Faure Gnassingbé
Faure Gnassingbé has ruled Togo since February 2005, when his father Eyadéma died after thirty-eight years and the army installed him within hours, the constitution was amended overnight, the speaker of parliament was kept out of the country so that he could not succeed. The African Union and ECOWAS called it a coup and made him hold an election in April, which he won and which the opposition said was stolen, in protests that killed some five hundred people and sent forty thousand across the borders. He has won every election since, in 2010, 2015 and 2020, with the constitution's term limits removed in 2002 for his father and restored in 2019 in a form that did not count his first three terms. In May 2025 he took the new office of president of the council of ministers, created by a constitutional change of 2024 that made Togo a parliamentary republic in which the leader of the majority party governs without a term limit and is chosen by a parliament his party controls. The opposition called it a constitutional coup and the protests of June 2025, led by rappers and bloggers, called the end. He was born in Afagnan in 1966, one of his father's many children, studied at the Sorbonne and took an MBA at George Washington University. He was elected to parliament for his father's home district of Blitta in 2002. He was minister of public works and mines from 2003, the son who had been prepared. The twenty years have been the port of Lomé made West Africa's largest transhipment hub with Chinese and Emirati money, and the phosphates, the growth of five per cent and the poverty of half the population. There is the mediation he has offered in the Sahel's coups and the Congo's war, which has made him useful to the region. There are the jihadist attacks in the north since 2021 that have killed soldiers and villagers in the Savanes and brought a state of emergency. The opposition's leader died in exile in 2024 and the parties are fragments. The family has now held Togo for fifty-nine years, the longest of any in Africa. The constitution of 2024 has been written so that it need not end.
- Lived: 1966 CE – ?
- Nationality: Togolese
- Roles: president, politician
