October’s BCC price tables show hospitality recovering in the capital and still waiting in the copper belt.

By Kanisa Magazine · October 2021

Congo’s hospitality trade is coming back unevenly, and the BCC’s price tables show where. In its digest of 27 October 2021, the Kinshasa index for restaurants and hotels reads 141.17 in the week to 24 October, up 1.1 per cent from 139.63 six weeks earlier. In Lubumbashi, the commercial centre of the copper belt, the same index moved from 117.89 to 117.98, a rise of 0.07 per cent.

The gap has a legal explanation. On 14 August the government announced that bars, terraces and night clubs could reopen and party halls could fill to half their capacity, while four provinces, Haut-Katanga, Lualaba, North Kivu and South Kivu, kept the stricter rules. The two copper provinces are on that list.

The reopening and the repricing

Restaurants and drink stalls in Kinshasa rose 1.25 per cent in six weeks, a pace that suggests owners regained pricing power.

The communication minister, Patrick Muyaya, announced the changes on 14 August on state television, with the curfew moved to run from 23:00 to 04:00 and new infections falling. Zoom Eco reported 129 new cases nationally on 13 August, of which 71 in Kinshasa, after the third wave. Kinshasa’s restaurants and drink stalls index moved from 141.38 in the week of 6 to 12 September to 143.15 in the week to 24 October. The movement came in steady weekly steps of 0.2 to 0.3 per cent, not a single jump, which is how a trade raises prices when customers return but capacity is still limited by half-full halls and a late-night curfew.

Hotels did not follow. The BCC’s accommodation line sat at 128.25 in September and 128.31 in October, while recreational and cultural services stayed at exactly 149.46 across the whole period. Rooms and cultural venues are repriced rarely and, in all probability, in dollars, so a flat index there describes how often prices are revised more than how busy the rooms are.

Why the copper belt lags

Lubumbashi’s accommodation and recreation lines did not move at all, matching the tighter rules still in force.

In Lubumbashi the accommodation index is 117.77 across the entire period, the recreation and culture services index 117.48, and restaurants only 0.03 per cent higher in the last week. That is the picture of a city whose economy is paid in copper dollars but whose leisure trade was still held back. Haut-Katanga’s rules, and Lualaba’s, applied just as the London copper price crossed US$10,000, leaving the region with money to spend and fewer places permitted to take it.

The purchasing power behind the table

Taxes, customs and beer volumes in the same digest suggest that the money is there.

The Treasury’s cumulative revenue had reached CDF 10.68 trillion by 22 October, against CDF 8.34 trillion for all of 2020, and the franc had moved about one per cent in the year. A leisure trade needs three things the digest can verify only in part: purchasing power, which is rising; security and public-health permission, which the August decision improved but unevenly; and air access, for which the BCC publishes nothing. Without a measure of flights and visitors, the evidence points at domestic consumers and business travellers, not tourists.

What an operator should do

Back the reopened capital for volume, and treat the copper belt as a deferred opportunity with its own regulatory clock.

For an operator, the table suggests different plays in different cities. In Kinshasa, restaurants and bars can test price rises of one to two per cent a quarter, tracking the index, while watching the curfew rules, which the August announcement set at 23:00 to 04:00. In Lubumbashi and Kolwezi, the opportunity is to prepare capacity, such as staffed kitchens, refurbished rooms and event space, so that the next easing of rules finds supply ready. The supplier angle follows: brewers, caterers and food distributors serving Kinshasa’s reopened venues have a measurable increase to plan on, and those serving Haut-Katanga should price in a delay rather than a loss.