Hands off my Constitution!
The local and international history of the current protests in Togo.
Election.
On 10 July 2025, barely two weeks from now, the people of Togo are scheduled to go to the urns for municipal elections. In the usual way of international media coverage, this would typically not garner much coverage. In 2024, Faure Gnassingbe successfully reformed the constitutional order, of which he had been head of state and government since he was installed by a military putsch after the sudden death of his father Eyadéma in 2005.
With a francophone love of counting constitutional regimes, Togo finds its government constituting its Fifth Republic, now with Jean-Lucien Savi de Tové as nominal head of state. Savi de Tové had been Togo’s foreign minister shortly after the 1967 coup that initially brought Eyadéma to power in 1967. Savi de Tové went into opposition until 1993, when Togo opened up to multiparty politics for the first time in three decades, at which point he briefly rejoined government before returning to opposition and exile in Benin. The advent of Faure in 2005 began another period in which people associated with the opposition was reintegrated into the government,1 and Savi de Tové accordingly took a series of ministerial posts more junior than what he had occupied twelve years before. He then retired, with his coming out for a figurehead role in Togolese government being something of a shock.2 Faure Gnassingbe retains ultimate power as Council President, elected by parliament without subjection to term limits.
While typically this would be a quiescent stage of government formation, that may not the case now. On 16 June, the Togolese government banned Radio France International and France24, the latter a television news outlet, from the country for at least three months. This move echoes those taken by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, three landlocked military juntas to which Togo provides key logistics support through its deepwater port at Lome, rated by underwriters Lloyd’s of London as the largest African port between Suez and Durban.3
Togo has had twenty years of impressive economic growth, much of it fed by its excellence in logistics; seventeen years after the establishment of Asky, that airline has, thanks to a key partnership with Ethiopian Airlines, established itself as the best airline in West Africa, making Lome’s airport a hub for regional air travel that eclipses Abidjan, Accra, and Dakar. Just this month, Togo has announced that it has attracted a factory in the fickle international textile industry, thanks in part to Adétikopé, a free trade zone of which it is hoped that it could give Togo a head-start in the long-planned African Intercontinental Free Trade Zone.
All the most recent Togolese elections have been won by the Union for the Republic, UNIR, the current party of the Gnassingbe regime. Most opposition parties are scheduled to participate in the 10 July polls.
Togo has for several years coordinated its security operations with those of its neighbors; insecurity in Burkina Faso, which has continued to mount since its special forces Captain Ibrahima Traoré took power in a coup in 2022, has led to a growing flow of refugees “trapped” in Togo’s northernmost Savanes region, sandwiched between Kara, from where the Gnassigbe family originates, and the Burkinabe border. The Togolese government is working with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, the Red Cross, and national and local NGOs to respond to the inflow; responses are likely being affected by this year’s crisis in UN funding. For many years, Togo, despite holding elections, was functionally the only dictatorship west of Cross River, south of the Sahara, and east of the Atlantic. A recent spate of coups in the Sahel have changed that, and Togo has increasingly openly considered the possibility of joining Burkina in its Alliance of Sahel States, or AES. In March of this year, a slim majority of Togolese people surveyed by Afrobarometer supported their country leaving ECOWAS to join AES; Togolese political sociologist Koffi Améssou Adaba, who led the survey, argued that this was down to simultaneous growing anti-western and pro-Russian sentiment in Togo, much of it hinging on government acquiescence to Western economic and fiscal pressures. The Togolese government’s openness to the AES is not without other costs; it may cost Togo leadership of the Economic Community of West African States, to the benefit of Senegal, whose president, with Gnassingbe, is co-leading ECOWAS’ negotiations with the AES, which has formally left the bloc.
A declaration in Lome.
