Regionalization of Electoral Politics in Togo
Radim Tobolka [email protected] 30 July 2014 Comments welcome!
ABSTRACT
The article provides both quantitative and qualitative evidence that Togolese electoral politics is regionalized along a north- south axis. The argument is based on a district-level analysis of selected general elections (1958, 2007, 2010, and 2013) and fieldwork focused on the working of political parties that the author conducted in the five regions of Togo in 2012. The significance of this regionalization is twofold. At the theoretical level, the north-south patterning can be described as an example of social antagonism that is primarily regional and not ethno-linguistic, a rare occurrence in sub-Saharan Africa. Using Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) terminology, we conceptualize it as a case of centre-periphery conflict. Secondly, the regional perspective enables a novel interpretation of the Togolese political deadlock that has hitherto been explained as a combination of the regime’s authoritarian practices and divisions within the opposition camp. The article argues that the regionalization is an additional essential element that helps to explain the continuation of the Gnassingbé family rule, especially after the Presidency passed from father to son in 2005.
Introduction
Since the re-introduction of multipartism in 1991, Togo has not seen a political turnover despite a steady stream of general elections. After Eyadéma Gnassingbé, Togo’s long-standing dictator, died in 2005, one of his sons, Faure Gnassingbé, replaced him via an unconstitutional seizure of power followed by a bloody presidential by-election and he eventually succeeded in installing a more humane version of the same regime. The Togolese post-1990 political trajectory attracted a limited scholarly attention which mostly focused on the country’s failed “transition to democracy”1 and elections.2 Only a minority of the texts dealt with other topics such as the security forces3 and political parties.4 These works explain the absence of political turnover by state-sponsored repression and intimidation, disunity and strategic mistakes of the opposition, close ties of the regime and its military forces with France, weak civil society, electoral fraud, biased electoral system, the political immaturity of Togolese citizens, and other related factors.
1. John Heilbrunn and Comi Toulabor, ‘Une si petite démocratisation pour le Togo...’, Politique africaine 58 (1995), pp. 85–100; John Heilbrunn, ‘Social origins of National Conferences in Benin and Togo’, Journal of Modern African Studies 31, 2 (1993), pp. 277–299; Kokou Folly Lolowou Hetcheli, ‘Démocratie électorale et violence politique au Togo’, Revue Perspectives & Sociétés 3, 2 (2012), pp. 31–56; Mathurin Houngnikpo, ‘Democratization in Africa: Double standards in Benin and Togo’, Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 25, 2 (2001), pp. 51–65; Dirk Kohnert, ‘Togo: Thorny transition and misguided aid at the roots of economic misery’ (MPRA Paper no. 9060, German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, 2007); Kathryn Nwajiaku, ‘The National Conferences in Benin and Togo revisited’, Journal of Modern African Studies 32, 3 (1994), pp. 429–447; Marc Pilon, ‘La transition togolaise dans l’impasse’, Politique africaine 49 (1993), pp. 136–140; Jennifer Seely, ‘The legacies of transition governments: Post-transition dynamics in Benin and Togo’, Democratization 12, 3 (2005), pp. 357–377; Jennifer Seely, The legacies of transition governments in Africa: the cases of Benin and Togo (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009). 2. Marc Pilon, ‘L’observation des processus electoraux: enseignements de l‘élection présidentielle au Togo (août 1993)’, Politique africaine 46 (1994), pp. 137–143; Tyson Roberts, ‘The legislative election in Togo, October 2007’, Electoral Studies 27, 3 (2008), pp. 558– 561; Jennifer Seely, ‘The unexpected presidential election in Togo, 2005’, Electoral Studies 25, 3 (2006), pp. 611–616; Jennifer Seely, ‘Togo’s presidential election 2010’, Electoral Studies 30, 2 (2011), pp. 372–375; Radim Tobolka, ‘Togo: Legislative Elections of July 2013’, Electoral Studies (2014),
Map of Togo: Administrative division, demography and politico-cultural areas
Sources: author; Nicoué Gayibor (ed.), Histoire des Togolais. Des origines aux années 1960, vol. 1 (Karthala, Paris, 2011), p. 48; République togolaise, ‘Quatrième recensement général de la population et de l’habitat. Résultats provisoires’ (Bureau central du recensement, Lomé, 2010), p. 2; République togolaise, ‘Recensement général de la population. Résultats définitifs’ (Bureau central du recensement, Lomé, 2011), p. 57.
Note: There are currently 35 préfectures plus the capital Lomé that correspond to 30 electoral districts (five electoral districts are composed of two préfectures and one préfecture is merged with Lomé).
The goal of this article is to show that Togolese electoral politics are regionalized into three politico-cultural areas along a north-south axis as shown in the map presented in Figure 1. We argue in this study that the existence of the three politico-cultural areas does not simply reflect ethno-linguistic composition of the Togolese society. Instead, we claim that the regionalization results from a host of geographic, historical, cultural, and socio-economic factors that have their own dynamics. Making use of Lipset and Rokkan’s5 terminology, we conceptualize this phenomenon as a variant of the centre- periphery conflict. There has been no systematic attempt to assess the role of the so called “north-south question” in the post-1990 political development of Togo.6 As far as the period of Eyadéma’s absolute rule from 1967 to 1990 is
5. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, ‘Cleavage structures, party systems and voter alignments: An introduction’, in Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds), Party systems and voter alignments: Cross-national perspectives (Free Press, New York, 1967), pp. 1–64. 6. Boona Ketehouli’s ‘Etude sur les dissensions ethniques et régionales au Togo’, (Ministère des droits de l’homme, de la démocratie et de la réconciliation, Lomé, 2005) offers a fascinating insight into the Togolese society and politics but suffers from two problems. Firstly, it conflates inter-ethnic and north-south rivalries; secondly, it provides little concrete evidence of the north-south antagonism; cf. Têtêvi Godwin Tété-Adjalogo, Le Togo: la vraie/fausse question nord-sud (Editions Haho, Lome, 2007). 2 concerned, both Brown7 and Toulabor8 judged the factor to be of little relevance. Both concluded that the supposed north-south antagonism was in fact a tribalist ideology actively promoted by Eyadéma to justify the 1963 coup d’état and the existence of his military dictatorship. It was possible because ‘in a plural society, it [tribalism] is the most easily mobilized and manipulated of all cultural themes’9 and the uneven socio-economic development of the north and south of the country was a common knowledge. In our view, the regionalist undercurrent was indeed dormant between 1967 and 1990 and remained marginal until 2005. On the other hand, we are going to argue that it not only is manifest in post- 2005 electoral politics, but is indispensable to comprehend the complexity of the current political deadlock.
The paper has seven sections and opens in Section 1 with a brief introduction to the Togolese party system and elections and this is followed by an overview of general election results over the last three decades. The text then presents three kinds of evidence to establish and assess the extent of political regionalization in Togo in Sections 3, 4 and 5. Firstly, in Section 3 using district-level election results from 1958, 2007, 2010, and 2013, it provides a quantitative overview of the north-south patterning that brackets out the role of the ethnic factor. Secondly, in Section 4, it enquires into opposition attempts to form party coalitions along the north-south axis. Thirdly, in Section 5, it analyses a recent experiment undertaken by the Togolese regime to create a national political party. The paper in Section 6 and 7 then theorizes about regionalization as a variant of the centre-periphery struggle. The concluding section evaluates the significance of the regionalization for Togolese national politics where the opposition is unable to score an election victory, while the ruling clique finds it difficult to gain a comfortable electoral margin and tends to resort to authoritarian practices that marred the period from 1991 to 2005.
