- Despite the anointing that the international community continues to give to the last dictatorship of West Africa, the Togolese volcano is reeling again, threatening to erupt.
Written By Thomas Dietrich - In appearance, in Lomé, everything is calm. On the beach, sand-spotted teenagers pull up fishing nets, heavy as mountains. Taxis-motorcycles, zemidjan, "z" as they are called here, farting and spinning, a customer on the rail, sometimes a chicken, often both at once. Advertising billboards are everywhere. Here an advertisement for a private university that promises tuition fees "from 0 CFA franc", there another one of a self proclaimed prophet, signet ring and gold curb, who announces that "the fire will soon come down on the ground", here again the poster of a Chinese restaurant, with its "soushis" looking like stale cakes.
On Togolese TV, everything is going very well (Madame la Marquise). In general, on the public televisions of African dictatorships, one must be concerned only when the programs are interrupted and where Soviet music is broadcast in a loop. But in Lomé, no storm warning for the moment. In the newspaper of 20 hours, the president Faure Gnassingbé does not derogate to his quarter of hour of daily celebrity. He treats the subjects one after the other, with his ideal-looking son-in-law, his impeccable costumes, his round face, his affable air, his falsely idiotic smile. A few days ago, he received IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, who declared herself "delighted" by her visit to the one whose family has held power for half a century.
What a contrast with the Togo of yesteryear! In 1960, independence saw the accession to power of one of the brightest minds that Africa has counted, Sylvanus Olympio. This polyglot graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE), aimed to make Togo, a strip of land of just 56,000 square kilometers, "the Switzerland of Africa"; and who said Switzerland meant monetary independence, which did not please the former French colonizer, who intended to keep Togo under the tutelage of the CFA franc; and who said Switzerland supposed the absence of a professional army, which angered the kabiyé combatants of the north, freshly demobilized from the Colonial and impatient to resume service.
National helmsman.Among them was Gnassinbgé Eyadéma, the father of the current president, a former sergeant-chef who had distinguished himself in Algeria by his propensity to torture the fellaghas. So when Sylvanus Olympio committed the sacrilege of printing his own currency, the Togolese franc which he intended to attach to the Deutschmark, the nascent Françafrique would soon have his head. On January 13, 1963, with the blessing of Jacques Foccart, De Gaulle's "Africa", a commando shot down Olympio in the trunk of the United States ambassador's car, where he had taken refuge. While he was still dying, Staff Sergeant Eyadema cut his tendons and put them in his mouth. Thus had just begun the reign of the "national helmsman", the "baobab of Pya" (as the press was to call later, in reference to his native village.
It was a long litany of repressions on the background of khaki uniforms, traditional struggles and fetishes, the Holy Trinity of Kabiyé power. After the speech of La Baule de Mitterrand, the autocrats of the continent had to try democracy. Dangerous exercise for Eyadema, who very quickly, faced a challenge threatening to overthrow her. In 1993, the "Old Man" crushed the demonstrations of the opposition and purged the army of all its mutineers.
The Elysee closed his eyes. And my father, who had the crazy idea to stay in Togo during these troubled years, told me about the houses that were being blown up with grenades, the bodies of the opponents that were thrown overnight into the lagoon of Lomé. who, at the first light of dawn, came to shore up the shore like so many extinct stars.
In 2005, Eyadéma gave up on a plane for Tel Aviv and Jacques Chirac said he lost a "personal friend". A constitutional manipulation was orchestrated under the baton of Charles Debbasch, a professor of law at the University of Aix-Marseille accustomed to African presidential palaces as well as courthouses. It allowed the most policed of fifty of the legitimate sons of Eyadema, Faure, to reach the supreme magistracy.
But the Togolese people did not allow themselves to be counted. Mainly in the south of the country, a volcano of anger and frustration too long killed erupted, and the district of Bé in Lomé barricada, becoming high-rise of the resistance to Eyadema. The death of the "Old Man" had not meant the surrender of the Areopagus of soldiers around him. The repression was merciless and 800 dead were raised, victims of the barbarity without name of the police. And Faure, the "ideal son-in-law" was sworn in after a sham presidential election, beginning his reign in the blood. Like his father.
Mirror with larks. And like his father, his first work was not to give the Togolese the means to live decently, but to build a personal power. He first dismissed the members of the clan who were shady, first of which his half-brother Kpatcha, a sumo wrestler and a physique of Gargantua, both for food and power. While the latter fomented a coup, Faure the slack, Faure undecided, Faure "the ideal son-in-law," revealed to the world his face of Janus by having Kpatcha thrown into a jail, where he has remained for nearly ten years years.
But unlike the Old Man, who ruled like a village leader in the northern mountains, having his opponents thrown to the lions of his personal zoo in Pya, descending into the arena to fight in traditional fights, setting appointments at Diplomatic Corps in a military camp at 4:12 am, the "Young" strives to show the world a more Westernized image, more acceptable to the international community and world opinion. This is only a mirror larks.