Public demonstrations have been forbidden in Togo since at least 2022, when there was a stabbing at Lome’s central market, Adawlato.4 But opposition parties, other civil society organizations, and “the youth” have called for civil disobedience and protests on Monday the 23d and Thursday the 26th through Saturday the 28th. The second window coincides squarely with the launch of the municipal electoral campaign in Togo. Because of the tendency to use “civil society” as a catchall phrase for non-profit organizations, it is not clear from here in Dakar how many of these organizations also took part in the African Development Bank’s first-ever Civil Society Open Day on June 3d, which looked to get NGO buy in for the government’s internationally financed development projects.5
The government engaged in a slate of mass arrests of people, including socially engaged Togolese rapper Aamron, on May 26th. Public protests against Aamron’s arrest on June 5th and 6th that also called for Gnassignbe’s resignation were characterized by Togo’s public prosecutor as “part of a revolt against the institutions of the Republic”; they saw more than fifty arrests. The government’s reaction earned a written rebuke from the conference of Catholic bishops, which has been critical of the lack of public engagement in the government’s constitutional reform efforts. Many of those detained were freed about a week ago. The government let Aamron go seemingly last,6 two days before the latest protests were to start; whether accidentally or intentionally, the date of Aamron’s release coincided with the “day of martyrs,” which “recalls the sacrifices made throughout history, from the struggle for liberation from colonialism to more recent conflicts for democracy and national unity.”
Aimé Adi, head of Amnesty International in Togo, and Marceau Sivieude, Acting Regional Director of Amnesty for West and Central Africa Amnesty International, each noted that several of the detainees in May and June are reported to have been tortured, and called on the government to investigage even before Aamron’s release. Without advocating civil disobedience, on the 23d, the Association of Victims of Torture in Togo, or ASVITTO, called on the government to investigate these recent political detentions in light of the country’s treaty obligations under the United Nations.
Protests and democratic turnover.
Faure Gnassingbe came to power in the middle of what was otherwise a two-decade long mass democratization of governance in West Africa that was unprecedented in its history. It was not clear in 2005 that that was what was going on, however. While the unrest in Togo was still ongoing, Aminata Touré published her essential Lettre au Président des Français à propos de la Côte d’Ivoire et de l’Afrique en général, on the roots of West Africa’s crises of the time. The question of Togo’s history up to that point was a key supplementary theme to her work.
But again, those first two decades of this century were very democratic decades, and 2005 was no exception. 2005 marked the success of a long drive in Benin called “Hands off my constitution,” (in French, “Touche pas à ma Constitution !)” that radically transformed the country’s political climate, to the point that according to François Soudan in Jeune Afrique, Patrice Talon, Benin’s current head of state, “gets annoyed at getting asked the question [of whether he would change the rules and seek a third term of office], seeing in it, he says, a sort of contempt: would an African statesman be ontologically incapable of keeping his word?”
A 2008 movement in Cameroon was less successful; Cameroon, like Togo, was throughout this period a bulwark of antidemocratic governance that repeatedly and successfully divided the opposition while also exploiting historically unprecedented security funding from the United States and its allies to crack down on its opposition.
Here in Senegal, the 2011 and 2012 opposition to a third term in office for then-president Abdoulaye Wade would eventually be known by two names, Y’en A Marre and M23, the latter for “Mouvement 23 juin.”7 But the essays commissioned for Chronique d’un Revolte,8 make clear the extent to which M23 was inspired by Benin’s successful movement, which had brought together the political opposition, NGOs, governance experts, and an angry youth ready to protest.
“That day surely marked the birth of Senegalese constitutional patriotism.”
