Togo: does France want to overthrow Faure Gnassingbe?

On 6 June, Faure Gnassingbé had a rotten birthday. To mark his 59th year, some Togolese took to the streets to demand the departure of the man who has ruled their country through blood and fear since 2005.

“We are currently heading toward the Togolese presidency, where protests are indeed under way calling for the reform to be reversed. This gathering in Lomé was meant to be a peaceful demonstration by young activists, but it degenerated into clashes with law enforcement near the GTA junction. Tear gas, arrests: the air has become unbreathable near the presidential building. The demonstrators, who had come to demand political reforms, the release of rapper Amron and the departure of the regime, were quickly surrounded by riot-gear security forces. Roadblocks, closed streets, and an increasingly charged atmosphere.”

This uprising by civil society and young people is unprecedented in this small West African country. The demonstrators, who are not organised by any opposition political party, are protesting both the rise in electricity prices and Faure Gnassingbé’s constitutional sleight of hand, which, let’s remember, scrapped the presidential election scheduled for 2025. Thanks to a new constitution, he is now elected by a national assembly almost entirely won over to his cause. In short, he has done away with the ballot box altogether. He doesn’t even need to stuff it anymore — clever.

The problem is that to stay in power, Faure has no qualms about resorting to the old tried-and-tested methods that have ensured the longevity and success of the Togolese dictatorship, torturers from father to son since 1967. One of the spearheads of the current protest movement, rapper Amron, who comes from the same community as Faure Gnassingbé, paid the price for it. Amron reappeared with his head and beard shaved to offer his apologies to the president of Togo’s council of ministers.

I would like to take this opportunity to ask forgiveness and offer my sincere apologies to Mister Faure, His Excellency Faure Gnassingbé, president of the council of ministers, for my disparaging, discourteous and outrageous behaviour.

The artist says he suffered from psychiatric problems but had recovered after treatment. His mother, who was present when he was arrested by law enforcement, doesn’t buy it.

This is pressure that was put on my son to make him speak. Watching him, it’s as if he were reading out a message someone wrote for him.

She denounces an arbitrary detention by the authorities and physical mistreatment. New demonstrations are planned from 26 June, and the Togolese authorities are starting to get rattled. So they are cracking down across the board. Already on 6 June, 81 demonstrators were arbitrarily arrested, and some were even tortured, according to the International Federation for Human Rights. And things are stirring even behind the scenes of power, even among the most loyal of the head of state’s loyalists. A former Defence minister, Marguerite Nakadé, called on the Togolese army to overthrow the regime, which enraged Faure, since Marguerite Nakadé was once the wife of his brother Ernest and even had two children with Faure himself.

But more importantly, is an information war also under way? Faure Gnassingbé’s latest idea for discrediting the fledgling uprising is to make people believe it is being manipulated by France. Yes, you heard that right: Françafrique’s best employee since the 1960s is apparently about to be fired by his own employer. In essence, Macron is supposed to have fallen out with Faure Gnassingbé, guilty of having grown closer in recent years to the anti-French, pro-Russian youth of the Sahel. In the end, if you go along with this story — a little too far-fetched to be true — the new Che Guevara resisting imperialism and Françafrique would be none other than Faure Gnassingbé.

For a while now, when we’ve been talking, we’ve said that we had the file on Togo and that France knows very well what it’s up to as far as Togo is concerned. So this message needs to be shared as widely as possible so that it can reach the Togolese people. It has to reach the Togolese people because the demonstrations are going to multiply in the days ahead. They are going to use the Israel-Palestine crisis. They’re going to import it into what’s happening in Togo.

Indeed, they are mobilising an impressive number of Togolese lawyers and other people who will claim to be lawyers or to belong to the Togolese bar. But in reality it’s rubbish, and they are indeed going to use a vast communication network that they’re going to set up. Yes, they will surely kill people in Togo. And when they’re done, don’t even be surprised, the Togo file will end up at the UN — they’ll even ask the UN to authorise them to intervene in Togo.

So honestly, guys, I like you, but you need to go easy on the Castel beer and the tramadol before spouting nonsense like that. As you know, if you follow my videos and my work, I will never hold back from criticising France’s dirty tricks in Africa, which are as numerous as the stars in the sky. But there is such a thing as reality, and you can’t twist it every which way. The truth is that Emmanuel Macron has never criticised Faure’s constitutional coup in Togo, nor the ongoing crackdown. Macron even needed Faure’s services recently, because the Togolese president acted as a mediator on behalf of the Élysée when four DGSE agents were arrested in Burkina Faso in late 2023. Faure Gnassingbé had then interceded with Ibrahim Traóré to try to get them released.