Democracy in Togo is only facade. Faure has the fine game of highlighting his southern ancestries (on the side of his mother) as a pledge of reconciliation with the whole of society, the power remains largely concentrated in the hands of the old Kabiyé generals. He hastily flaunted his diplomas at the Paris-Dauphine and George Washington Universities, but that did not prevent civil society members from languishing in prison - at present four are still detained in Lomé. Folly Satchivi, the leader of "Under no circumstances", Messenth Kokodoko and Joseph Eza of the Nubueke Movement as well as Assiba Johnson.
Finally, Faure can always be proud of having recruited in his government young Togolese over-graduated as the Minister of Posts and Digital Economy Cina Lawson, the slingshot never ceased to hatch during his thirteen years of magisterium. And it broke out last year, threatening to put him down from his throne.
The scenario begins in a classic, almost banal way. Like many of his colleagues in French-speaking Africa, Faure Gnassingbé intends to drag himself to power. Problem, the Constitution of Togo in 1992 does not allow him, in theory, to run in the presidential election of 2020. Never mind, Faure calls on the indefensible Charles Debbasch to carve a tailor-made constitutional amendment which would allow him to renew until 2,030. Emmanuel Macron's France did not protest; who is silent consents. But faithful to its long militant and protesting tradition, the Togolese did not pray to go out on the street and oppose this institutional putsch.
One could have expected the mobilization to be the strongest in the south of the country, where the Ewe majority has always opposed the Eyadema dynasty, forcing the latter to use a thousand ruses of Ulysses. so as not to be overwhelmed. The mobilization was certainly, especially under the impulse of the historical opposition and its leader, Jean-Pierre Fabre, but what marked a turning point in the young History of Togo, is the rooting of the revolt north.
Sokodé, the third largest city in Togo with the majority of the country's 20% Muslims, is now living in terror. When the traveler crosses it, he can only be surprised at the strong military presence in this medium-sized town, with just over 100,000 inhabitants. The red berets, the paras-commandos, feared and hated by the population, control the entry points of Sokode, searching most vehicles. On the night of October 28 to 29, they engaged in a real pogrom, shooting in the air until the dawn, stripping shops, beating random quidams, as if a whole city was responsible for the crime of lèse -Majest to "an ideal son-in-law," whose hands are more and more red with hemoglobin, the blood of his own people.
Eye of Sauron. It must be said that Faure is a thousand times right to be wary of Sokodé, become Sokodé the rebel, Sokodé the revolutionary. In August 2017, it was here that the insurgency against his constitutional revision project rocketed his first barrel of powder. The surprise was total. The government kept its eye of Sauron turned towards Lomé, leaving the rest of the country, mistakenly believing that the ethnic Kotokoli, losso or kabiyé of the center and the north would have always acquired the power in place.
This was to ignore two essential parameters: the first is that the north-south divide in Togo is a myth and that the 8 million Togolese have always lived in good harmony (community or denominational), do not displease some Cassandras Quai Orsay. The second is that the level of fed-up has reached such peaks that even in the most favorable regions of the regime, protests of magnitude have erupted.
The power, which had long agitated the specter of a witch hunt in the north in case of seizure of power of the opposition (mistakenly assimilated to the south), was left clueless. And the combination of the revolt of Sokodé led by Tipki Atchadam with the old opposition of Lomé directed by Jean-Pierre Fabre made Faure tremble on its bases, bringing more than 500 000 people to parade in the streets of all the country. It was only at the cost of yet another ruthless repression that the Eyadema dynasty was able to maintain its leadership in Togo, helped perhaps by the unpreparedness of a section of the opposition, overwhelmed by his success, including Tipki Atchadam, who quickly, too quickly, fled to Ghana.
He has been living there for a year now, hiding from the henchmen of power, refusing any interview, cultivating the mystery so characteristic of a north that has not yet shelved all its fetishes, communicating with its supporters only with the help of WhatsApp audios. His return to his homeland is the subject of many speculations and will be one of the stakes of the coming confrontation, between an increasingly lonely power and a people more and more unanimous.
The next objective of Faure is to go forcibly to the holding of parliamentary elections, which he set for December 20. A real flight forward. UNIR-RPT, the party in power, is already in order of battle, supported by an ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) which pretends to play the good offices to better favor Faure. It must be admitted that the parties most involved in the mediation of ECOWAS, the Ivorian Alassane Ouattara and the Guinean Alpha Condé, are not themselves paragons of democracy and are not in a great hurry to disavow their co-religionists.
