Togo votes for a new president on Saturday, with the incumbent Faure Gnassingbe seeking a third term in office to extend his family’s grip on power into a second half-century.
Polling stations in the tiny West African nation open at 0700 GMT, with some 9,000 police and soldiers on patrol, and with borders shut until Sunday morning for security reasons. Gnassingbe, 48, has been in power since the death of his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema, in 2005, winning contested elections that year and five years later.
Some 3.5 million of Togo’s seven million people are registered to vote.They will choose between Gnassingbe and his beaten opponent from last time round, opposition leader Jean-Pierre Fabre.
