“Foresighted fear is the mother of all security” (Edmund Burke)
The young president is clearly determined to cut off the heads of the emblematic figures of his regime. After changes in the military high command, followed by the unexpected arrest, mid-January 2023, of the former chief of staff of the Togolese Armed Forces, it is rumored that another “securocrat” in chief of Faure Gnassingbé, once very influential in the military apparatus and key element of the presidential system, would also be arrested.
Pillar of the regime, the Togolese army has always shown its loyalty to the head of state, head of the armies. A security apparatus deemed homogeneous on which the father who led the country for four decades might count. It is also on the army that the power of the son rests. He was able to count on the men in uniform during the ups and downs that the country had to go through, from its tumultuous accession to the serious socio-political crisis that shook his regime in 2017. The army was in all the right moves in the benefit of Faure Gnassingbé.
However, serenity does not seem to be in order within the state apparatus. The upheavals and other changes that regularly occur within the great mute sometimes testify to the feverishness of Togolese power. Moreover, the coups d’etat which have multiplied in the meantime in the West African region have had repercussions in our country and within the security services. With reorganizations and changes at the head of certain regiments. It might have stopped there, especially since the mistral seems to pass through a sub-region that runs a greater risk of “somalisation” because of the incessant terrorist incursions into a number of countries.
In Togo, however, the regime’s chief “securocrats” who yesterday were rain or shine, seem to be in the sights. Great was the astonishment of the Togolese when at the beginning of the year, the former chief of general staff of the FAT and brother-in-law of the head of state was arrested. Without any other form of explanation. Indiscretions, another senior officer, a former top secret service official who had maintained frank enmities with the first, would also meet the same fate.
This other arrest, if it were to be confirmed, would be a double-edged sword for the authorities, which might alienate many influential members. When we know that these senior officers who have fallen into disgrace, all come from the ethnic group that some say is “dominant” in circles of power. Even if it is common ground that the same assumptions had been made when the former all-powerful Ministers of Defense and Territorial Administration, Kpatcha Gnassingbé and Pascal Bodjona had been neutralized. But life goes on…
Medard Ametepe
Source: Liberty / libertetogo.info