Public Procurement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — Volume I: The Framework, the Actors, the Procedures and the Documents.

Roughly sixty-three per cent of Congolese State expenditure flows through public procurement. It is the mandatory point of passage between a budgetary decision and physical reality: an approved budget does not build a school; a contract does.

This book begins from a finding established by the international assessment of the Congolese system under the MAPS methodology — a finding that runs against received opinion: the Congolese legal framework is not the system's primary weakness. It is assessed as broadly consistent with international good practice. The weakness lies in implementation — the capacity of procurement units, the disconnect between the procurement chain and the budget chain, and the traceability of administrative acts. In a sample of one hundred and fifty-two contracts, only forty-eight per cent of procedures were found fully compliant, and close to one in five duly awarded contracts was never performed because the funds committed at launch had been reallocated before execution.

That diagnosis dictates the method. Rather than commenting on the statute article by article, the book follows the actual life of a contract — need, legal characterisation, cost estimate, planning, choice of procedure, bidding documents, advertising, evaluation, award, approval, contract, performance, payment, control, disputes, record-keeping — and identifies at each step the error that voids the procedure, the irregularity that carries criminal exposure, and the document that protects the officer.

The text states the law as at 27 August 2026 and incorporates Ministerial Order No. 006/CAB/ME/MIN.BUDGET/2025 of 9 June 2025, which doubled all thresholds for tendering, prior review and approval, together with the most recent case law of the Court of Cassation. It closes with seven levers for action — five of which require no new legislation — each accompanied by its implementation cost and its one-year performance indicator.

With thirty-four chapters, sixty practitioner questions, a workbook with model answers, and seven annexes comprising reference tables, a glossary, templates, checklists and a concordance grid, it is designed as a working instrument as much as a scholarly treatise.