1. Togo’s Party System and Elections10
Immediately after the parliament approved a charter on political parties in April 1991, the broad alliance of opposition associations known as FAR (Front des associations pour le renouveau) disintegrated into a multitude of political parties never to unite again. It looks as if each opposition leader founded his or her own party; and this is the origins of a majority of contemporary parties (e.g. CDPA, CAR, ADDI, CPP [via UTD], and MCD [via PDR]).11 The party scene, which crystallized in 1991 and 1992, remained stable for almost 20 years as Table 1 demonstrates. Very few durable new parties were founded between 1993 and 2009: only CPP (a refurbished UTD), MCD (splinter of PDR) and PDP (genuinely new).
During this period, members of what was once the RPT (note that acronyms for all parties discussed is given in Table 1) held office and the opposition was divided between UFC, chaired by Gilchrist Olympio, son of the first President of Togo, and CAR, headed by Yawovi Agboyibo, a former human rights lawyer. This division among Togo’s opposition parties is long-standing and deep-seated. The two camps did not agree on whether to boycott the first post-1990 parliamentary elections in 1994; and the poll was eventually only boycotted by the stronger UFC party as shown in Table 2. This stance split the opposition votes and very probably prevented political turnover when Edem Kodjo, a former regime man competing under the minor UTD opposition label, sided with Eyadéma against the winner CAR. Subsequent parliamentary elections, in 1999 and 2002, were boycotted by both camps. The split re-emerged in 2006, after the opposition and the government signed the ‘Accord politique global’: CAR chairman Agboyibo accepted Faure Gnassingbé’s offer to become the prime minister of the transitional government despite the fact that the stronger UFC
7. David Brown, ‘Sieges and scapegoats: The politics of pluralism in Ghana and Togo’, Journal of Modern African Studies 21, 3 (1983), pp. 431–460. 8. Comi Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadéma (Karthala, Paris, 1986), pp. 32–40. 9. Brown, ‘Sieges and Scapegoats’, p. 448. 10. Besides several months of desk research of both primary and secondary sources in French and English, the text draws on a fieldwork that the author conducted in Togo in October and November 2012. The fieldwork included 23 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with members of Togolese political parties. Altogether, 35 members from ten different political parties (ADDI, ANC, CAR, CDPA, MCD, OBUTS, PDP, Sursaut Togo, UFC, and UNIR) participated in the interviews. In terms of hierarchy, four respondents were national level party officials or MPs, 15 were middle rank officials (regional or préfectoral), two were lower level officials (section and sub-section), nine were regular party members, and the exact position of five others was not established. The interviews took place in seven different locations: Atakpamé, Dapaong, Kpalimé, Kara, Lomé, Sokodé, and a small town in the Savanes region. Informed consent procedure was performed with all respondents. The conversations were not recorded; only hand-written notes were taken. The shortest interview lasted 20 minutes, the longest one 195 minutes, the average length was 75 minutes. 11. Apedo-Amah, ‘Togo: le ventre mou d’une démocratisation’. 3 protested against his appointment.12 The national vote share of UFC and CAR in the 2007 elections was larger than the RPT’s, i.e. 45% vs. 39%. However, due to ‘votes per seat’ imbalances between electoral districts and the mandate allocation rules in place, the divided opposition vote although constituting a plurality yielded a disproportional 38% of seats in parliament.13
Table 1. Main political parties in post-1990 Togo
First president Abbr. Name in full Founded Notes Name Background Soldier, active participant Former single party and instrument of social control Rassemblement du Eyadéma of the 1963 coup d’état, during Eyadéma’s military dictatorship, ruling from RPT 1969 peuple togolais Gnassingbé President of Togo 1967- 1969 till April 2012 when it was dissolved by 2005, Kabiyè from Pya Eyadéma’s son Faure Gnassingbé Lawyer, prime minister CAR won the 1994 elections but was outmanoeuvred Comité d’action Yawovi CAR 1991 2006-2007, Ouatchi by Eyadéma’s RPT and Edem Kodjo’s UTD; CAR pour le renouveau Agboyibo from Yoto préfecture gained 4 MP seats in 2007 and 5 seats in 2013 UTD won 7 MP seats in 1994, Kodjo accepted First Secretary General Eyadéma’s offer to become the prime minister, thus Union togolaise Edem of RPT, minister under UTD 1991 splitting the opposition and enabling Eyadéma to cling pour la démocratie Kodjo Eyadéma, Ewe speaker to power, UTD merged with other parties to form CPP from Kpalimé in 1999 Alliance pour la Medical doctor, currently démocratie et le Nagbandja Support base among the Moba in the northern region ADDI 1991 honorary president of développement Kampatibe of Savanes, ADDI obtained 3 MP seats in 2013 the party, MP since 2013 intégral CDPA emerged from the student opposition Convention Leopold Professor at University movement in the late 1980s; it has never won any MP CDPA démocratique des 1991 Messan of Lomé, born in Aného seats; its current chairperson is Brigitte Kafui peuples africains Gnininvi in Lacs préfecture Adjamagbo-Johnson UFC claims heritage of pre-independence CUT Exiled businessman, son (Comité de l’unité togolaise), it boycotted the legislative Union des forces de Gilchrist of President Sylvanus elections in 1994, 1999 and 2002 and won 27 MP seats UFC 1992 changement Olympio Olympio murdered in in 2007; it split after Olympio struck a power-sharing 1963, Afro-Brazilian deal with Gnassingbé in 2010, UFC gained only 3 seats in 2013 Convergence Edem Former president of Successor of UTD, the party has never won any CPP patriotique 1999 Kodjo UTD (see above) legislative seats panafricaine Manager in higher Parti démocratique Bassabi education, teacher, PDP has many teachers in its ranks and won 1 MP seat PDP 2005 panafricain Kagbara labour union leader, in 2013 native of Binah Mouvement citoyen Mouhamed MCD is a splinter of Zarifou Ayéva’s PDR (Parti pour Notary, Kotokoli from MCD pour la démocratie 2006 Tchassona la démocratie et le renouveau); the party has never won Sokodé et le développement Traoré any MP seats Former Secretary ANC is a majority wing of the UFC that split off in Alliance nationale Jean Pierre ANC 2010 General of the UFC, 2010, after the 2013 elections it became the strongest pour le changement Fabre Ewe speaker from Lomé opposition party with 16 MPs President of Togo since Successor of RPT, officially ruling Togo since the 2013 Union pour la Faure UNIR 2012 2005, son of Eyadéma elections when it gained 62 MP seats (a better result République Gnassingbé Gnassingbé than RPT in 2007) Former soldier, active NET appeals to young voters who follow internet Nouvel engagement Gerry writer and blogger of NET 2012 media; it had a surprisingly strong showing in the 2013 togolais Taama Nawda/Kabiyè origin elections but did not win any MP seats from Siou, born in 1975
Source: author’s compilation of official election results and information from a variety of secondary sources.
