Pogo: tiny dictatorship looks East and West

Press, 14 November 1977, Page 18

Pogo: tiny dictatorship looks East and West

By

TONY HODGES

in Lome, Togo

Standing three times larger than life in the centre ot Lome, capital of the West African Republic of Togo, is a towering statue of General Gnassingbe Eyadema, Togo’s President.

Pompous in the extreme, with fatherly arm outstretched, it is a classic example of North Korean “socialist realism,” a gift frem Pyongyang to Togo’s far-from-socialist rulers. North Koreans are much in evidence in Togo. They are assisting agricultural programmes and North Korean military instructors are helping to train Togo’s army.

North Korea’s help in boosting the political fortunes of General Eyadema, who has ruled Togo since an army coup 11 years ago, is ironical, since in every other respect Togo’s ties are solidly with the West. The European Common Market countries buy more than 85 per cent of Togo’s exports — with France, 17 years after granting Togo independence, still taking 45 per cent (according to 1974 trade figures).

“Togo inspires confidence among investors,” a Canadian diplomat in Lome told me. “This is linked to the general political climate which is pro-Western.” His views were echoed during a recent visit bv the Right-wing West German politician. Mr Franz Josef Strauss. “Togo can be the Switzerland of Africa,” said Strauss, who is a longstanding admirer of Eyadema and has been here four times since 1972.

The Togo Government is, in fact, just one of several staunchly capitalistic African regimes which look to the Stalinist personality cults of Eastern rulers like Mao Tse-tung and Kim II Sung for techniques in bolstering dictatorial political systems.

The regimes of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Gabon’s Omar Bongo are cases in point. Like Mobutu and Bongo, F.yadema has modelled his personality cult on those of the North Korean and Chinese rulers.

Giant portraits of the President adorn Lome streets, and the governmentcontrolled daily “TogoPresse,” which carries one of Eyadema’s “sayings” in a box on its masthead every morning, ritualistically des-

cribes his speeches as

“brilliant” or “masterly.” The President is variously flattered as ‘Le Guide” (“The Guide”), “Le Tims onier” (“The Helmsman), “Le Pere de la Nation” (“The Father of the Nation”).

The Lome regime is keen on “animation” — the use of song and dance and slogan-shouting, involving up to two or three thousand “animators” at a time, to project in crude but dramatic form the current slogans of the Government and to glorify the President. Though President Eyadema’s regime was born from a military coup, it is buttressed by a large civilian movement, the Togolese People’s Rally (R.P.T.). This, say the regime’s ideologists, is not a “party” — a term they reserve for the partisan groupings led by Togo’s squabbling pre-coup politicians — but a “national movement”; or, as the President himself put it when he first floated the idea at a rally in 1969, “a vast movement which regroups all Togolese in the same national crusade.”

The R.P.T. is organised pyramid style, with government policies, slogans and instructions transmitted downwards from the summit (the National Council, the Central Committee and the Political Bureau) through regional and canton committees to the neighbourhood and village committees at the base.

Flanking the R.PT. are what are known as its “marching wings”. These include the R.P.T. Youth, a women’s organisation, a gov-ernment-supervised trade union federation and, most interesting of all, a “Union of Traditional Chiefs of Togo,” whose members attend government rallies and functions decked out in colourful robes and even crowns.

President Eyadema has a pre-eminent position in the

R.P.T., with the personal power to nominate the nine members of its all-powerful Political Bureau.

In fact, the personal concentration of power in President Eyadema’s hands is remarkable. He can appoint and dismiss his ministers at will; and, though he works closely with the generally technocratic Council of Ministers, he personally issues all laws in the form of decrees. There have been no general elections since the pre-coup National Assembly was abolished 11 years ago. And, as a one-party State, opposition political parties are of course illegal. But, despite its authoritarian style, the Togo Government is often proud to inform visitors that it does not have any political prisoners in its jails. This has not always been strictly true. In April, some 20 teachers, many of them at Lome’s University of Benin, were detained for their political activities; and their cases were taken up with the Togolese authorities bv an Amnesty International team which visited Lome early in October. The dissidents were released almost immediately afterwards. At present, the regime has no need to detain opponents — simply because there is hardly any organised opposition activity. By and large President Eyadema seems to be fairly popular — partly because in 1975 he decided to abolish all taxes levied on the peasantry (who make up 85 per cent of the population), a move made possible by the fourfold increase in the world price of phosphates, Togo’s key export, in 1974.

The phosphate price has fallen since then, though not to pre-1974 levels. And, observers here say, President Eyadema’s future popularity may depend on trends, beyond Togo’s control, in the world phosphate market. — O.F.N.S. Copyright.