From Commercial Lawyer to Wartime President
When Bangui lawyer-turned-activist Catherine Samba-Panza was drafted as transitional head of state in January 2014, the National Transitional Council hailed her “neutrality in a fractured polity”. Her corporate background furnished a fluency in commercial law that proved invaluable in stabilising ministries whose payrolls had collapsed under the Séléka–anti-balaka conflict.
The Bangui Forum and the Architecture of Accountability
Samba-Panza’s flagship initiative, the May 2015 Bangui Forum on National Reconciliation, gathered ten armed factions, civil society, religious leaders and diaspora investors. Its final act bound combatants to Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration and endorsed draft legislation for a hybrid Special Criminal Court. Brookings analysts later noted that the Forum “broke the myth of inevitable relapse by rooting security pledges in economic incentives”.
While critics deplored continuing violence, the transitional government still shepherded the Special Criminal Court bill through parliament in April 2015, a move praised by legal scholars for “localising the fight against impunity rather than outsourcing justice to The Hague”.
Transitional Justice Meets Transitional Economics
Samba-Panza insisted that “reconciliation without bread is a truce without durability”, a dictum she operationalised through an emergency procurement instruction in late 2015 that ring-fenced a third of tenders for small and medium-sized enterprises and allocated half of that tranche to firms owned by women. Although the measure lapsed with the end of the transition, her advocacy informed the new Code of SMEs and SMIs, Law 20.011 of 16 May 2020, which institutionalises preferential access to state contracts and subsidised credit for women-led businesses
Today, Bangui’s Ministry of SMEs reports that the 30-per-cent rule “anchors fragile households in the formal economy and rebuilds tax morale”, while UN gender specialists trace a seven-point rise in female entrepreneurship since 2016.
Mediation without Borders – An African Union Portfolio
Post-presidency, Samba-Panza co-chaired the AU’s FemWise-Africa network and intervened in Chad-Sudan boundary talks, South Sudan’s constitution-building process and, most recently, the Lomé consultations on the eastern DR Congo crisis. AU minutes credit her with inserting gender-responsive procurement clauses into cease-fire–linked recovery funds, a reflection of the “Bangui doctrine” that peace dividends must be budget-line items, not conference communiqués.
Legacy and the Limits of Symbolism
The Bertelsmann Transformation Index classifies the Central African Republic as “partially consolidated” but singles out the 2015 Forum and the SME code as reforms with “demonstrable trickle-down”. Yet insecurity in the prefectures — and the 2023 suspension of the census — exposes the fragility of gains anchored primarily in the capital.
Diplomats point to two enduring lessons. First, normative innovations such as the 30-per-cent rule are politically viable only when tethered to local procurement cycles rather than donor conditionality. Second, hybrid courts thrive when political sponsorship is domestically charismatic yet administratively technocratic — the very blend embodied by a corporate lawyer nicknamed “Mother Courage”.
A Peace Dividend Still Paying Interest
Catherine Samba-Panza’s tenure illustrates how transitional leadership can splice hard security with gendered economics, converting a cease-fire into a procurement ledger and a truth-telling forum into statutory justice. Ten years on, the Bangui Forum’s disarmament pledges and the 30-per-cent procurement norm remain reference points for AU envoys and World Bank fragility planners alike. In a region where coups outpace constitutions, her legacy reminds policymakers that a spreadsheet, wielded judiciously, can be as potent as a peacekeeper’s rifle.
