IT IS Friday 13th in central Lomé, the capital of Togo. A military parade to mark the anniversary of the day that Gnassingbé Eyadéma, the long-term President, came to power. Eyadéma died last year, but since the seat of power was inherited by his son, Faure, the parade tradition has continued.
The band plays the Hallelujah Chorus, battalions march past overseen by heavily armoured vehicles manned by militia with the initials FAT (Force Armée Togolaise) on their caps, while soldiers on the ground keep the civilian onlookers in order with liberal use of belt and stick.
It is this same state security apparatus, a United Nations report said recently, that was principally responsible for the political violence and human rights violations during Faure’s election that resulted in 400-500 people being killed, thousands wounded and 30,000 seeking refuge in neighbouring Ghana and Benin. The report also cited evidence that army commando units had been primed “not only to crush the demonstrators and militants but also to round up the corpses and systematically dispose of them so that they could not be counted”.
The details seem unhappily reminiscent of the Amnesty International report into Eyadéma’s re-election in 1998, when hundreds of opposition supporters were killed. But what has all this got to do with world football? The answer is in the grandstand enjoying the military parade: Commandant Rock Gnassingbé, the brother of the President, who himself happens to be the president of the national football federation.
Suffice it to say that the commandant did not reach the heights of football administration through a process of democratic election. Suffice it to say also that, as a senior military man and head of the army’s artillery division, it takes a lot to stand up to him. But football is a powerful medium, even in Togo, where power is the private preserve of so few, and when the country have qualified for the World Cup finals, the national team suddenly becomes an item of global interest and infinitely more powerful than before.
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Thus it is that Les Eperviers — the Hawks of Togo — have decided to take on the commandant. Indeed, it could hardly be more embarrassing for him that, in the crucial preparation period before the African Cup of Nations in Egypt this week, they decided to go on strike.
They took action on the subject of money. They know that there is money because when you qualify for an international tournament, the handouts are massive. They also suspect that money is a weakness of the commandant’s because of the letter in the newspaper, Forum De La Semaine, that accused him of having his hand in the till.
Forum is a beacon of liberal, uncensored journalism in Togo and, because of this, its popularity soars. The state tried and failed with various sweeteners to bring its editor, Dimas Dikodo, onside — and so locked him up instead. It was to Forum that Tino Adjeté, the football federation (FTF) treasurer, wrote an open letter to Rock Gnassingbé, saying that it was impossible for him to do his job because the commandant took sole charge of the FTF’s income and was unaccountable for where he spent it.
“You are in violation of the rules of the FTF,” he wrote. “You have a duty to the statutes of Fifa. It is incumbent on us to stay credible before the rest of the world. I would like to give you the opportunity to straighten this situation out.”
Even before the letter, the finances of football in Togo were an open joke. The FTF receives $250,000 (about £140,000) a year from Fifa, but the 14 professional clubs get none of it. The national television station also broadcasts two live matches a week, but the clubs receive no return from that, either. Etoiles Filantes, Togo’s champion club, play on a pitch that most amateur teams in Britain would be ashamed of and pay their players in the region of CFA55,000 (about £62) a month.
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The club used to receive a CFA5 million annual handout from the FTF, but that dried up. Yet ask Messan Hukportie, the Etoiles Filantes president, why the commandant cannot support the clubs financially and he laughs as if astonished by the question’s naivety.
So Adjeté was brave to have written the open letter to Forum. He also gave the players ammunition for their battle. They had asked the FTF for CFA2 million living expenses for the African Cup of Nations and the weeks of preparation before it. When the commandant then offered them a quarter (the equivalent of £560), they downed tools.
They were scheduled to go to France a fortnight ago to play a friendly against Guinea but refused to fly. Emmanuel Adebayor, the star striker who signed for Arsenal last week from AS Monaco for £7 million, then went on national radio to say that he was about to leave and fly back to Monaco. The next day, the public sided with the players. In a country run by such a regime, the football team are a rare focus for national pride, which is why 6,000 Togolese suddenly turned up to support the team in training.
Pressured by public opinion and with the days fast running out before the match against Guinea, the commandant performed a rare about-turn and conceded to the players’ financial demands. When the team then lost 1-0 to Guinea, everyone agreed that it was purely because they had flown only the night before the fixture and that the commandant was again to blame.
And now, despite the army and the regime behind him, the commandant’s power suddenly looks assailable. The players have an idea of their worth and of the commandant’s ability to meet it. So when they got back from France, they issued infinitely more ambitious demands: CFA20 million (about £22,500) each for having qualified for the African Cup of Nations, plus CFA5 million per match won in the tournament, CFA3 million per draw and CFA1 million per defeat.
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The commandant, however, still bears the appearance of a powerful man. The day after the parade, he called a press conference to announce an FTF sponsorship deal. It was no sensation — a Dutch textile company had bought the rights to print cloth with the Hawks’ logo on it — but the fanfare around it was. His arrival into a room bedecked with balloons and national flags was accompanied by a 25-piece brass band. His short speech was bracketed by further blasts from the musicians. Indeed, he managed to make himself appear exceedingly impressive until a journalist went off script and asked about the footballers who were holding him to ransom. He responded with an explosion of anger, accusing his questioner of being unpatriotic and attempting to hijack the agenda.
Yesterday, two days before the start of the African Cup of Nations, the players were still negotiating with the commandant. The impasse is so bad that they missed their intended flight — and their first match is on Saturday. They are expected to get their way, or near enough, a kind of happy ending, albeit a hopeless way to prepare for such a tournament. But if the match here was football versus the banana republic, it seems that the game is the winner. To a limited extent, anyway. The man to worry about in this is the treasurer who put his neck on the line. He does not share the profile that has made the players untouchable.
“The fact is that money has been going missing,” he said. “I didn’t want people to think it could have been me. I had to do something. But I have no idea what the repercussions will be.There could be problems ahead for me —everyone knows what can happen to people in this country.”