The party landscape started to change quickly after the Presidential Election of 2010. In May 2010, it was discovered that UFC chairman Olympio without the knowledge of the party’s national committee, had struck a power-sharing deal with the ruling RPT that gave 7 ministerial portfolios to the UFC in the new government. This revelation led to the split
12. Kohnert, ‘Togo’, p. 19. 13. Roberts, ‘The legislative election in Togo, October 2007’. 4 of UFC. Although the Olympio’s minority faction managed to retain the UFC party label (with the help of the regime- controlled judiciary), its shift from radical opposition to the cooperation with the government led to its demise. The party won only 3 MP seats in 2013, a decrease from 27 in 2007. This poor showing may spell the end of the Olympio family’s eight decade influence on Togolese politics. In the meantime, the majority UFC faction headed by the former UFC general secretary Jean Pierre Fabre founded a new ANC party in October 2010. The ANC spearheaded the creation of CST (Collectif sauvons le Togo)14 opposition coalition in April 2012 which subsequently was the first runner up (with 19 MP seats) in the 2013 elections following the ruling party with 62 seats.15
In any case, the most important opposition division - the one between CAR and UFC - survived the UFC split. When ANC, the main heir of UFC, became the leading member of the CST coalition, a parallel opposition coalition Arc-en-ciel (Rainbow) was formed under the leadership of CAR. The reasons for the continuing division are partly connected to the earlier disagreements between UFC and CAR, and to the composition of CST coalition which includes a small but well- funded political formation OBUTS (Organisation pour bâtir dans l’union un Togo solidaire). When Agbéyomé Kodjo, President of OBUTS, served as Eyadéma Gnassingbé’s Interior Minister in 1993, about 20 people were shot dead in the ‘Fréau jardin massacre’ by security forces during a peaceful opposition demonstration.16 Many people hold Agbéyomé Kodjo responsible for the event. Later, when the same Agbéyomé Kodjo served as prime minister between 2000 and 2002, CAR chairman Agboyibo spent seven months in prison after being prosecuted for defaming Kodjo. On the other hand, it was during Agboyibo’s transitional government that the gerrymandered electoral districts that disadvantage the opposition were approved by the National Assembly.17 In 2012, changing the biased electoral legislation was one of the main demands of the widespread anti-government protests led by CST.
Apart from the UFC break-up, there were other developments as well. In April 2012, Faure Gnassingbé took the bold step of dissolving his own party, the RPT, which was founded by his father in 1969 and was instrumental in maintaining the regime for more than 40 years. On the same day, President Gnassingbé launched a new political formation UNIR which fared better in the subsequent parliamentary elections in 2013 than the RPT had done six years earlier. Almost simultaneously, another successful political project, though much smaller, was started by a generation younger northerner Gerry Taama. His brand new party NET fielded candidates in only four districts, but obtained about the same number of votes as former Prime Minister, Edem Kodjo’s party, CPP, which competed in ten districts.18 The party does not fit easily into the post-1990 “regime-opposition axis” and its identity remains vague.
From a theoretical view, the party system in Togo is similar to other sub-Saharan countries in its elitism and ethno- regional underpinning. As for the former, we recall Manning’s19 assertion that ‘[b]oth in the first period of multiparty politics in Africa immediately after independence, and in the “second independence” in the 1990s, parties often grew not out of socioeconomic cleavages or struggles over the nature of state authority, but out of elites’ urgent need for electoral vehicles which would allow them to compete in the newly devised rules of the political game’. As we have seen, the elite nature of the Togolese political parties has greatly contributed to the opposition fragmentation and the absence of political turnover. As for ethno-regionalism, it is related to the hostile environment in which the parties operate.20 Togo’s parties’ ability to withstand these pressures is usually achieved through their organizational reliance on ethno-regional social networks because alternative networks that the parties could lean on or co-opt are rarely in place.21 The majority of Togolese parties have an ethnic or ethno-regional core.22,23 The opposition division between the “old” UFC/ANC versus
14. This coalition name translates to the ‘Save Togo Collective’ in English. 15. Roberts, ‘The legislative election in Togo, October 2007’; Tobolka, ‘Togo’. 16. CVJR du Togo, ‘Rapport final’ (La Commission Vérité Justice et Réconciliation du Togo, Lomé, 2012), pp. 192–194. 17. Roberts, ‘The legislative election in Togo, October 2007’, p. 559. 18. This observation is based on 61 files downloaded from
It is important at this early juncture to supplement our discussion of Togo’s party system with some brief comments about the nature of general election over the last three decades; as this provides important contextual evidence regarding the regional nature of Togolese politics in terms of ethnic and ‘centre-periphery’ factors: themes that will be developed more fully in later sections of this paper.
2. General Elections after 1990
In Togo, in contrast to other sub-Saharan countries, parliamentary and presidential elections do not coincide; and the polls come in more or less regular intervals of one to three years. By the time of writing this article, five legislative and five presidential general elections had been held as shown in the second column of Table 2. According to official results, all five presidential elections were won by Eyadéma or his son Faure Gnassingbé and all but one legislative elections were won by the ruling RTP/UNIR. The only opposition victory in 1994 was followed by a period when RPT ruled in a coalition with a minor opposition party UTD before attaining the majority again via a set of by-elections in 1996.26 Only four out of the 10 general elections - those in 1994, 2007, 2010, and 2013 - were reasonably competitive and their results viewed as credible by the international community as outlined in the penultimate column of Table 2.
Table 2. General elections in Togo since the reintroduction of multipartism in 1991
Type of Opposition Year Violence† Credibility†† Comment election participation UFC president Gilchrist Olympio banned to run, all main opposition 1993 Presidential Boycott Yes Low candidates boycotted the election; Eyadéma secures the first term in office in the multiparty era Boycotted by UFC, the ruling RPT lost according to official results Partial 1994 Legislative Yes High nevertheless; the opposition CAR wins 36 MP seats against 35 of the ex- boycott single RPT party (n=81) Gilchrist Olympio opposition candidate; the national election committee 1998 Presidential Full Medium Low disintegrated; victory of Eyadéma announced by the minister of interior and refused by the EU observer mission All main opposition parties boycotted the election, RPT allocated 79 MP 1999 Legislative Boycott No Low seats (n= 81) All main opposition parties boycotted the election, RPT allocated 72 MP 2002 Legislative Boycott No Low seats (n=81) Olympio banned to run, Bob Akitani UFC candidate; isolated incidents of violence; African observers satisfied with the election; no EU or US 2003 Presidential Full Medium Medium observer mission present; Eyadéma secures the third “multiparty” term in office UFC president G. Olympio banned to run; widespread violence; EU and 2005 Presidential Full Yes Low US declare the vote not free and fair; Eyadéma’s son Faure Gnassingbé secures his first term in office The first legislative elections with UFC participation, RPT wins 50 seats 2007 Legislative Full No High against 27 of UFC and 4 of CAR (n=81) Faure Gnassingbé wins his second term in office when he beats Jean-Pierre 2010 Presidential Full No High Fabre of UFC New presidential party UNIR wins 62 MP seats, opposition coalition CST 2013 Legislative Full No High 19, opposition coalition Arc-en-ciel 6, governmental UFC 3, one MP independent (n=91)
24. Eastern Ewe are called Ouatchi. In 2007, CAR won four MP seats; three of them in Yoto, the native district of its founder, Yawovi Agboyibo. In 2013, CAR candidates on Arc-en-ciel coalition lists won five MP seats, three of them in Yoto district again. 25. As for PDP, the party is strong in Binah prefecture where its founder, Bassabi Kagbara, comes from. However, in 2013, the PDP’s only MP did not win his seat in Binah but in Dankpen, another northern district that does not neighbour Binah. The 2012 fieldwork data also indicate the party is a non-ethnic project. As for the “new” UFC (UFC after the split in 2010), it cannot be called “southern” anymore. Most of its voters inhabit the Plateaux, Maritime and Savanes regions. The party won two MP seats in Savanes and one MP seat in Plateaux in 2013. It has clearly lost its original southern ethno-regional base. 26. Katharine Murison, ‘Togo: recent history’, in Iain Frame (ed.), Africa South of the Sahara 2009 (Routledge, London, 2008), pp. 1200– 1209; Seely, The legacies of transition governments in Africa. 6 Sources: ACAT France et al., ‘Déclaration de 8 ONG sur les élections présidentielles au Togo’, Survie, 2003,
Note: † Violence immediately before, during, or after polling day †† Credibility = credibility of popular support as indicated by the official results, i.e. to what extent the official results reflect popular support. Factors that lower credibility: opposition boycott, violence, low voter turnout, non-adherence to legal framework and government-opposition agreements, artificial barriers to opposition candidacies, large-scale fraud, tendentious court decisions about complaints and appeals, etc. Factors that increase credibility: opposition victory, transparency of published results, favourable reporting by election observers, etc.
