The BCC governor has held the franc steady, and February put the hardest decision of her tenure on her desk.

By Kanisa Magazine · February 2025

By 21 February 2025 the dollar stood at CDF 2,855.70 on the central bank’s indicative rate, only 0.3 per cent above its level three weeks earlier. Congo’s central bank had held its policy rate at 25 per cent throughout, and its stock of bills had grown by well over CDF 500 billion since the turn of the year. The person who signs those decisions is Governor Malangu Kabedi Mbuyi, a former International Monetary Fund official who has run the Banque Centrale du Congo since June 2021.

She is the most consequential public official in Congolese monetary policy and, in February, the one with the hardest decision on her desk: whether the banks of Goma may reopen in a city held by rebels. This profile looks at how she runs the machine, what the numbers say about her record, and the people she must work with.

An IMF career in a Congolese job

Three decades at the Fund make her the interlocutor Kinshasa’s lenders trust most.

According to the BCC’s own biography, Malangu was appointed by presidential ordinance on 30 June 2021, the first woman to lead the institution. She held a senior post at the central bank earlier in her career, then spent more than thirty years at the IMF, finishing as head of mission and director of the Fund’s regional technical assistance centre for West Africa, AFRITAC West, which covers five countries. Her degrees are in economics and econometrics. The BCC lists her objectives as better institutional management, control of inflation and the exchange rate, higher foreign reserves and macroeconomic stability. Two vice-governors have worked beside her since 31 December 2021, among them Fafikiri Alimasi wa Asani.

That background matters in practice. Congo’s programme with the IMF and its donor relationships depend on a central bank that can show targets are met and data are published, and the weekly statistical digest the BCC issues is part of that discipline.

What the record shows

Inflation roughly halved and the franc’s decline slowed from 22.4 per cent to 6.2 per cent.

The BCC’s weekly digest records the policy rate at 8.25 per cent on 28 December 2022 and 25 per cent a year later, where it has remained. Over the same period the annual rate of consumer-price inflation fell from 23.8 per cent at the end of 2023 to 11.7 per cent at the end of 2024, and stood at 11.3 per cent in Kinshasa and 10.7 per cent nationally in the third week of February 2025. On 19 February the BCC’s own measure of the real policy rate, the nominal rate less annual inflation, was 14.3 per cent.

The currency tells the same story. At its meeting of 30 January, the monetary policy committee, chaired by the governor, recalled that the franc lost 22.4 per cent in 2023 and 6.2 per cent in 2024, according to the Agence Congolaise de Presse. It kept the rate at 25 per cent, citing a cyclical rise in first-quarter liquidity, and left reserve requirements unchanged at 12 per cent on franc sight deposits and at 13 and 12 per cent on dollar sight and term deposits. The committee also called for continuing coordination of monetary and budget policy within the IMF programme.

The instruments in motion

Bills outstanding rose from CDF 302 billion to CDF 864 billion in seven weeks.

Holding a rate is not passive. On 19 February the BCC had CDF 864.35 billion of its own bills outstanding, against CDF 301.7 billion on 31 December, at weighted rates of 24.5 per cent for both seven-day and 28-day paper. The cumulative interest cost for the year stood at CDF 24.1 billion. Each auction takes francs out of the banking system so that they do not chase dollars.

Reserves are the other lever. They were US$5,131 million at the end of 2023, US$6,132 million at the end of 2024 and US$6,337 million at the end of January. They touched US$6,382 million on 20 February and were US$5,987 million the following day, a fall the digest does not explain. A central bank that reports reserves daily has chosen a transparency that makes such moves visible, and therefore open to question.

The Treasury partner and the test in the east

Finance Minister Doudou Fwamba Likunde holds the other half of the balance, and Goma holds the hardest decision.

Policy works only if the Treasury cooperates. Doudou Fwamba Likunde joined the Suminwa government as finance minister in May 2024. Radio Okapi’s profile of 29 May 2024 records that he had been deputy director general for technical affairs at DGRAD, the administrative revenue body, since 2021, after starting in the spending chain of the Finance Ministry in 2010. A revenue administrator is a natural partner for a central bank that does not want to finance the state: the BCC digest shows a cash deficit of CDF 387 billion to the end of January, and every franc not raised in tax must be borrowed or cut.

On 12 February, Radio Okapi reported, bank and microfinance leaders in Goma told M23 representatives that reopening was a matter for the monetary authorities in Kinshasa, in particular the BCC. Banks had been closed since the city fell on 27 January. Any decision therefore turns on a governor who must weigh the legal and reputational risk of licensed banks operating under rebel control against the harm to residents who cannot reach their money, and who are meanwhile paying mobile-money fees several times higher than normal.

What to watch

Treat the governor’s three numbers as the barometer: the rate, the bill stock and reserves.

For a business with Congolese exposure, the profile points to a short list. The policy rate and the weekly bill stock show whether francs are being tightened or released. The reserve line shows whether the franc’s stability is being paid for. And the decision on Goma will show how the central bank behaves when its rules meet a crisis. A treasurer should not expect rate cuts while real rates sit above 14 per cent and the Treasury runs a deficit, and should plan franc costs on that basis until the weekly numbers say otherwise.