A former IMF mission chief ran one fixed rate through war and inflation, and May 2025 tested it.

By Kanisa Magazine · May 2025

When the Banque Centrale du Congo closed the books on the week to 24 May 2024, it was defending a policy rate of 25 per cent, reserves of US$5.8 billion and annual inflation above 21 per cent. Twelve months later the rate had not moved, yet the IMF was telling Kinshasa that year-on-year inflation had fallen into single digits for the first time since July 2022. The person who owns that arc is the central bank’s governor, Malangu Kabedi Mbuyi, and May 2025 was the month her record met its hardest test.

The test came from the east. M23 fighters had taken Goma in January and Bukavu in February, banks in the Kivus had shut their doors, and the World Food Programme reported in March that a sharp fall in the franc and a closed banking system were feeding hunger there. A governor can print francs but cannot print confidence, and confidence is the one input a dollarised economy withdraws first.

Her answer was a fixed price and a long memory. This profile reads that answer through the BCC’s own numbers and what the IMF, the finance ministry and the governor herself said in May.

The Fund economist who runs the franc

Three decades at the IMF shaped a governor who treats credibility as the central bank’s main asset.

Malangu Kabedi Mbuyi holds a degree in economics and a master’s in econometrics, and by the BCC’s own biography spent more than 30 years at the International Monetary Fund. Her last post there was mission chief and director of the regional technical assistance centre for West Africa, a five-country brief that taught her how small, dollar-exposed central banks lose and regain trust. She was named governor by presidential ordinance dated 30 June 2021, which made her the bank’s first female head.

The bank lists her priorities in plain order: institutional governance, control of inflation and the exchange rate, a larger stock of foreign-exchange reserves, and closer financial integration through SADC and the West African monetary union. That order matters. Reserves come third, but they are the means by which the first two are paid for.

What a year at 25 per cent bought

The rate stayed fixed while inflation more than halved, which quietly turned a nominal rate into a very high real one.

The 2024 digest records the starting point precisely. On 24 May 2024 the BCC’s weekly statistical digest showed an indicative rate near CDF 2,795 to the dollar, gross international reserves of US$5,818 million, equal to 3.1 months of imports, a 25 per cent policy rate and year-on-year inflation of 21.38 per cent. The real policy rate was therefore about 3.6 points. By the IMF’s account in mid-May 2025, inflation had dropped below 10 per cent in April, which on an unchanged 25 per cent rate lifts the real rate above 15 points.

Nothing about that required a new instrument. The governor held a rate and let time do the work. Seven-day and 28-day bills drained surplus franc balances from the banks every week, and each week that the franc held, the case for holding dollars instead weakened a little.

Pressure in May 2025

Conflict tested the fixed rate, and the official line was that the franc barely moved.

According to Congo Quotidien’s report of the 44th meeting of the council of ministers, on 25 May, the governor told ministers that depreciation had been held to 0.1 per cent on both official and parallel markets, with the interbank rate steady around CDF 2,850. She credited coordination between budget and monetary instruments, together with strict regulation of bank liquidity. Those are the government’s figures, relayed in the press, and the finance ministry has every incentive to present them favourably.

The external anchor was visible in a second place. On 13 May an IMF team led by Calixte Ahokpossi, after a mission from 30 April, reached staff-level agreement on the first review of the Extended Credit Facility, with Board consideration expected at the end of June. The Fund put growth at 6.5 per cent in 2024 and above 5 per cent for 2025, recorded reserve accumulation from US$1.7 billion in 2021 to US$6 billion in 2024, and said the exchange rate had been stable since mid-2024. It also said the escalation in the Kivus had cost thousands of lives and had weighed on the budget.

Finance Minister Doudou Fwamba, speaking at the Spring Meetings in Washington on 24 April, said he remained optimistic that the country was moving in the right direction despite a difficult context. The pairing is the point. A governor who restrains money and a minister who restrains spending are one policy seen from two desks.

How a governor makes a franc worth holding

Bills, reserves and fiscal discipline form one system, and a leak in any of them shows up in the exchange rate.

The mechanism has three moving parts. First, the weekly auction of BCC bills sets a floor under franc interest rates: a bank that can earn 25 per cent for a week at the central bank has little reason to lend francs for less or to swap them into dollars. Second, reserves give the franc credibility at the counter: when importers and money-changers see the BCC able to sell dollars, they stop pricing in a slide. Third, the Treasury must refrain from drawing on the central bank, because a deficit financed by new francs undoes the first two.

The weakness is concentration. Reserves of about three months of imports are adequate, not generous, and they depend on copper and cobalt prices that the DRC does not set. That is why the IMF still described reserves as below adequate levels.

Consequence and decision

The franc’s calm is a policy outcome with an expiry date that treasurers can read in the weekly digest.

For businesses, the consequence is a window rather than a guarantee. A year of stability has let importers in Kinshasa, retailers in Lubumbashi and lenders in Matadi plan franc costs with less padding, and it has pushed inflation into a range where franc wages hold their value for longer. The window closes if reserves fall, if the Treasury leans on the central bank, or if conflict spreads to the mining belt.

The practical reading is a short list. Watch the gap between the indicative and parallel rates in each weekly BCC digest, which should stay within a fraction of a per cent. Watch gross reserves against the three-month mark. Watch the policy rate, which can only be cut safely while inflation stays low. Treasurers should price franc contracts for the next two quarters on the assumption that Malangu Kabedi Mbuyi’s plateau holds, while keeping dollar liquidity for the day it does not.