In our reading of the post-1990 politics in Togo, the combined forces of the opposition (UFC/ANC plus CAR) had a greater share of popular support at least until 2007: even if the election results support this interpretation as is the case for the 1994 and 2007 polls or run counter to it as is the case for the 1998, 2003 and 2005 contests. According to Toulabor,27 in the 1998 presidential elections, the opposition candidate Olympio even won in Kabiyè-dominated districts. In another non-boycotted poll in 2003, Bob Akitani was the main opposition candidate. Although Akitani was less well known than Olympio, there is little evidence to suggest that the voting behaviour differed from that evident in 1998. The same argument applies to Akitani’s candidacy during the presidential elections of 2005.28
Having set the party system context of contemporary Togo politics in the first two sections, we are now in a position to look in greater detail at the electoral foundations of regional politics in Togo though an empirical analysis of recent election results.
3. District Level Analysis of Election Results
For the quantitative analysis of regional patterning of electoral politics, we use district-level results for the 2007, 2010 and 2013 national elections.29 To put these elections in a broader context, we include the results from 1958, the last competitive poll preceding Togo’s independence. According to Roberts,30 the 1958 election ‘was arguably Togo’s last freely contested multiparty legislative election until October 2007’.
Table 3 shows popular support for the incumbent and the main opposition contender in the five administrative regions of Togo during the four selected elections. In 1958, the coalition of northern UCPN (l’Union des chefs et des populations du nord) and predominantly southern PTP (le Parti togolais du progrès) competed against the pro-independence, Ewe- dominated CUT. As it turned out, large numbers of northerners voted CUT at the expense of their own conservative
27. Toulabor, ‘Violence militaire, démocratisation et ethnicité au Togo’, p. 113. 28. See Seely ‘The unexpected presidential election in Togo, 2005’, p. 613, for an opposing view. 29. We exclude year 1994 for two reasons. Firstly, the district-level results are not easily available. Secondly, while the aggregated results of the 1994 elections are broadly credible (opposition victory), it is uncertain whether the same can be said about the district-level results. 30. Roberts, ‘The legislative election in Togo, October 2007’, p. 558. 7 political representatives assembled in UCPN and the former scored as surprising victory.31 We see that the support for CUT is spread more or less evenly from north to south with the exception of Kara. There are no “southern” versus “northern” tendencies.
Table 3. General elections of 1958, 2007, 2010, and 2013: the incumbent versus the opposition†
Region 1958 Legislative†† 2007 Legislative 2010 Presidential 2013 Legislative (from north % % % % to south) Incumbent Opposition Incumbent Opposition Incumbent Opposition Incumbent Opposition UCPN+PTP CUT RPT UFC Gnassingbé Fabre UNIR CST Savanes 24 76 57 10 85 12 61 17 Kara 68 32 75 5 86 11 72 3 Centrale 31 69 70 14 85 13 74 12 Plateaux 18 82 43 40 63 33 59 14 Maritime 29 71 16 60 32 60 24 51
Sources: Adam Carr, ‘Republic of Togo. Legislative elections of 14 October 2007’, Psephos: Adam Carr’s Election Archive, n.d.,
† Electoral system in 1958 legislative and 2010 presidential elections: first-past-the post; electoral system in the 2007 and 2013 legislative elections: proportional with majoritarian effect due to low district magnitudes. †† The number of valid votes that the candidates gained in each electoral district is not indicated by Gayibor for the 1958 elections. The average of district percentages is used instead.
The years 2007 and 2010 show that the opposition had difficulties to obtain votes to the north of the Plateaux region; in 2013 it hardly reached beyond the Maritime region. In a mirror image, the ruling party had a great difficulty to get a solid foothold in the south, especially in the Maritime region. The increased support for the opposition in the northern Savanes region in 2013 (17%) was due to northern party ADDI joining the CST coalition. The drop in opposition support in the Plateaux region in 2013 (compared to 2007) is caused by the success of the UNIR party project.32 Compared to 1958, there is a clear north-south split is visible in 2007, 2010 and 2013. The ruling party is firmly implanted in the Savanes, Kara and Centrale regions while the opposition holds the Maritime region. In sum, the Plateaux region is a contested “middle” ground.33
For the next calculation, rather than the administrative regions, we will use the folk imagery of the „North versus South” politico-cultural division. As the calculation seeks to isolate the impact of the ethnic factor on the election results, basic information about the ethno-linguistic composition of Togo is necessary. The country is a patchwork of 20 to 50 ethnic groups of various sizes and historical relatedness speaking about 40 languages.34 As elsewhere in West Africa, their 31. Nicoué Gayibor (ed.), Histoire des Togolais. Des origines aux années 1960, vol. 4 (Karthala, Paris, 2011), pp. 650–663; Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadéma, p. 19. 32. The drop in opposition support in 2013 does not disappear when the second main opposition force is included in the count. In 2007, UFC plus CAR obtained 47% of Plateaux votes; in 2013, CST plus Arc-en-ciel obtained only 23% of Plateaux votes. 33. Due to the lack of credible election results, we do not know to what extent the electoral split already existed between 1993 and 2005. In our reading of the situation, the split was less pronounced because of the country-wide hostility towards Eyadéma. There is at least one academic source that suggests otherwise: when interpreting the 1993 elections, von Trotha, ‘C’est la pagaille’, pp. 158–159, notes a marked north-south division. According to the official results of the boycotted elections, there was a low voters’ turnout in the south and high turnout in the north. At the same time, the proportion of votes for Eyadéma was high in the north; in the south, the few people who voted in the south, preferred to cast their votes for two marginal candidates who remained in the competition. In our view, these numbers reflect the manipulation of the electoral process rather than popular support. 34. Nicoué Gayibor (ed.), Histoire des Togolais. Des origines aux années 1960, vol. 1 (Karthala, Paris, 2011), pp. 27–60; Paul Lewis, Gary Simons and Charles Fennig (eds), Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 17th edition (SIL International, Dallas, 2013); Toulabor, Le Togo sous 8 geographic distribution corresponds very roughly to climatic zones running in east – west direction. The largest collectivities are the Ewe (42% of the population), the Kabiyè (14%), the Moba (7%), and the Kotokoli (6%) Lamba (4% of the population) and Nawdeba (3.5% of the population);35 with the exception of the Ewe, all of them consider themselves “northern”. As everywhere else, the relations between these ethnic groups are shaped by their past and present interactions, occupational specializations, religious allegiances, languages, cultural stereotypes, etc.36 Political awareness of the Togolese ethic groups varies and is generally low. Only two ethnic identities are sharply politicized: Ewe and Kabiyè. In addition, the 2013 election results as well as some older evidence suggest that the Moba may be capable of acting in a politically cohesive way; and ally themselves with the Ewe against the Kabiyè37 (Figure 1).
