Togo’s Fore Gnassingbé walks a diplomatic tightrope between Russia and France

While some West African countries are choosing to solidify old ties with France and others forge new ones with Russia, one country is trying to have the best of both worlds.

After the failed military coup attempt in Benin on December 7, rebel leader Lieutenant Colonel Pascal Tigre made a discreet escape, apparently across the border into neighboring Togo. From this temporary refuge, he appears to have been able to travel to safer refuge elsewhere – possibly Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, or Niamey, Niger.

The opacity surrounding Togo’s role in the incident is typical of a country that, under the leadership of Fore Gnassingbé, knows how to gain maximum diplomatic leverage by flouting convention and forging relationships with a variety of often competing international partners.

The Lomé regime was too shrewd to be caught for openly supporting a challenge to Benin President Patrice Talon (with whom the Lomé regime’s relationship was protected at best), nor to formally confirm the Benino people’s belief that it ensured the security of coup leader Tigray. Both governments are members of the embattled Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).

However, Gnassingbé has made no secret of friendly and supportive relations with the Sahel military juntas of Burkina Faso and Niger and Mali – all three countries withdrew from ECOWAS last January.

Nor is he afraid to remind France, Togo’s traditional main international partner, that he has other options.

On October 30, President Macron welcomed Gnassingbé to the Elysee Palace for talks aimed at strengthening bilateral relations.

But less than three weeks later, the Togolese leader had a very warm meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. They formally approved a defense partnership that would allow Russian ships to use the port of Lomé, one of the best-equipped deep-water ports on Africa’s west coast and an important supply gateway for landlocked countries in the Sahel that have become key protectors of the Kremlin following military coups in 2020-2023.

While Gnassingbé’s trip to Paris was fairly low-key, his trip to Moscow was high-profile and wide-ranging.

The bilateral military agreement provides for intelligence and joint military exercises (although Lomé has no plans to provide a base for the Afrika Korps, the successor to the Kremlin-controlled, now-defunct Wagner mercenary army). All this is complemented by economic cooperation plans and announcements of the reopening of their respective embassies, both of which were closed in the 1990s.

All this inevitably made France uneasy, and Togo was once regarded as one of France’s most loyal allies.

When Lieutenant Colonel Tigris staged a coup in Benin, Macron was quick to make clear to other ECOWAS governments that France could quickly provide emergency professional military support for its intervention to protect the constitutional order.

Togolese insist their move to strengthen ties with Russia is not intended to sever ties with the West. Instead, Lome sees the move as a natural diversification of relationships.

There is a certain consistency to this argument.

Three years ago, Togo and Gabon chose to join the Commonwealth to complement their long-standing participation in the International Organization of Francophone Nations (IOF), the organization of French-speaking countries. Meanwhile, Commonwealth stalwart Anglophone Ghana joined Francophone last year.

Indeed, many West African governments today are angry at the tendency outsiders to view such ties as a choice between new Cold War alliances or taking sides in a narrow Anglophone-French rivalry between former colonial powers.

They said they wanted to be friends with a wide range of international partners and saw no reason why such relationships should be exclusive.

Perhaps more than any other leader in West Africa, Togo’s prime minister has sought to extend this pluralistic approach to his regional affairs.

Lomé is a major cargo and tourism centre, with its port accommodating the largest ocean-going container ships, and feeder vessels distributing transshipped cargo to other smaller or shallower ports unable to do so. From Lomé Airport, local flights fan out to West and Central Africa. The city is also home to banks and other regional financial entities.

These linkages help diversify the economic base of a country where rural areas remain relatively poor.

Togo needs to remain at the heart of the ECOWAS regional bloc and, indeed, straddles the key Lagos-Abidjan transport corridor, which is the bloc’s main development priority.

But Gnassingbé concluded that he also needed to maintain strong ties with the breakaway military regimes, which now form their own Alliance of States in the Sahel (AES) – an alliance that Togo’s foreign minister, Professor Robert Ducey, has even speculated about joining.

But it’s not just economic or diplomatic diversification. This is also related to Gnassingbé’s domestic political strategy.

Constitutional changes announced in 2024 and implemented this year transform the term-limited presidency into a purely ceremonial role and transfer all executive powers to the position of prime minister, now called “President of the Council”, borrowing terminology from Spanish and Italian. The following article has no term limits.

This allowed Gnassingbé to hand over the presidency to a low-profile regime stalwart and assume a new and powerful role as prime minister, with little hope of ending his restrictive rule given the long dominance of his party, the Union of the Republics (UNIR), in successive parliamentary elections.

This caused a lot of controversy. But the protest was quickly quelled.

Even individuals with peripheral links to the demonstrations have been detained. High-profile critics such as rapper Amron (real name Narcisse Essiwi Chala) or former defense minister Margaret Gnakade (wife of Gnassingbé’s late brother) have been threatened with prosecution. Journalists said they had been intimidated.

Government members accused protesters of violence. They warned of “fake news” on social media, argued that human rights arguments were being used to destabilize the situation, and accused civil society figures of fabricating accusations against security forces.

In the words of one minister: “When you encourage people to engage in gratuitous violence, that is actually terrorism.”

In September, the European Parliament approved a resolution calling for the unconditional release of political prisoners, including dual Irish-Togolese national Abdel Aziz Goma, who has been detained since 2018.

The Togolese government responded by calling the EU ambassador and telling him that the country’s judicial system operates completely independently.

With his diversified international strategy, Gnassingbé has sought to warn Western critics that he has a choice and does not need to make concessions to Europe or anyone else.

However, Togo has a history of sudden protests or riots.

Despite the upbeat tone, the new “President of the Council” may have quietly concluded that it would be prudent to adopt a gesture of magnanimity in order to quell the resentment still bubbling beneath the surface.

In his State of the Union address earlier this month, he said he would instruct the attorney general to consider the possibility of releasing prisoners.

This retreat from earlier repression suggests that not even Gnassingbé’s flexible international networks can defuse underlying political discontent at home.