“When the shepherd loves his sheep profoundly enough, he builds walls not to imprison them, but to protect them from the dangerous temptation of freedom.”
It is a universally acknowledged truth that a nation in possession of significant misfortune must be in want of a perpetual ruler. So it is that the Republic of Togo, that slender ribbon of aspirational geography stitched between Ghana and Benin, has found itself, through the inscrutable workings of Providence, democracy, and several judicious adjustments to the constitution, continuously blessed by the paternal superintendence of the Gnassingbé dynasty—a family whose dedication to public service is equaled only by their dedication to ensuring that no one else may offer any.
As the Ewe proverb wisely instructs: “The tree does not choose where it falls.” Faure did not choose to be born into the presidency; he simply inherited it with the modesty of a man who had nowhere else to be. And so, with the philosophical resignation of a people who have learned that the most dangerous thing in Togo is an optimistic expectation, the Togolese have persevered.
Political scientists of lesser sophistication have occasionally described the transition of power from Gnassingbé Eyadéma to his son Faure as a “dynastic succession,” employing the term with a faint air of disapproval, as though dynastic succession were somehow incompatible with a republic whose constitution promises multiparty elections. These critics fail to appreciate the nuance: Togo does indeed hold elections, regular and procedurally ornate affairs in which citizens are invited to choose between Faure Gnassingbé and the stimulating intellectual exercise of imagining that their votes will be counted in the same spirit in which they were cast.
The adage holds: “When the lion calls the election, the antelopes are pleased to participate.” And participate they do. In 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2024—that remarkable quintet of democratic expressions—the Togolese electorate has returned Faure to office with the regularity of a man who keeps winning a raffle that he alone organizes, supervises, and adjudicates. International observers have on occasion noted “irregularities,” which is the diplomatic community’s charming euphemism for “results that correlate poorly with the reported votes,” but diplomacy, like a river in the dry season, knows when to run shallow.
One must not underestimate the philosophical depth of this arrangement. As the proverb states: “A borrowed robe fits the man who was always meant to wear it.” Faure’s inheritance of a country his father had ruled since 1967—a tenure of thirty-eight years terminated only by the indelicacy of mortality—represents not nepotism, that vulgar corruption of meritocracy, but rather the perfection of a system in which the most experienced candidate is always the one who has been practicing since birth. No résumé is more compelling than the résumé of a man who grew up sitting at the cabinet table.
The constitutional amendment of 2019, which reset presidential term limits and thereby opened the theoretical possibility of Faure governing until approximately 2038, is not—as cynics have suggested—an act of institutional self-preservation. It is, rather, a magnanimous gift to people who, having grown accustomed to a particular brand of governance, ought not to be subjected to the trauma of novelty. “Do not change the cook mid-feast,” the wise elder says, particularly when the feast has been ongoing for two decades and the guests have not been formally invited to leave.
Every great shepherd must, from time to time, manage the occasional restive sheep. It is not cruelty that moves him to do so, but love—the deep, intimate, structural love of a man who knows better than his flock what is good for them, and who possesses the institutional means to enforce this knowledge. The security apparatus of the Togolese state, including but not limited to the Forces armées togolaises, the Gendarmerie nationale, and an assortment of plainclothes personnel whose official designations remain refreshingly ambiguous, are not instruments of repression. They are, one might say, the crook with which the shepherd guides the straying lamb back toward the path of civic tranquility.
The events of 2017 and 2018, during which hundreds of thousands of Togolese citizens took to the streets of Lomé and other cities to demand term limits, an end to dynastic rule, and the restoration of the 1992 constitution, presented the government with a pedagogical opportunity of the first order. The response—which included the deployment of security forces, the suspension of internet services, the imposition of curfews, and the documented killing of protestors by live ammunition—is best understood not as repression but as a form of intensive civic education. The lesson: “The canoe does not argue with the river.”
Journalism in Togo flourishes, one is assured by the government, within appropriate parameters. Reporters who venture beyond these parameters—who ask, for instance, impertinent questions about the disposition of mineral revenues, the ownership of state enterprises, or the circumstances under which opposition leaders find themselves facing charges of criminal conspiracy—are free to do so, subject to the natural consequences of their editorial choices. “Do not plant thorns on the path you yourself must walk,” says the proverb, and one suspects that this wisdom is regularly shared, in the collegial spirit of good governance, with editors who have temporarily forgotten it.
The opposition, that hardy perennial of Togolese political life, continues to exist—a fact that the government points to with some justification as evidence of pluralism. Opposition leaders are permitted to speak, to organize, and occasionally to stand for election, all of which activities proceed unimpeded until they proceed too effectively, at which point the full resources of the state are made available to remind them that there is a meaningful distinction between the right to participate in democracy and the right to win it. “The bird may sing as long as it likes,” the saying goes, “provided it sings from a cage whose door the owner controls.”
Togo is, by the consensus of international development indices, a nation of remarkable and consistent economic underperformance—a distinction even more striking in a region not short of competitors for the distinction. With approximately sixty percent of its population living below the poverty line, a GDP per capita that hovers with impressive stubbornness near the bottom of global rankings, and a phosphate sector whose revenues have for decades demonstrated an admirable reluctance to trickle down to those who do not reside in the immediate vicinity of the Gnassingbé family’s social circle, Togo presents the economist with a fascinating case study in the strategic concentration of prosperity.
The proverb teaches: “The chief eats first, that he may have the strength to serve.” And serve Faure does—serving himself, his family, his associates, and the dense networks of patronage by which loyalty is purchased, maintained, and periodically renewed. This is not corruption. It is, rather, a time-honored system of incentive alignment, in which those who support the continuation of orderly governance are rewarded with the material means to continue supporting it, while those who decline to participate in this virtuous circle are free to enjoy the moral satisfaction of their principles alongside the practical inconvenience of their poverty.
