Profile of Maurice Nguesso aka “Le Grand frère national” (part 1)

As he likes to say himself, he doesn’t know exactly when he was born. But he quickly adds that: what is certain is that, I am the elder brother to Denis Sassou Nguesso. He goes on: if he is the President of the Republic, I am his elder brother and in our village of Edou and I am the chief, although our local tradition made  him (Denis Sassou Nguesso) the Mwene or head, after he was initiated into our mythical world of the Mbouchis at a very young age. Maurice Nguesso concludes: I also don’t know how old my younger brother was, when he was initiated. The owner of MNCOM and several other companies in Congo is a patriot. He is also creative and imaginative. Maurice Nguesso is the most popular figure the ruling family after late Edith Lucie Bongo Ondimba and he is fondly called “Ya Maumo” or “Le Grand frère national”. But like most northerners of his epoch, he doesn’t know his exact age. He relies like most northerners of his generation on age the Roman Catholic birth certificates established for them by the Roman Catholic missionaries. It is therefore believed that, he was born between 1938 and 1940. Maurice Nguesso, besides calling himself or identifying himself most often as the elder brother to the President of the Republic, likes to categorize himself as a bourgeois.

To support the fact that, he is an elite and thus refined and different from most people of his Mbouchi tribe of Edou village, he has named his large white colored building in Edou as “Villa Bourbon”.  According to the online dictionary Wikipedia, the Bourbon is a European royal house of French origin, a branch of the Capetian dynasty. Bourbon kings first ruled France and Navarre in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma. Spain and Luxembourg currently have Bourbon monarchs. Maurice Nguesso has not only named his villa after the Bourbon, he also loves and admires white people especially those from France. He also says he is not a communist like his younger brother but a capitalist. Before his younger brother came to power in 1979 and also changed in real life not only mythical, the balance of power within the clan and family, his senior daughter, Mrs. Lydie Hortense Kourissa once told me that, her father(Maurice Nguesso) was the first in their family to make money. In other words, Maurice Nguesso did not wait for his younger brother to become president before starting to test the thirst that comes with riches or wealth. This contradicts the claims widely circulated that, he is what he is today because of his younger. While Maurice Nguesso is a self made man who has to a certain degree benefited from his younger brother, it is not the same with other members of the ruling family whose status in the society did change because of President Denis Sassou Nguesso.