New Togolese President Faure Gnassingbe could yet weather the political storm that surrounds his controversial appointment, thanks to his strong support from the army, analysts said this week.
Decisive action by former colonial ruler France will be needed to reverse parliament’s decision to install Faure as president following the death of his father Gnassingbe Eyadema, Africa’s longest-serving leader and one of Paris’s most loyal client rulers. The African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, the European Union and the United States have condemned what they see as a coup d’état.
”If France comes out and condemns [Faure’s appointment], and says they have troops on alert in Senegal, and if at the same time the people rise up, there could be change,” said one long-time observer of the country. ”Otherwise all eyes will be on Togo for a week, and then there will be more rigged elections in 2008.”
The South African government is standing by the AU’s position that ”nobody will take their seat in the hallowed corridors [of the AU] if they have come to power by unconstitutional means,” a foreign affairs official told the Mail & Guardian.
The official said that the more drastic step of economic sanctions against Togo was not on the cards at this stage.
Richard Cornwell of the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria said it was possible that Togo would aim for a compromise that would pacify international criticism: reappointing the speaker of Parliament, who was hastily voted out in favour of Faure, then holding elections within 60 days as demanded by the Constitution.
”Then as long as they can split the opposition, they are home and dry,” Cornwell said.
The most prominent exiled opposition leader, Gilchrist Olympio, is barred from candidacy by a 2003 constitutional amendment that presidential candidates must have been resident in Togo for at least 10 years.
Cornwell added that no new leader could survive without military support: ”How do you change a regime for one headed by Olympio — how long could he last without a real coup; one in which people get killed?”
The 1967 coup that brought Eyadema to power was the work of soldiers from northern Togo who had fought for France in the colonial war in Algeria, and then returned home to be branded sell-outs by a society then dominated by an educated southern elite. This military support kept Eyadema in power for nearly 38 years.
The brutal crushing of opposition protests in 1993 left the Togolese afraid to speak out against the regime, as evidenced by the failure of this week’s opposition call for a stay-away.
Eyadema’s life was marked by a series of lucky escapes that led him to believe his presidency was divinely ordained.
”If what I do does not please Almighty God, then let him bar my route,” he was fond of saying. He survived a mysterious plane crash in 1974, and an assassination attempt by a corporal who fired live bullets at close range at him in 1967.
In March 1993 insurgents killed Eyadema’s chief of defence staff and his military aide de camp, but the president again survived when live grenades were thrown into his living quarters.
But on Saturday, the end came quietly and suddenly.
”Eyadema looked so hale and hearty on Friday,” special presidential advisor Barry Moussa Barque said. ”He even received visitors and chatted with them. But suddenly he slumped during a meeting on Saturday morning.”
The Military High Command hastily swore the oath of allegiance to Faure, in defiance of a Constitution that names the speaker of Parliament as interim ruler in the event of the president’s death.
The outrage that this caused among the opposition groups prompted the political somersault by parliament, who voted Faure in as speaker.