As the second step, we need to delimit the three politico-cultural areas geographically. Looking at the electoral support as captured in Table 3, it is tempting to include the three most northern regions (Savanes, Kara and Centrale) in the North. However, in folk understanding, the best candidate for the centre of Togo’s political gravity is the town of Blitta in the prefecture of the same name.38,39 For this reason, we will exclude this préfecture from the North (Figure 1). The delimitation of the polito-cultural South follows a different logic. We cannot include in it all the territory south of Blitta. In the folk representation of the North/South dichotomy, the South roughly equates with the historical Ewe lands.40 Therefore, the South starts about half-way between Blitta and the coast. In this way, we split Togo into three politico- cultural units: North, South and Centre, the latter being a residual space in-between as shown earlier in Figure 1).41
Table 4 shows the dynamics of electoral support in the politico-cultural areas we have just delimited. Without any detailed district-level data on the distribution and voting behaviour of ethnic groups, we are forced to make two assumptions. Firstly, while there is no evidence that any northern ethnic group allies itself automatically with the Kabiyè, their neighbours and ethno-linguistic “cousins”, Lamba and Nawdeba, share the same rural-rural migration predicament with them.42 Considered “intruders” in the south and centre of the country, they may have strong reasons not to vote for any party that they would consider Southern. Therefore, in Table 4, we classify them together with the Kabiyè as if they had similar political preferences.43 To be able to assess the impact of their political behaviour, we classify all Kabiyè, Lamba and Nawdeba as living in the North. While not exactly true, this assumption dilutes any indications of the possible difference in the North-South dynamics that Table 4 is meant to show; therefore, if these indications are present anyway, it makes them more solid.44 Secondly, we assume that all Ewe live in the South. This is largely true and it is the way we defined this politico-cultural area.
Eyadéma, pp. 11–12. 35. The last census was conducted in 2010 but the final report does not include any information on ethnic groups. The previous census results from 1981 can be found in United Nations, ‘Written replies by the Government of Togo to the list of issues (CERD/C/TGO/17) to be taken up in connection with the consideration of the 6th to 17th periodic reports of Togo (CERD/C/TGO/17)’ (United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Geneva, 2008). This source lists 38 ethnic categories. In addition, an international household survey was conducted in Togo in 2006 with 6,462 households surveyed: IHSN Survey Catalogue, ‘Togo - Enquête à indicateurs multiples 2006’,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Population†† Valid votes Other Kabiyè Ruling Politico- Ewe-led parties/ Difference Total Lamba Ewe Total party/ Elections cultural opposition† candidate Nawdeba candidate area s
Number % % % Number % % % % Area Absolute North 1,920,565 34 62 0 725,554 32 67 15 17 5* 2007 Centre 781,422 14 0 0 340,518 15 52 42 6 16 Legislative South 2,983,114 52 0 80 1,227,744 54 21 69 11 -11** Total 5,685,101 100 21 42 2,293,816 100 39 47 14 North 2,078,377 34 63 0 791,406 39 85 14 1 22* 2010 Centre 849,164 14 0 0 306,803 15 69 30 1 42 Presidential South 3,263,623 53 0 80 942,337 46 38 60 2 -20** Total 6,191,164 100 21 42 2,040,546 100 61 38 1 North 2,249,647 33 63 0 625,419 33 68 18 14 5* 2013 Centre 922,779 14 0 0 239,985 13 66 17 17 25 Legislative South 3,570,674 53 0 79 1,014,521 54 29 59 12 -20** Total 6,743,100 100 21 42 1,879,925 100 47 40 13
Sources: Election results: see Table 3. Demographic data: IHSN Survey Catalogue, ‘Togo - Enquête à indicateurs multiples 2006’,
Notes: † UFC + CAR + CDPA in 2007; Fabre + Agboyibo + Adjamagbo-Johnson in 2010; CST + Arc-en-ciel in 2013 †† Data for 2007 and 2013 are calculated using regional population growth rates. * Column 7 minus column 3 ** Column 8 minus column 4
Relying on the two assumptions noted above, columns 3 and 4 of Table 4 show that, between 2007 and 2013 the Kabiyè, Lamba and Nawdeba comprised about 63% of the population of the north; and the Ewe comprised about 80% of the population of the South. There is a significant overlap between the area electoral support for the ruling party/opposition and the geographic distribution of the respective ethnic groupings. This overlap is not unexpected. Given the post-1945 history of Togo, the southern Ewe should be as motivated to vote for the Ewe-led opposition as the Kabiyè (plus some Lamba and Nawdeba) should be motivated to vote for the ruling party. The most important thing to notice is that in all three elections, in the North, the ruling party had a greater share of election support than the proportion of its putative ethnic base in the population as indicated in columns 3 and 7 of Table 4. In the South, on the other hand, the Ewe-dominated parties always had a smaller share of election support than their putative ethnic base. See columns 4 and 8 of Table 4 for details. The absolute difference ranged from 16 (in 2007) to 42 (in 2010) percentage points as shown in column 11 of Table 4. How to explain the difference? In spite of the fact that Table 3 is a simplification, it suggests that some of the Ewe do not vote for the Ewe-led opposition. Transferring the same logic to the North, we can expect that some Kabiyè (Lamba, Nawdeba) do not vote for the Kabiyè-led ruling party.45 Obviously, these “missing votes” have to come from other ethnic groups. However, the same reasoning cannot be applied as easily in the South because there are no such “missing votes”: the population proportion of the Ewe is always higher that the opposition vote
45. Cf. Toulabor, ‘Violence militaire, démocratisation et ethnicité au Togo’, p. 113. 10 share. In other words, the input of pro-opposition non-Ewe votes in the South is smaller than the input of pro-incumbent non-Kabiyè (non-Lamba, non-Nawdeba) votes in the North.
Of course, other reasons may explain these electoral dynamics in terms of five alternative causal mechanisms: (1) it is possible that the election results were rigged (or rigged more) in the North and not in the South,46 (2) it is possible that people in the North voted for the ruling party under pressure, (3) Northern population is mostly rural; the ruling party may have “bought” the rural votes via electoral gift-giving, (4) the Southern Ewe-led parties have a weak presence in the North; people vote the party with the strongest presence, i.e. the ruling party, (5) the political style of the Southern parties does not appeal to Northern peoples; at the same time, the political style of the ruling party has a non-negligible appeal in the South.47
While there is very probably some truth in all these alternative explanations, our model suggests that the electoral dynamics in the three regions are different. Now it is appropriate to switch attention away from the dynamics of district level electoral politics toward the outcomes of elections: government formation processes.
