Faure-Gnassingbe-of-Togo2010

Presidential voting postponed; Togo’s main opposition quits elections commission, calls it “electoral masquerade”

Special to USAfricaonline.com

Togo’s main opposition party said Saturday it had quit the commission organising presidential elections next month (March 2010).

The Union of Forces for Change said in a statement that it did not want to be associated with an “electoral masquerade,” charging that rules had not been followed in drawing up new electoral rolls.

The UFC claimed that a population census had been inadequate, minors and foreigners had been put on the roll in some areas and Togolese had not been properly made aware.

The party, headed by Gilchrist Olympio, had three members on the 17-seat commmission, whose president Taffa Tabiou told AFP their resignation would make no difference.

A presidential decree on Thursday said the polls set for February 28 had been delayed until March 4 following an opposition request.

Campaigning, which had been due to start on February 13, will now start on February 16.

In power since 2005, President Faure Gnassingbe is running for another term of office against six other candidates.

The electoral commission said last month that UFC leader Olympio had ruled himself out as a candidate by failing to appear in Lome for the medical examination required by the country’s constitution.

The UFC candidate in the February 28 poll would instead be party secretary general Jean Pierre Fabre.

A UFC official said that Olympio, 73, who lives in the United States, had been unable to come to Lome because he was suffering from “backache.”

Olympio’s father Sylvanus was the first post-independence president of Togo. He was assassinated in the 1963 coup in which Faure Gnassingbe’s father, Gnassingbe Eyadema, took part before taking power in 1967 and ruling until his death in 2005.

Faure Gnassingbe was named president by the army on his father’s death. After international protests he stepped down to allow elections, which he won, returning to the presidency the same year.

One of the candidates, Brigitte Kafui Adjamagbo-Johnson of the opposition Democratic Convention of African Peoples, is the first woman to run for the presidency in the small west African country.

The constitutional court has also proclaimed the candidature of Kofi Yamgnane, a former French government minister who holds dual nationality, invalid because his French documents give one date of birth and his Togolese documents give another.

For many observers, the election will be a test of Togolese democracy after the parliamentary elections that took place without incident in October 2007.

In Togo, presidential elections have always been followed by opposition challenges and violence, particularly in 2005 after the death of General Eyadema.

Opposition demonstrations were severely repressed, leading to between 100 and 800 deaths, according to different sources. ref: AFP