Of course, the opposition, united in Brigitte Adjamagbo's C14 (platform of fourteen parties), and the young civil society, incarnated by the David Debosse movement of David Dosseh, protest, call for a boycott. But they do not rebel against a manipulated electoral process - the latest census is unreliable and UNIR-RPT-friendly constituencies have, on average, half as many inhabitants as those promised to the opposition - they revolt against a tyranny more than half a century old, which kept the Togolese in a state of extreme poverty (159 th in the rankings of the index of human development).
Because, beyond the democratic stakes, Togo has an economy of all paradoxes. First, there are the resources of the subsoil, phosphate in particular. Until the 90s, phosphate accounted for nearly half of state revenues, making Togo the 3 th African producer. Gnassingbé Eyadéma had nationalized the resources, following the pseudo-attack of Sarakawa which he would have been the target in 1974 and that he used to strengthen his power, as well as his legend. But prevarication and increasingly fierce competition internationally have led to a vertiginous drop in production.
Today, despite a recovery plan, the sector has not left, like that of cotton. On the offshore oil side, the situation is hardly more enviable. At least in appearance. Because many sources suspect the ruling clan and the Italian oil company ENI to organize a clandestine exploitation of Togolese oil, up to 15 million barrels a year!
As much money as the Togolese will never see any kopeck. Nor do they touch the dividends of the revenues of the deep-sea port of Lomé, managed opaque by Bolloré and which feeds not only the national economy, but also the bordering countries. Togo is a rich country, which could largely provide for the needs of its 8 million inhabitants, if it had not been a predatory state, victim of the famous "Dutch disease".
Play behind the scenes. As always in its former colonies, the Elysee is working behind the scenes. Although Emmanuel Macron has not officially received Faure Gnassingbé in France, the French authorities continue to support the Eyadema lineage. In addition to the ancient ties that unite Paris and Togolese power, the senior officers of the French army intend to rely on the Togolese army, one of the few experienced along the Gulf of Guinea.
Alarmed by the chronic weakness of the Beninese and Burkinabé armies, worried by the irruption of AQIM jihadists in eastern Burkina, a contagion that could eventually spread further south, towards the coast, the hawks of the Hotel de Brienne consider the Togolese regime as one of the last bastions of stability in the middle of a West Africa won by chaos and radical Islamism.
Nevertheless, this ultra-safe reading of the partnership between France and Togo can not convince. Nothing can justify Emmanuel Macron's guilty support of a regime that is not very concerned about human rights. What is more serious is that France is not the only fairy to look sympathetically at Faure's wobbly cradle.
Germany, having long been uncompromising about respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, yielded to realpolitik and set foot on a territory it controlled until the beginnings of the First World War. The European Union is not left out. The president of the EU-ACP (Africa-Caribbean-Pacific) joint parliament, the controversial Belgian MEP, Louis Michel, goes to Togo several times a year, appearing all smiles with Faure, not missing an opportunity to praise "the spectacular progress of Togo in terms of development ".
The country is, moreover, a privileged partner of the European Commission, so much so that it has been designated as leader of the negotiations for the post-Cotonou agreements, which must refound the partnership between the EU and the ACP countries. on the horizon 2020. Blessed bread for the despots of the South of the Sahara and the technocrats of the Commission, who intend to make a clean sweep of all democratic demands to give free rein to unconditional economic exchanges between the two continents.
Despite the anointing that the international community continues to give to the last dictatorship of West Africa, the Togolese volcano is reeling again, threatening to erupt. Under the apparent calm, nothing goes to Lome. A first demonstration organized by Togo standing took place on November 3, followed by another, more massive, initiated by the C14 on the 17th of the same month.
Others will come. The Togolese Church, too, calls on the government for democratic reforms. The country has entered a new round of protest. Even in Kara, the big city of the north, the stronghold of power, where my father once built two health centers, a certain tension reigns. The Pharaonic statue of Staff Sergeant Eyadema (at no less than Pharaonic cost), planted in front of a congress hall in desperately deserted corridors, seems to be wavering on its base; the marble lions that guard it have stopped roaring.
What will it take this time for the revolt to become a revolution? It is perhaps the rapper Smockey, the leader of the citizen Broom and figure of the Burkinabe revolution of 2014, who spoke to me the best. He told me that they had succeeded in overthrowing Blaise Compaore only because they had been "naive", that they had not taken the measure of the danger they were running, of the monster they were attacking. "It takes naivety to succeed in a revolution."
But how can it be in Togo, after so many deaths, tears and bloodshed, after fifty years of seeing each other, as Aimé Césaire wrote, "cleverly inculcate fear, the inferiority complex, the tremor, kneeling, despair, theft? How can one still believe in dawn, having walked so much in the night? This is the challenge of the Togolese people.
Les faits - Thomas Dietrich, writer and former high official, comes back from Togo where he stayed from October 30th to November 6th.
This piece was originally written in French
Source: l'opinion