4. Government Coalition Formation in Togo
As far as the behaviour of political parties is concerned, we would expect the regionalization to manifest itself in two ways. Firstly, the opposition political parties will create North-South coalition only rarely and with difficulties. Northern parties will be suspicious of Ewe real agenda and the Ewe-led parties may think they do not need Northern support because a repetition of the 1958-style victory is still possible.48 Secondly, it will be hard to create a national party as the project will tend to have a different appeal in each of the three politico-cultural areas.
As for the coalition formation, we need to look at presidential and parliamentary polls separately. There were four presidential elections that the opposition did not boycott, i.e. 1998, 2003, 2005, and 2010 – as shown earlier in Table 2. The opposition agreed on one common candidate only in of them, in 2005.49 On the other hand, as we argue above, Olympio and Akitani probably enjoyed a larger share of popular support than Eyadéma in 1998 and 2003, respectively. Therefore, strictly speaking, no agreement on a common opposition candidate was necessary in 1998 and 2003; and the united opposition front in 2005 made no difference in terms of the official results: Eyadéma was proclaimed the winner again. The situation in 2010 differed because Faure Gnassingbé was significantly more popular than Eyadéma. Only a common opposition candidate had any chances to beat him, if at all. However, there was only a partial opposition agreement this time: UFC with the northern ADDI party and several micro parties formed FRAC (Front Républicain pour l’Alternance et le Changement), an alliance that supported one common candidate, UFC’s Fabre. Eventually, six nominally opposition candidates including Agboyibo of the second strongest opposition party CAR competed against the incumbent Faure Gnassingbé. In terms of results, only Fabre had a strong showing; other five contenders got together mere 5% of the votes.50
As for the parliamentary elections, there was no opposition agreement or coalition in 1994. The following parliamentary elections with full opposition participation took place only after 13 years, in 2007. Again, no opposition coalition was formed in 2007. It was not until the parliamentary elections in 2013, that the opposition parties, for the first time in 20 years, united into two formal coalitions. However, besides perpetuating the basic opposition division between Western and Eastern Ewe (Ouatchi), these coalitions only partially resolved the limited north-south penetration of the opposition parties. The strongest and the most radical opposition ANC united with the northern ADDI to form the CST coalition. This union bore fruits in securing two MP seats in the Savanes region.51 CAR united with three smaller parties, one southern (CDPA) and two northern (PDP and MCD) to form the Arc-en-ciel. Although the leaders of the three
46. There is no transparency of election results in Togo. Results broken down by individual polling stations are never published. 47. Note that this last alternative explanation would goes against our assumption about the symmetry between Kabiyè and Ewe voting behaviour that reflects the post-1945 history of Togo. 48. Cf. Ketehouli, ‘Etude sur les dissensions ethniques et régionales au Togo’; cf. Tété-Adjalogo, ‘Togo’, pp. 65–73. 49. Seely, ‘The unexpected presidential election in Togo, 2005’, p. 613. 50. Seely, ‘Togo’s presidential election 2010’, p. 374. 51. Two ADDI candidates heading CST coalition lists in districts Tône-Cinkassé and Tandjouaré, respectively. Also, an ADDI member in the fifth place of the CST list in Grand Lomé district was elected. 11 minor parties were at the top of Arc-en-ciel lists, none of them won a seat.52 Thus, the only tangible result of the Arc-en- ciel coalition agreement was one seat won by a PDP candidate in the northern district of Dankpen.53
While the distrust between ANC and CAR is well-known, it is less clear what made PDP and MCD to ally themselves with the weaker, regional CAR rather than the stronger and broader-based ANC. In the research interviews, three out of four respondents from the smaller parties (PDP, MCD and CDPA) decried the lack of opposition unity in general. They showed no preference for CAR over ANC. In their opinion, the opposition fragmentation was caused by disagreements between party leaders, all based in Togo’s capital, Lomé. Publicly, the opposition explained the failure to create a large coalition by disagreements over strategy: CST preferred a confrontational campaign with large-scale mobilization and often violent street protest, while Arc-en-ciel took a more moderate stance. However, the role of north-south friction cannot be discarded either. It is possible that ANC did not offer PDP and MCD sufficient concessions in terms of modus operandi of their cooperation and the placement of their candidates on the coalition lists because it thought it would get enough votes even without these northern parties. As a consequence, the two opposition camps again competed for the same electorate in a number of districts, the same situation as in 2007. One important difference was that this time their combined popular support (40%) fell short of that of the incumbent (47%).54
Having examined district level electoral dynamics and the process of government formation it makes sense at this point to consider the broader question of why there are no truly national parties in Togo: a characteristic that is also evident in many contemporary sub-Saharan political systems.
5. National Party Formation
The transformation of the ruling RPT into UNIR in 2012 was a carefully orchestrated attempt to create a truly national party, or at least an attempt to create such impression. From the very start, the creation of UNIR was imbued with geographic symbolism. RPT was dissolved during a congress in Blitta, Faure Gnassingbé’s birthplace and the centre of political gravity of the country. On the same day, a ‘general assembly of founders’ (Assemblée Générale des fondateurs) launched UNIR further south in Atakpamé, the most southern large urban centre not dominated by Ewe speakers. The main message following the creation of the party was UNIR ≠ RPT, i.e. UNIR is a national, multi-ethnic formation.55 As much as it may sound like a cheap marketing trick that all opposition respondents ridiculed, the fieldwork conducted in 2012 identified two social groups that answered the call. Firstly, the former opposition activists who were in their twenties between 1990 and 1994. Over the years, these politically-minded people grew disillusioned with the endlessly bickering opposition and its inability to enforce government turnover and the resultant zero impact they have on the running of public affairs. Moreover, this middle-aged disillusioned cohort grew more pragmatic and opportunistic in its political outlook. The second receptive group were young voters who did not remember the Eyadéma’s dictatorship and wanted to believe that Faure Gnassingbé was offering a genuinely new political project. Their support of UNIR was helped by a distinctly fresh-looking and technologically sophisticated UNIR campaigning. Disillusion from the split of the UFC in 2010 featured prominently in the pro-UNIR narratives of both of these groups.
