Financing is in the budget and copper is above the floor; January’s question is what gets built.

By Kanisa Magazine · January 2025

Congo has money pledged for infrastructure on a scale it has not had before, and January 2025 is when the argument shifted from financing to delivery. The amended Sicomines contract commits a Chinese consortium to build US$324 million of infrastructure a year from 2024 to 2040, and the IMF’s January country report says the authorities have already written those flows into their 2024 and 2025 budgets.

The same report is blunt about the record behind the pledge. A 2023 audit by the Inspection Générale des Finances found that only a very limited part of the projects under the 2008 mining-for-infrastructure deal were actually completed.

A pledge tied to the copper price

The money is only owed while copper stays above a floor, and in January it did.

Under the 2024 amendment, according to Mining.com’s account, the US$324 million a year is conditional on copper holding above US$8,000 a tonne, and Sicomines stops financing infrastructure if the price falls to US$5,200 or lower. The Banque Centrale du Congo’s 29 January digest puts London copper at US$9,167 on 24 January, comfortably above the floor. The financing condition is therefore met; the open question is what gets built.

How the money is meant to travel

A special Treasury account at the BCC, held at the Bank for International Settlements, is the control point.

The IMF describes a financial mechanism in which the Sicomines resources pass through a special Treasury account held by the BCC at the Bank for International Settlements, so that the flow to each project can be traced. The authorities are also developing a framework to oversee the full life of each project, from appraisal and selection to monitoring, evaluation and audit. The Fund notes one gap: there is no clear enforcement mechanism if actual investment falls below plan. That is the point at which an approved sum stops being a road.

Where execution slows

Budget lines, emergency procedures and slow procurement are the usual brakes, not a lack of money.

The IMF’s list of obstacles is specific. The expenditure chain is weakened by spending through emergency procedures, procurement, commitment and cash plans are poorly formatted and too infrequent, and domestically financed capital spending stays near 1.8 per cent of GDP. The digest shows the same pattern in miniature: capital expenditure in the Treasury table stood at CDF 259 billion in the latest column, against CDF 3,538 billion for the whole of 2024, with some earlier columns carried forward because data were not available. Security spending, projected by the IMF at 2 per cent of GDP in 2024, competes for the same cash. The Fund forecasts it will ease to 1.5 per cent of GDP in 2025, which it says creates room for more domestically financed investment, but that forecast was made before the fighting around Goma reached the city.

The rural roads test

The 38,000-kilometre road pledge is the first physical measure of whether money turns into assets.

At his December state-of-the-nation address, President Tshisekedi pledged to rehabilitate 38,000 kilometres of agricultural roads in 2025 under the local development programme for 145 territories, Actualite.cd reported. The IMF puts that programme’s cost at US$1.7 billion, or 2.7 per cent of GDP, partly funded by the 2021 SDR allocation. It is a financed programme with a measurable output, and kilometres rehabilitated per quarter are easy to count. Delivery will depend on contractors reaching territories where the roads are worst, which are often the places with the thinnest procurement capacity, so the number of road brigades actually deployed matters as much as the kilometre target.

What an investor or contractor should track

Ask for the tender, not the pledge.

For contractors and equipment suppliers, the useful milestones are not announcements but procurement notices, signed contracts and mobilisation of crews. For investors in logistics, warehousing and construction materials, the question is whether Sicomines projects move from the special account to awarded tenders in the first half of 2025. Track four things: the copper price against the US$8,000 floor, published project lists, tender awards and the BCC’s monthly capital-spending line. A pledge that clears all four is an asset in the making; one that stalls at the first is still a budget line.