A story of 2 families, their sons and an assassination at heart of Togo’s presidential vote

Story of 2 families at heart of Togo’s election

LOME, Togo — The villa behind the locked gate still bears the bullet marks from a coup that brought down this country’s first president. Half a century has passed, but Togo’s presidential election on Thursday reaches back to the country’s original sin as the killer’s son runs against the dead president’s political heirs.

Only a block from the home of the slain president, the campaign billboard of President Faure Gnassingbe towers above passing motorists. Gnassingbe’s father publicly bragged about having killed the nation’s first leader, giving interviews in which he detailed the president’s final moments.

In an effort to break with the past, the 43-year-old Gnassingbe has left his family name off most of his posters — going simply as ‘Faure’ — as well as the symbol of his father’s party, even though he is running on its platform. And two months ago in an attempt to close the wound at the heart of Togo’s political life, Gnassingbe canceled the military parade customarily held every Jan. 13.

It was on the night of Jan. 13, 1963, that Gnassingbe’s father led a group of soldiers to the residence of Sylvanus Olympio, shooting him and leaving his body at the gates of what was then the U.S. Embassy next door.

Eyadema Gnassingbe went on to become the country’s military dictator, ruling for nearly four decades during which time he celebrated the day of Olympio’s assassination as a national holiday.

When he died in 2005, the military installed his son, then held elections. The vote rigging was blatant, including instances in which soldiers burst into polling stations, threw tear gas canisters and made off with ballot boxes, according to Amnesty International. In the days after the vote, security forces killed at least 400 people in targeted assassinations intended to punish the opposition, according to a U.N. inquiry.

The opposition is believed to have won the vote even though a technicality prevented Gilchrist Olympio, the son of the murdered president who bears a striking resemblance to his father and who is the symbol of the country’s opposition, from being a candidate.

Five years later, Olympio has again been disqualified after the election commission ruled he had improperly filled in a required medical certificate.

“We still think — perhaps naively — that the system can be changed through the ballot box,” says the 73-year-old Olympio, who returned to Togo to rally support for Jean-Pierre Fabre, the man chosen to replace him. “What we need is help imposing the verdict of democracy.”

Even with Olympio not officially in the race, the story of Thursday’s election is very much the story of the two families.

The family of the dead president returned from self-imposed exile over the weekend. Thousands of supporters mobbed the highway leading into the capital to accompany Olympio’s motorcade. His supporters wore yellow T-shirts, the color of the party he founded, the Union of Forces for Change. They waved palm fronds, the party’s symbol, above their heads. So many people blocked the two-lane highway that it took him several hours to traverse the roughly 5-mile (8-kilometer) stretch from the Ghana border to his villa.

“We weren’t paid to be here,” they chanted in a jab at the ruling party which is accused of handing out bags of rice and cash to those who attend its rallies.

Gnassingbe has held few rallies in the capital, instead hopscotching the sliver-like country in the presidential helicopter.

His beefy face smiles down from every municipal wall and nearly every billboard. His campaign commercial plays on a continuous loop on state TV. He has vastly outspent the opposition which has almost no billboards and only flimsy posters printed on faded paper. He is accused of handing out cash to youth leaders to create support groups.

“He gave me around $2,000 to start my organization,” says Piwou Nadjombe, a 28-year-old real estate agent who is the president of an organization called Club Faure and who had taped Gnassingbe’s posters on both doors of his car.

Nadjombe says that the candidate should be praised for distancing himself from the ruling Rally of the Togolese Party, or RTP, the party his father founded and which is still run by the dictator’s apparatchik. “His father was a dictator. He’s an intellectual. It’s not fair to judge the son based on the father,” he says.

Human rights groups say the country of 6 million squeezed between Benin and Ghana still has far to go but has taken baby steps toward democracy since the dictator’s death.

“It’s obvious that the ruling party still controls a great deal, but the press is much freer than before and even though we know our phones are tapped, we’re no longer afraid of speaking out,” says Claudine Ahianyo-Kpondzo, who heads the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding here.

With a freer press, many hope that any vote rigging will quickly be exposed. There are several hundred election observers, including 80 from the European Union who will stand vigil as the roughly 3 million registered voters cast their ballots for one of the seven candidates in the race.

Olympio remains the revered symbol of the opposition, but his health never fully recovered from a 1992 assassination attempt by the Togolese military, which left bullet fragments in his body. He recently took a bad fall and walks with a halting gait.

Some say the country is caught between two families whose pasts are too heavy to discard. Sylvanus Olympio’s house is a symbol of how time has stood still.

Not lived in since he was assassinated, the family recently began repairs. The walls are being repainted but the workers have been told not to plaster over the bullet holes. One pierced the mirror of the president’s armoire, the splintered glass a reminder of a bloody past.

“The Togolese need to turn a page on their past,” says Nicolas Lawson, another candidate in the race whose party’s symbol is an open book with a page turning from left to right. “We’re caught between two dynasties.”