In organizational terms, RPT structures were dissolved and former RPT membership does not automatically translate into UNIR membership: each individual had to re-apply. Many of the national and middle ranking members of RPT did not secure similar positions in UNIR; especially higher-level party structures were formed from new people. The federal (préfectoral) committees (so called focal points), the backbone of the party, were named by ‘Lomé’.56 Several informants claimed that the majority of the federal focal point members came from opposition parties. The author had a chance to inquire into the composition of three federal committees of UNIR totalling 17 persons. Only one of them was a member of a former RPT federal committee. At least four of them were at some point active in an opposition party (ADDI, PDR,
52. Bassabi Kagbara (PDP) headed the list in Binah and Mouhamed Tchassona Traoré (MCD) in Tchaoudjo, their respective heartlands. Brigitte Kafui Adjamagbo-Johnson (CDPA) headed the list in Ogou-Anié, outside her party’s ethno-regional base in eastern Maritime region. 53. Tobolka, ‘Togo’. 54. Adam Carr, ‘Republic of Togo. Legislative elections of 25 July 2013’, Psephos: Adam Carr’s Election Archive, n.d.,
It is unclear whether the UNIR project has any long-term goals. Although the party officially registered several weeks after the meeting in Atakpamé, its ‘constitutive congress’ has been repeatedly postponed and has not taken places to this date. The party has neither disclosed its official statutes. After the 2013 election campaign, outward signs of activity within UNIR ceased and its internet communication tools went either silent or do not contain any information about party activities. At the same time, the electoral success of UNIR is a clear sign that there is a demand for ethnically neutral political party that would overcome the crude Ewe-Kabiyè antagonism. Significantly though, the effort to harness these sentiments came from the ruling party that, compared to the opposition, has financial and clientelist resources to run such an organization and to co-opt influential individuals in it. The different regional appeal of the new party is apparent when we compare the 2007 and 2013 election results (Table 4). Taking the ratio of votes for the ruling party versus Ewe-led opposition as a measure, we see that that the position of UNIR in the North somewhat weakened compared to RPT in 2007. In the South, its standing improved but the support for the opposition is still twice as big. In the Centre, however, it enjoyed a conspicuous success. While in 2007 the support for the RPT and the Ewe-led opposition was more or less balanced, in 2013, UNIR obtained almost four times more votes than the Ewe-led opposition. This pattern conforms to our expectations regarding the relationship between regionalization and any national party project.
Having looked at the empirical evidence for district electoral patterns, national government formation and the regional dynamics underpinning attempts for form truly national parties in Togo, it is now appropriate to deal directly with the question of whether regionalization has non-ethnic foundations: a perspective adopted in this paper.
6. North-South Regionalization as a Non-ethnic Phenomenon
We have shown in Tables 3 and 4 that Togolese electoral politics is regionalized along the north-south axis. The central claim of our article is that this regional pattern does not simply reflect ethno-linguistic or ethno-regional composition of the Togolese society but has its own internal dynamics tied to geographic, historical, cultural, and socio-economic differences between the three areas: North, South and the Centre. In other words, we argue that the people in the politico- cultural North, who repeatedly vote for the ruling party rather than the southern-led opposition, do not do so because of their own ethnicity, because of sympathy to the Kabiyè as an ethnic group, or because they are opposed to the Ewe as an ethnic group. They do so because of their collective identity as “northerners” who do not see any other strong political formation that would be able to defend their “northern” interests against “southerners”. Similarly, Ewe-speakers of the South do not vote for the Ewe-led opposition because they resent “northern” ethnic groups (with the exception of the historically conditioned hostility towards the Kabiyè) but because they led the struggle against the French rule, were deprived of their prominent role after the 1963 coup d’état and because they think they are, due to their particular location, skills and culture, more competent to run state affairs than “northerners”.
13 Table 5. Comparison of the “expected” and actual vote share of the ruling party/candidate in the politico-cultural North in 2007, 2010 and 2013
Ruling party/candidate vote share in the North in % Election Difference “Expected”† Actual 2007 Legislative 53 67 + 26% 2010 Presidential 47 85 + 81% 2013 Legislative 47 68 + 45%
Sources: see Table 3.
Note: † The “expected” vote share is calculated using the values in Table 4. For example, in the South in 2007, for every percent of Ewe demographic proportion (column 4), the Ewe-led opposition obtained 0.86 percent of popular vote (column 8 divided by column 4); the “expected” vote share of the ruling party is obtained by multiplying the Kabiyè-Lamba-Nawdeba demographic proportion in the North in 2007 (column 3) by this number (62 x 0.86 ≈ 53).
The key piece of evidence for our claim can be found in Table 4, namely the larger-than-expected vote share of the ruling party in the North compared to the gains of the Ewe-led opposition in the South as indicated in columns 10 and 11 of this table. To quantify the discrepancy more precisely, we calculated, as shown in Table 5, the “expected” vote share of the ruling party in the North and compared it to its actual share in the three elections.57 We can see from this table that the actual electoral gains of the ruling party/candidate were between 26 and 81% higher than analogical pro-opposition vote in the South would make us believe.
Our supporting evidence comes from our analysis of coalition formation and the UNIR project. Given the extremely precarious situation of the opposition since autumn 1991, especially in the north of the country, there have been strong incentives to cooperate throughout the multiparty period until the present. In this light, we interpret the near absence of north-south coalitions as a sign of serious misunderstanding and deep distrust between respective opposition elites that cannot be easily brushed away by the frequently encountered laconic remark that ‘everybody wants to be a chief in Africa’. As for the notable regional difference in UNIR’s organization and electoral impact, they also point to a poor nationalization of the Togolese political space. Whether the increased electoral penetration of UNIR in the Centre and the South is in fact a beginning of the creation of such space or reaching the limits of it, remains to be seen.58 This raises the question is this north-south regionalization a reflection of centre-periphery confliction – a theme explored in the penultimate section of this paper.
7. North-South Regionalization as Centre-Periphery Conflict
In Lipset and Rokkan’s59 terminology, the regionalization of the Togolese electoral politics is best theorized as a variant of centre-periphery conflict. By classifying it as such, we do not want to imply that a similar process of cleavage creation that Lipset and Rokkan60 described for Western Europe is under way in Togo.61 Instead, we are saying (1) that the general idea of cleavage creation as a ‘translation of social conflict into political and party alternatives’62 is valid in Togo and (2) that the particular concept of territorial-cultural conflict during nation-building is useful for making sense of the Togolese electoral politics. At no point, however, we must forget that both the nature of the political parties and the state substantially differs
57. Similarly to Table 4, the calculation in Table 5 presumes that the voting behaviour of the Ewe is analogical to that of the Kabiyè: in a particular election year, the former vote for the Ewe-led opposition with the same probability that the latter vote for the ruling party. 58. As a numerical series, the RRT vote shares per electoral district in 2007 have Gini Coefficient 29.7; the UNIR district results in 2013 have Gini Coefficient of only 18.0, a substantial decrease. 59. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, ‘Cleavage structures, party systems and voter alignments’. 60. Ibid. 61. Cf. Vicky Randall, ‘Party systems and voter alignments in the new democracies of the Third World’, in Lauri Karvonen and Stein Kuhnle (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments Revisited (Routledge, London, 2001), pp. 244–265. 62. Peter Mair, ‘Cleavages’, in Richard Katz and William Crotty (eds), Handbook of Party Politics (SAGE, London, 2006), p. 371. 14 from Lipset and Rokkan’s63 model.64 In the study of sub-Saharan political parties, the centre-periphery conflict has been mentioned in two different contexts. Firstly, some authors attempted to theorize ethnicity as a social cleavage along Lipset and Rokkan’s65 lines and subsume it under the centre-periphery heading.66 This use of the term openly diverges from its original meaning and describes a situation where ‘the conflict is not so much about the dominant culture but about who controls the commanding heights of the state for the selective or particularistic distribution of patronage’.67 Secondly, the term was employed in its original sense by Osei68 in her theorization of the Ghanaian party system, for example. We follow the latter approach.