So yes, Faure has grown closer to the AES [Alliance of Sahel States], which uses the port of Lomé as a gateway. There are Turkish mercenaries fighting jihadists in northern Togo. But after a brief falling-out in early 2024, Faure and Macron patched things up and were all smiles on several occasions, such as at the commemoration of the Provence landings in August 2024, and at the Francophonie summit in October. Because let’s be honest, France continues to support the Togolese dictator.

In fact, Macron agreed to accredit Togo’s new ambassador to Paris, Colonel Agadazi, who nevertheless has blood on his hands, having taken part for 30 years in the Togolese regime’s vile killing machine. France’s ambassador to Lomé, Augustin Favereau, is for his part a fervent defender of the Togolese regime. He even refused for several months to grant consular protection to the French-Togolese family of a deceased opposition figure, Bertin Aglaglo, several members of whom were thrown in jail on completely absurd accusations of Islamic terrorism, even though they are Christians. Augustin Favereau clearly prefers the interests of the Togolese regime to those of his fellow citizens, since he did everything he could to cover up my arrest by Faure’s henchmen in Lomé when I travelled there to report in April 2024.

French companies continue to win contracts in Togo, such as the SME Mater, which is set to build 21 bridges in Togo for a total cost of 100 million euros — largely footed, incidentally, by the French taxpayer. French arms trafficker Robert Montoya is back in business in Lomé and is currently delivering military equipment bought in Eastern Europe and Turkey. And half a dozen French military advisers continue to support the Togolese gendarmerie and army.

All this to tell you that France is not trying to overthrow Faure. Quite the opposite. At the same time, things have changed in recent years. Our country is no longer the one calling the shots in Africa. Even if it wanted to, it could no longer orchestrate coups. Otherwise, I can tell you that people like Ibrahim Traóré, Assimi Goïta or Faustin-Archange Touadéra would have been six feet under long ago. Our diplomacy, our intelligence services, our army are out of their depth. They are forced to watch helplessly as the former colonial power declines, becoming a kind of bogeyman, a boogeyman waved around to scare people — and Faure has understood this perfectly.

What better way to discredit the defiance of Togolese youth than to make people believe it is being secretly manipulated by France? What better way to dissuade people from taking to the streets than to tell them: “You’re just puppets of Macron and the DGSE”? So the Togolese regime is building itself a cardboard pan-African stature to try to save its own skin. Behind the scenes, it is orchestrating an information offensive through waves of trolls and fake news on Facebook and TikTok, carried out with the support of certain AES regimes such as Burkina Faso. The goal, in particular, is to make people believe that the leaders of the protest movement, such as the very courageous journalist Ferdinand Ayité, are agents of the French DGSE.

See, I told you, alcohol abuse is bad for your health. I know that after this video, I’ll be branded a Paris spy again, just as I was when I was expelled from Togo in April 2024. Well, three months after my expulsion, the very same trolls who had called me a secret agent were suddenly saying I was a great journalist, just because I had revealed the French military presence in Guinea. Make up your minds, guys.

On 16 June, the Lomé regime went a step further, banning RFI and France 24 broadcasts for three months, as if these French media outlets were somehow responsible for the destabilisation in Togo. This ban will obviously feed the narrative that France is trying to force Faure out. It’s rather ironic when you think about it, given that, on the contrary, these French public broadcasters have always downplayed the violence of the Togolese regime and have always sought to protect it. This is particularly true at France 24, where one of the senior editors is a close associate of Togolese minister Gilbert Bawara and constantly softens any criticism of the dictatorship on France 24’s airwaves. In fact, the channel deliberately kept quiet about my arrest and brutal expulsion from Togo.

Make no mistake, in Togo, France is as always on the wrong side of history, because Macron continues to cosy up to bloodthirsty dictators who nonetheless betray him and will no doubt end up turning their backs on him. That’s been the case recently, and I think Togo may well follow suit by joining the AES. And the ones who will always pay the ultimate price in this story are the peoples themselves, particularly Togo’s, which since the 1990s has sacrificed thousands of its sons in an endless march toward freedom.

I still remember my father, who was a humanitarian doctor in the north of the country and who used to tell me about the criminal madness of Colonel Eyadéma, Faure’s elder brother, who was a bloodthirsty brute no longer in his right mind and who, in fact, ended up threatening my father with a weapon. All these killings, the innocent lives found each morning in the Lomé lagoon, the abominable repression of the uprisings of 1993, 2005 and 2017, were all carried out with France’s support — France, I say it plainly, has the blood of the Togolese people on its hands, and let us never forget it.