Rarely, the Togolese government took stock of the “terrorist” attacks in the country, in a press release read Monday evening, November 27, on state television. During 2023, Togo reported “31 deaths, 29 injured and 3 missing” in “terrorist” incidents, Yawa Kouigan, the minister of communication and government spokesperson, told TVT . “Our country experienced an ambush attack, 11 clashes with armed terrorist groups, 9 explosions of improvised explosive devices and twenty discoveries and neutralization of improvised explosive devices,” she detailed.
According to the minister, “the first terrorist attack” took place in Sanloaga in the prefecture of Kpendjal in November 2021, and “was followed by several incursions and incidents in the savannah region”, in the north of the country, near the border with Burkina Faso.
The northern regions of Benin, Togo and Ghana face attacks and incursions from jihadist groups that thrive in the Sahel and seek to move south.
Elections in 2024
Until now, the Togolese government communicated sparsely on the subject. In April, the President of Togo, Faure Gnassingbé, indicated that jihadists had killed around 140 people, including around a hundred civilians, since their first attacks at the end of 2021 in this country.
Security will be at the heart of the organization of the next legislative and regional elections which should be held “at the latest at the end of the first quarter of 2024”, as Yawa Kouigan announced in the same press release.
The government assured that it would “take into account the persistence of security challenges to guarantee everyone – candidates, voters and citizens – the necessary security throughout the national territory”. Faure Gnassingbé has been in power since 2005 after succeeding his father, General Eyadéma Gnassingbé, who ruled the country with an iron fist for thirty-eight years.