According to Bartolini and Mair’s69 operationalization of the model, ‘the concept of cleavage is restricted to those phenomena in which social reality, identity and organization combine and interact with one another’.70 Even a very cursory overview of the recent political history of Togo points to the continuing struggle over cultural dominance between the “pre-destined” South and “forgotten” North. The fact that this discourse is very much alive was confirmed during several research interviews, including former and current members of the opposition. Similarly to other West African, the socio- economic disparities between the coastal region and the inland are long-standing and the German and French colonization further reinforced them. The Ewe-speaking South had better infrastructure, more developed economy, more westernized elite, higher literacy rate, and its inhabitants felt culturally superior to the northern peoples.71 The 1940s and the 1950s brought important shifts in collective identities. In response to the pan-Ewe movement that attempted to unite various Ewe groups living in the Golden Coast and both the British and French Togoland, northern elites got politically organized. In 1951, they founded their own political party UCPN which allied itself with a pro-French PTP dominated by southerners. As noted above, this political re-positioning took a surprise turn during the 1958 elections when the population across the country, including the North, chose to support the nationalist, Ewe-led CUT, chaired by Sylvanus Olympio. For a time, it looked that the North-South antagonism lost its edge.
The situation changed again in 1963 when the CUT government was overthrown by a group of disgruntled officers from the ex-colonial army and President Olympio was murdered. The putschists came from northern ethnic groups and the locus of power gradually moved to the northern Kozah and Binah préfectures, to the hands of Etienne Eyadéma and his Kabiyè-dominated army. The murder of Olympio on the second day of the 1963 coup, supposedly by Eyadéma himself, started to be celebrated as a state holiday, a practice that was officially cancelled only at the beginning of 2014.72 The organizational manipulation of the cleavage intensified in the 1970s, when the dictatorial regime, represented by a single political party RPT, introduced an ideology that claimed that the Ewe had hegemonic inclinations and the responsibility of the (Kabiyè-led) North was to counter them.73
63. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, ‘Cleavage structures, party systems and voter alignments’. 64. We have already mentioned the elitist basis of the parties (Manning, ‘Assessing African party systems after the third wave’, p. 715) and the hostile environment in which the opposition operates (LeBas, From Protest to Parties, p. 250). Due to the close relationship between politics and economy, the ruling elites have more to lose than elsewhere in the world. In addition, a mixture of patrimonial and legal-bureacratic logic permeates state functioning which alows for prevalence of various forms of clientelism. 65. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, ‘Cleavage structures, party systems and voter alignments’. 66. Gero Erdmann, ‘Party research: Western European bias and the “African labyrinth”’, in Matthias Basedau, Gero Erdmann, and Andreas Mehler (eds), Votes, Money and Violence: Political parties and elections in sub-Saharan Africa (Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Stockholm, 2007), p. 43–48. 67. Gero Erdmann, ‘The cleavage model, ethnicity and voter alignment in Africa: Conceptual and methodological problems revisited’ (GIGA Working Papers, German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, 2007), p. 11. 68. Anja Osei, Party-voter linkage in Africa: Ghana and Senegal in comparative perspective (Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 2012), p. 137. 69. Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair, Identity, competition, and electoral availability: The stabilisation of European electorates 1885-1985 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990), pp. 2011–220. 70. Mair, ‘Cleavages’, p. 373. 71. Brown, ‘Sieges and Scapegoats’; Jeune Afrique, ‘Togo “pas de place chez nous pour des parias”. M. Antoine Idrissou Meatchi, vice- président de la République togolaise répond’, no. 222, 1965, pp. 23–25; Ketehouli, ‘Etude sur les dissensions ethniques et régionales au Togo’; Tété-Adjalogo, Le Togo; Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadéma, pp. 32–40; Yagla, L’édification de la nation togolaise. 72. Christophe Boisbouvier, ‘Togo: qui a tué l’ancien président Sylvanus Olympio?’, 2013, Jeuneafrique.com,
In spite of his ostensibly ideological position, Eyadéma’s ruthless methods directed many Togolese citizens’ attention away from the North-South tension and toward Kabiyè minority rule and the subsequent pro-democracy struggle of the 1990s. It was only after Eyadéma’s death and the outburst of military violence that accompanied the election of his son that the repression finally eased. Starting with 2007, the elections became more credible and the European Union resumed its cooperation with the government. At the same time, the cautious political liberalization was not accompanied by improvement in the governance of the country. Under these new circumstances, with new election data and the new developments on the political party scene, it became possible to examine the North-South cleavage as a primarily regional, non-ethnic phenomenon that has resurfaced after a period of relative invisibility.
At the level national politics, since 2007 in the least, Togo’s regionalization has diverted a portion of northern votes away from the opposition to the ruling party; and hindered the creation of opposition coalitions. It thus contributes to the absence of democratic political turnover. Simultaneously, the regionalization may complicate the regime’s attempt to create a nation-wide political space where it could fully deploy the incumbent advantages that accompany neo-patrimonial governance: the merging of the party and the state, clientelism, financial superiority, etc. Therefore, the North-South cleavage plays an important role in the current political deadlock. General elections continue to pose a direct threat to the regime’s survival and are always organized with utmost unwillingness and trepidation as witnessed in 2013.74 In any case, as of mid-2014, UNIR appears to be little more than an electoral strategy, a bargain between a younger generation of political opportunists of diverse ethno-regional background and the ruling Gnassingbé clique. In exchange for the fresh, multi-ethnic air and the support of Faure Gnassingbé’s continuing presidency, the President sacrificed the old RPT generation, provided the necessary finances, and let some of the new generation to take parliamentary, executive and civil service posts. There are few signs that UNIR is intended to broaden the ethnic base of the Kabiyè-dominated regime.
Re-introducing the North-South cleavage in the equation of Togolese politics helps one to situate the main political actors in their web of relationships and to grasp better their overall motivations. Together with the analysis of the regime’s authoritarian instincts and the more conventional explanations of opposition disunity, it gives a deeper insight into the complexity of Togolese predicament. On the other hand, there are other factors, even less well circumscribed, which may influence the course of events in extremely important ways and have not been touched up in this paper. For example, the three switches from the opposition to the pro-government camp – of CPP’s Edem Kodjo in 1994, CAR’s Yawovi Agboyibo in 2006 and UFC’s Gilchrist Olympio in 2010 – point to a specific Togolese political culture, to what Lawrance75 refers to as deep-rooted opportunism that formed during the colonial period and affected the path to independence.76 Another important variable is demography: 61% of the Togolese population is under the age 25 years.77 If political participation of the younger generation remains limited and governance does not improve, many of the current supporters of the UNIR may become disenchanted; and the party may find itself short of credible promises as early as during the presidential elections planned for 2015. In such case, new youth-oriented political parties formed in the centre or north of the country (such as Gerry Taama’s NET) may alter the current dynamics. Finally, it is no coincidence that the government has been dragging its feet on decentralization, first mentioned in the 1992 Constitution and elaborated in acts of law from 1998 and 2007. The regime’s control of the citizen is the tightest outside urban centres, especially in the north, and holding the local elections may significantly shake power relations nation-wide.
74. Tobolka, ‘Togo’. 75. Lawrance, Locality, mobility, and ‘nation’, pp. 1–6. 76. We mean the refocusing of CUT from the promotion of the Ewe state to the promotion of the Togolese state. 77. République togolaise, ‘Recensement général de la population. Résultats définitifs’ (Bureau central du recensement, Lomé, 2011), p. 9. 16