COUNTRY:  TOGO.

The protests in Lomé against Togo’s constitutional reforms — which restructured the country’s political system around a presidency of the Council of Ministers currently occupied by President Faure Gnassingbé, extending effective political continuity without a direct electoral mandate under the new framework — illuminate the gap that exists in many governance systems between constitutional legality and democratic legitimacy. The constitutional changes may have been adopted through formally legal procedures; the question the protesters are raising is whether procedures that are technically legal are sufficient to confer the legitimacy that constitutional arrangements require to function as genuine constraints on power rather than instruments of its perpetuation. This distinction — between legality and legitimacy, between constitutional compliance and democratic consent — is one of the central governance challenges of the contemporary African political moment, where the architecture of formal democratic institutions is increasingly being navigated by actors skilled at exploiting its procedural pathways while circumventing its normative intent.

The composition of the opposition to the reforms — political parties, civil society actors, and a significant cohort of young citizens — reflects a generational dimension whose significance deserves attention. Africa’s youth population, which constitutes the majority in most African countries, is increasingly engaged with governance questions through both traditional civic channels and digital platforms that enable rapid collective mobilisation around political grievances. Young Togolese citizens who have known no political leadership other than the Gnassingbé family across their entire lifetimes are not expressing abstract constitutional preferences when they protest reforms that entrench that continuity under a new institutional framework; they are articulating a fundamental expectation about democratic governance — that it should provide genuine mechanisms for political change rather than sophisticated management of its appearance.

The events in Togo, viewed alongside the ECOWAS Court’s recent ruling on the procedural illegitimacy of the same constitutional reforms, present African regional institutions with a question about the practical consequences of their normative authority. Regional courts can issue rulings; enforcement depends on the political will of member states and the institutional coherence of regional organisations whose leverage over domestic constitutional processes is inherently limited. What the Togolese protests demonstrate — and what regional institutions should take seriously — is that democratic legitimacy has popular roots that legal and institutional frameworks can channel but cannot manufacture. When citizens take to streets in significant numbers to contest constitutional arrangements, they are providing the most direct available evidence that those arrangements lack the consent whose presence is the only foundation on which durable political institutions can be built.

Photo: AI-GENERATED.