Brazzaville's market chaos

Paul Obambi has seen enough. The president of the Brazzaville Chamber of Commerce sat across from Congo's commerce minister on June 2 and told her, plainly, that the country's market cannot function properly without a standardised price reference tool that the government abandoned decades ago and has never replaced.

"We want the mercuriale back. Prices should be displayed for fair trade. When the mercuriale disappears, the problems begin," Obambi said at a public-private dialogue session convened by Commerce Minister Jacqueline Lydia Mikolo in Brazzaville. The meeting brought together economic operators, employers' unions and chamber representatives from Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, Dolisie and Ouesso. Obambi was the most direct voice in the room.

He has earned the right to be direct. Born on December 13, 1954, in Brazzaville, Obambi is the founder and chief executive of Sapro Group, a Congolese conglomerate with operations spanning agro-industry, energy, construction and infrastructure development. He has previously led or acquired companies including Translo and Congo Oil, building one of the more diversified private sector portfolios in the Republic of Congo. He has held the presidency of the Brazzaville Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Agriculture and Trades since 1998, making him one of the longest-serving and most institutionally embedded private sector voices in the country. He has spoken at the Forbes Africa Summit and is widely regarded in business circles as one of the most analytically rigorous economic minds in Central Africa.

The instrument at the centre of his push is not widely known outside Francophone Africa but was once a cornerstone of Congo's commercial regulation. The mercuriale is an official government price reference list, a published schedule of benchmark prices for a defined basket of goods including imported consumer products, foodstuffs, construction materials and key commodities. First established in Congo in 1924 during the colonial period, it functioned as a publicly available document that any trader, consumer or government inspector could consult to know what a fair or official price for a given product should be at any given time.

In practice it served several functions simultaneously. It gave consumers a tool to assess whether they were being overcharged and gave traders a defensible basis for the prices they quoted. It served as an anti-speculation instrument by closing the information gap that sellers in import-dependent markets typically exploit. Government inspectors could use it to identify and sanction traders operating significantly outside published benchmarks. And it functioned as an economic barometer, updated periodically to reflect actual market conditions, giving both businesses and policymakers a clearer picture of inflationary pressures and supply disruptions. Think of it as something between a government price gazette and a consumer price index, except it was designed to be actionable on the ground rather than merely statistical.

Its gradual abandonment removed all of those functions simultaneously. In a market where most goods are imported, priced in CFA francs pegged to fluctuating import costs and sold through chains with limited transparency, the absence of any official pricing benchmark creates conditions where the most powerful player in any transaction sets the terms. That is almost never the consumer and, in many cases, not the small trader either.

Obambi's push for the mercuriale sits within a wider reform agenda he laid out at the June 2 meeting. He called for a single payment window to consolidate the multiple tax and fee obligations currently scattered across different administrative bodies, a reform businesses across Congo say would eliminate significant operational friction and reduce the informal costs that accumulate when traders navigate overlapping bureaucratic requirements. He also called for the digitalisation of administrative procedures, improved product traceability and a stronger role for the Chamber of Commerce's mediation and arbitration centre as a mechanism to settle commercial disputes outside the court system.

The mediation point matters. Congo's formal court system is slow, expensive and unevenly accessible to smaller businesses. An effective commercial arbitration centre embedded within the Chamber of Commerce would give traders a faster and cheaper route to resolve contract disputes, a prerequisite for the kind of commercial confidence that functional markets require.

Minister Mikolo received the proposals without resistance. She announced plans to establish a permanent formal consultation structure giving private sector operators a structured voice in government reform processes. "Everything we do, we will do together," she said. She identified digitalisation as the primary axis of her ministry's reform programme and cited a system already underway for publicly notifying consumers about substandard imported products, with future alerts naming both the goods and the importers responsible, as a tool to protect consumers and level the competitive playing field.

Obambi's broader concern, though he framed it diplomatically, is that Congo's business environment remains structurally ill-equipped to compete under the African Continental Free Trade Area, the sweeping continental agreement that is gradually dismantling tariff barriers between Africa's 54 countries and creating the world's largest free trade zone by number of member states. Mikolo holds specific ministerial responsibility for Zlécaf, the French acronym for AfCFTA, and the June 2 meeting reflected a shared recognition that Congo's commercial infrastructure needs significant upgrading before the opportunities of continental free trade become accessible rather than threatening to local businesses.

Obambi has been making versions of this argument since the late 1990s. What has changed is the urgency. Congo's consumer markets have faced sustained pricing pressure from currency movements, import cost volatility and post-pandemic supply chain disruptions. The mercuriale, whatever its limitations as a century-old instrument, at least forced prices into the open. Whether the government moves quickly to reinstate it, with the enforcement capacity needed to make it meaningful rather than decorative, will determine whether this push produces real change or simply another well-attended meeting in Brazzaville.