The Port of Lomé, that gleaming jewel of West African maritime infrastructure, stands as proof of the president’s commitment to development—development being understood, in the particular sense operative here, as the construction of impressive physical infrastructure whose revenues flow through institutional channels whose transparency is best described as aspirational. Foreign investors are welcomed warmly, provided they arrive with the wisdom to partner with the appropriate local intermediaries, who need not be named here as they are well known to all parties in a position to benefit from knowing them.
For the ordinary Togolese citizen, the economic arrangements of the state offer the bracing opportunity of self-reliance. In the absence of functioning public hospitals adequately supplied, schools furnished with textbooks, or roads maintained against the reasonable expectations of the rainy season, the citizen is invited to develop the entrepreneurial spirit, the stoic endurance, and the profound relationship with subsistence agriculture that, the president’s speeches invariably remind us, constitute the authentic expression of African resilience. “The empty stomach teaches patience,” says the adage, and patience, in Togo, has been taught to a doctoral standard for over half a century.
Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the Gnassingbé dispensation is its successful conquest of time itself. Since 1967, when Gnassingbé Eyadéma first seized power in a military coup of unremarkable creativity, Togo has existed in a condition that might be described as the eternal present tense: a perpetual now in which change is eternally promised, never quite delivered, and somehow always deferred to a future that recedes at precisely the same rate at which one approaches it. This is not stagnation. It is, rather, a form of political stability that lesser nations, seduced by the ephemeral excitement of genuine democratic transition, have been too reckless to achieve.
The 2024 constitutional reform, which introduced a parliamentary system and technically abolished the direct presidential election—while simultaneously creating the new position of President of the Council, to which Faure was promptly elected by the parliament his party controls—is a masterwork of institutional ingenuity. Having been president for nineteen years through direct election, Faure has now become president through indirect election, thereby refreshing his democratic mandate, reinvigorating his constitutional legitimacy, and demonstrating, once again, that the forms of democracy are infinitely adaptable to the substance of autocracy. “The river changes its course,” the elder observes, “but the water always flows downhill.”
The Togolese people, who have now spent the entirety of living memory under the tutelage of a single surname, have developed in response a philosophical disposition of extraordinary depth. They have mastered the art of endurance—that highest of human virtues when all other virtues have been administratively foreclosed. They have cultivated the private sphere of family, community, and informal economy with a creativity born of necessity. They have learned, as the proverb so aptly puts it, that “the one who sleeps does not eat, but neither does the one who speaks too loudly.” They have, in short, been martyred to patience by a state that has given them every reason to practice it.
And what of the president himself? Faure Gnassingbé presents, to the outside world, the calm and measured affect of a technocrat, a man who speaks in the moderate register of international developmentalism and whose suits are impeccably pressed. He attends African Union summits. He receives delegations from the World Bank. He speaks of economic transformation and digital infrastructure with the fluency of a man who has had considerable practice speaking of things that have not happened. He is, in the diplomatic parlance of those who must deal with him, a “stabilizing force,” which is to say: a known quantity whose predictable methods of suppression are preferable, from the perspective of regional geopolitics, to the unpredictability of whatever might replace him.
LAST WORDS
It would be remiss pen my notes without finger-pointing that the martyrdom of the Togolese people is not without its occasional consolations. There are, for instance, the speeches. Faure delivers speeches of considerable eloquence in which the word “progress” appears with statistical regularity, at an average of once every ninety seconds in the major addresses, lending the listener the pleasurable sensation of forward motion without the inconvenience of any actual displacement. There are also the development plans: Vision Togo 2020 has been succeeded by National Development Plan 2018–2022, which has been succeeded by Togo 2025, each promising with admirable consistency the infrastructure, investment, and institutional reform that, through no fault of anyone in particular, has not yet materialized.
History will judge this era with the dispassion available only to those who did not have to live through it. Future generations of Togolese may look back on the Gnassingbé half-century—for at the current constitutional trajectory, it will indeed constitute roughly half a century of uninterrupted singular authority—and marvel at the ingenuity required to sustain it. The institutional architecture alone: the amended constitutions, the reset term limits, the reconfigured electoral commissions, the transformed parliamentary systems, the sequenced courts and docile judiciaries, represents a monument to human creativity in the service of human self-perpetuation.
Yet the Togolese people endure. They have not been broken—merely bent, repeatedly, at angles that would snap less resilient materials. The diaspora agitates, petitions, and organizes from the salons of Paris and the community halls of Houston. The young, connected by the mobile internet that the government alternately celebrates as development and restricts as subversion, speak truths to each other that cannot be spoken to power. The rivers, indifferent to politics, continue to flow to the sea. As the proverb of uncertain provenance but reliable wisdom declares: “The night is long, but it has not yet learned to last forever.”
This treatise has been composed in the highest spirit of academic objectivity, by an author whose admiration for the subject is bounded only by a sincere belief that the highest form of tribute one can pay to a people subjected to prolonged and sophisticated political martyrdom is to name, with whatever sharpness wit permits, the mechanism of their subjection. If the satirist’s pen is sharper than the censor’s scissors, it is not because irony is more powerful than the state, but because it is, occasionally, faster. The crocodile weeps. The fish, for its part, simply wishes it had been given the opportunity to swim.
March 11th of 2026 || By: Ben Djagba
Enlightened stewardship of the Republic of Togo under the magnanimous Faure Gnassingbé