Alioune Tine was among those most responsible for setting up the Senegalese M23. Speaking of himself and the Dakar-based African Conference for the Defense of Human Rights, or RADDHO, which he led at the time, Tine recalled in Chronique when the memory was still fresh:
We started it, we called for the creation of the movement “Hands off my Constitution,” say no to the legal project and we took the initiative to call together civil society and the political parties. Everything started with the call we made from Geneva and all the calls we made to get people together. Our status as coordinator was recognized. Being an organization of civil society, we could regulate the base of the M23 platform, and try to encourage the candidates and political parties. During the first round, we approached all the candidates without any problems. That was the first part, the creation of the movement on the basis of “Hands off my Constitution.”9
Three years after the election, Tine was named West and Central African Regional Director of Amnesty International, a post he held for another three years before becoming a UN expert in Mali. Tine is mostly diplomatic when he discusses the problems he had with Macky Sall, who ultimately won the election. Novelist Boubacar Boris Diop writes with greater candor in another Chronique essay:
Macky Sall received universal support not because of his program, but because it was crucial to get rid of a whole clan of predators. The scenario is identical to that of 2000, when Wade was the lethal weapon against [Abdou] Diouf. When are we going to free ourselves from the trap of a cyclical referendum? The fact that a choice as important as that of the head of state is mostly dictated by basic emotions is particularly unhealthy. We can boast about our democratic maturity the day we manage to break from this vicious cycle. Yes, we are masters in the art of getting rid of a bad President. Perhaps what remains is to learn to choose a good President, one who will win our informed vote based on his personal qualities and his vision of our destiny …10
Not everyone was hedging their bets against Sall at the time. Senegalese constitutional scholar Ismaïla Madior Fall wrote:
Even if the protest of June 23rd wad for the main part a constitutional pretext for the populations to express their general frustration, that day surely marked the birth of Senegalese constitutional patriotism.11
Though Sall, who eventually won the 2012 election, engaged with the pro-democracy protests in only formal and minimalist ways, his administration ultimately hired many members of M23 for intermediate and senior leadership positions. Fall was one such hire, becoming judicial counselor to the president in 2013 and minister of justice and foreign affairs for several stretches in Sall’s second term, when Sall cracked down on the opposition, university students, and, perhaps most quixotically of all, Senegal’s southern breadbasket, the Casamance, in hopes of securing a third term. By 2021, a Movement for the Defense of Democracy or M2D, this time closely associated with presidential candidate Ousmane Sonkho, levied against Sall many of the critiques that M23 had done against Wade, this time often finding itself in direct conflict with now-powerful veterans of the M23 movement that had inspired it. M23 had largely split, and despite the support of Tine and others for M2D, many of its most visible members found themselves in 2022 on the opposite side of the same debate they had contested a decade before. In any event, the legalist and populist opposition, fighting against unconstitutional presidential power grabs, was victorious in 2024 as it had been in 2012, even if the same thing might be said of the president who succeeded Sall as Diop said of Sall himself.
The story of “Hands off my Constitution” does not end in Senegal. In 2013, the year after Sall replaced Wade, a coalition of opposition political parties, unions, civil society organizations, and youth, under the banner Le Balai Citoyen, started a “Hands off my Constitution” movement with key inspiration from Senegal’s Y’en a Marre, aiming to remove from power Blaise Compaoré, who had been the country’s dictator since 1987; they succeeded in replacing him with a transition to democracy.
If an effort specifically called “Hands off my Constitution” failed in 2015 in Congo-Brazzaville, the Beninois movement’s influence can be seen in the 2016 “Bye Bye Kabila” movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Bye Bye Kabila was spearheaded, among others, by Lutte pour le Changement or LUCHA, based in Goma since 2012 and careful to accept no foreign funding, and Filimbi of Kinshasa, founded the year before. Filimbi’s founders consciously drew on the examples of Senegal’s Y’en A Marre, and Burkina’s Balai Citoyen, some of whom came to Kinshasa for the purpose. As with Senegal’s M23, Filimbi’s leadership was solidly middle-class, while it successfully mobilized popular opposition against a continuation of Kabila’s mandate. Both LUCHA and Filimbi were able to act as mobilizers of “the youth” even as their leaderships were not particularly young at the time. As would be the case in Senegal at the end of Sall’s term, the Kabila administration strategically used both arrests and releases of protest leaders as tools in an unsuccessful effort to break public opposition.
