Cameroonian billionaire Paul Fokam Kammogne's Congolese bank is $117 million in the red

Afriland First Bank RDC has negative equity of $116.9 million and is approaching insolvency, four years after Congolese regulators moved against the bank and pushed out the Cameroonian group that owned it.

Central Bank of Congo figures for the end of December 2025 show the lender booked a loss of $50.4 million and a negative net banking income of $4.68 million, meaning its core business generated no revenue after costs. The Congolese banking sector as a whole reported aggregate net banking income of $2.24 billion over the same year.

The bank held $48.05 million of equity in June 2021 and ranked seventh among the country's 15 commercial banks, according to the central bank's own report published that August. Seven of those 15 lenders sat below the $30 million minimum capital requirement then in force. Afriland was not among them.

The regulator raised the minimum to $50 million from January 2025.

Afriland First Group, the holding company Paul Fokam Kammogne founded, claimed 95.6 percent of the Congolese bank's capital before the intervention. It now says it was expropriated.

How the bank was taken

The sequence began with a boardroom dispute rather than a solvency problem.

Joseph Toubib, chairman of the board, suspended chief executive Souaibou Abary in July 2021. The Central Bank of Congo installed a close surveillance team the following month.

Governance trouble turned into a capital question within months. The regulator assessed the bank's recapitalisation requirement at $90 million in March 2022. Afriland First Group disputed the figure and made its participation conditional on an independent audit. The disagreement was never resolved.

The central bank placed the lender under provisional administration on June 20, 2022, appointing a seven-person team led by Mudiay Mpinga, a former senior official at the regulator, with a mandate to prepare a recovery plan inside 180 days.

The Democratic Republic of Congo enacted a new law on credit institutions on Dec. 27, 2022. Three weeks later, on Jan. 20, 2023, the same team was reappointed under a resolution regime rather than provisional administration. Resolution is the final stage in bank intervention, and it gave the commissioner authority to replace the company's governing bodies, act on its capital and dispose of assets.

A loan book that stopped working

The numbers at the end of 2025 show a bank whose lending has largely ceased to perform.

Afriland holds $124.9 million in deposits against $175 million in gross loans. Only $37.8 million of that book, 21.6 percent, is classified as healthy. The bank has set aside $131.9 million in provisions against non-performing credits, a figure larger than its entire deposit base.

Commercial losses have compounded the position. The bank lost contracts to pay teachers and school operating costs across five administrative entities during 2025. The transferred business covered 29,513 staff and 2,039 institutions, worth around 12 billion Congolese francs a month.

A bank can absorb a loss when it provisions heavily against bad debt. Afriland's difficulty is that its banking activity no longer produces enough revenue to cover its costs at all.

The arbitration

Fokam Kammogne took the dispute out of Kinshasa and into international arbitration.

Afriland First Group and several other claimants, including Fokam Kammogne personally, filed at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in August 2023, challenging the measures Congolese authorities had taken. The tribunal rejected a jurisdictional objection from the DRC in July 2025, allowing the case to proceed. It remains pending.

The group issued a statement in February saying it had been evicted from the capital of Afriland First Bank RDC by the Congolese state and the central bank. It describes the outcome as expropriation and is seeking compensation.

Whoever recapitalises the bank now faces a hole that has grown from $90 million to more than double that, alongside a loan book requiring extensive clean-up and a legal fight over who owns the institution.

The wider group

The Congolese subsidiary is the exception in a group that has grown steadily elsewhere.

Fokam Kammogne left a branch manager's job at Cameroon Bank in 1979, completed a doctorate at the University of Bordeaux in 1989 on the economics of Cameroon's informal sector, and built Afriland First Bank on the argument that street traders, market women and rural savings cooperatives constituted a financial system French colonial banking had simply refused to serve.

Afriland's total assets crossed 2.032 trillion CFA francs at the end of 2024, about $3.6 billion, passing the 2 trillion mark for the first time and making it the largest African-owned commercial bank in Central Africa. Net income reached $50.75 million. The group operates in nine African countries, serving more than 705,000 customers through 87 branches, 218 automated teller machines and 386 electronic payment terminals, and received clearance from the Central African Banking Commission to open in Congo-Brazzaville, the Central African Republic and Chad. It partnered with the International Finance Corporation in 2025.

Forbes Afrique has estimated Fokam Kammogne's fortune at $690 million, placing him second in Cameroon behind Baba Ahmadou Danpullo. He was born on July 27, 1948 in the village of Mboukué in Baham, in Cameroon's West Region.