In Mauritania between 2016 and 2019, a movement arose opposing any change to the constitution enabling an extension of term limits. While it did not use the “hands off” terminology of Benin and Senegal, opting instead for a laconic “no,” it did have early and consistent support from resident constitutional scholars, following a pattern established by other successful movements in the region. The movement was not able to place a member of the opposition in the presidential palace, it was successful in ensuring that that the letter of the law regarding presidential succession and elections was followed.
In Guinea-Conakry from 2019 to 2020, protests against a referendum allowing Alpha Conde to run for a third term failed; the referendum passed, Conde won, and he was swiftly ejected in a coup. The Conakry-Guinean experience might be viewed as a turning point in West Africa: since then, disaffection with incumbent regimes, when it has resulted in regime change, has always done so through the medium of a military coup; the soldiers who thus take power do not return it to civilian control.
Commonalities.
I was here in Dakar during the M2D protests and in Ouagadougou during those of Balai Citoyen. It seems that the most successful civil democratic protests of this kind have a few things in common:
Coordination among NGOs but movement independence from any one NGO
Support from active, resident, respected constitutional scholars
Widespread participation or acquiescence of a political opposition that has not boycotted the electoral process
Mobilization of a young cohort of citizens
A demographic and temporal crescendo of public protests in urban centers
Willingness of movement leaders to deploy protesters to places where they may be arrested and risk death at the hands of police
Willingness of protesters to follow this lead
Assumed, non-public encouragement of the incumbent administration to back down, coming from influential diplomatic allies, often including one willing to host the incumbent’s exile.
There is one other key ingredient: what might be called a sense of shame or pride in the incumbent administration. The idea here is that a head of state would blanche at the mounting death tolls that it would take to maintain power; that he would have a sense that departure or acquiescence would be a positive mark on his legacy. In the absence of this, protests are much less likely to have immediate impact.
That is all very theoretical. For now, eyes are on Togo.
See, eg. Cina Lawson: “my dad was an opponent of the regime and we were exiles.” The standard early history of the Lawson family is discussed in Roberto Pazzi’s Les Peuples d’Adjatado (v. 5 pp. 223ff passim); a short version is available here. A mid-twentieth-century update with an alternative early history is available in Pascale Barthelmy’s Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale ( 1918 – 1957 ); a short primary-source version is available here. A two-volume history dedicated to the family has also been published in Paris. The tendency of a small number of families to remain politically prominent over multiple generations is particularly pronounced in Togo, where some descendants of Sylvanus Olympio are still politically active.
For a dated but well-researched and informative survey of another country whose government integrates, discredits, dismisses, and reintegrates members of its opposition, see Fanny Pigeaud’s Au Cameroun de Paul Biya.
Different port rankings use different measures; Lloyd’s uses twenty-foot equivalent units, a measure of container traffic.
According to the Ivoirian news source cited later in this paragraph, the law in question dates to 2011, requiring written registration of intent to protest, and has since been amended. The incident is reported to have been a knife attack by a Chadian national who may have been either inclined to petty crime or suffering mental health problems; in recent news, including articles cited here it is usually recalled accurately, generically and without reference to scale as “a violent attack” or “a deadly attack.”
All Africa’s article on the event reprints without change a press release from the African Development Bank.
As of June 17th, the government was still holding three detainees from the protests, of whom one was Aamron; The cited article in the Paris Monde did not speak to the situation of the other two detainees.
Not to be confused with M23, Mouvement 23 mai, the armed insurrection that more recently has captured Goma and surrounding territory in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
For a discussion of how this book came to be, see:
(Tine in Kouoh, ed., 2012, v. i, p. R58, my translation)
(Diop in Kouoh, ed., 2012, v. i, p. R30; italics and ellipsis Diop’s)
(Fall in Kouoh, ed., 2012, v. i, p. R46)