Togo votes for a new president

Togo went to the polls in presidential elections yesterday, with the incumbent Faure Gnassingbe seeking a third term in office to extend his family's grip on power into a second half-century.

Gnassingbe, 48, called on people in the small west African nation to "vote in peace" after casting his ballot in the capital Lome, as fears of election violence remained fresh in the nation's memory.

Some 500 people were killed and thousands more injured in the disputed 2005 vote, according to the UN. Around 9,000 security personnel were deployed nationwide yesterday.

Gnassingbe has been in power since the death his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema, in 2005, winning contested elections that year and five years later.

He is heavily favoured against a splintered opposition, with Jean-Pierre Fabre of the five-party coalition called Combat for Political Change (CAP 2015) seen as the only credible challenge to the ruling family dynasty.

Fabre voted in the densely populated Lome neighbourhood of Kodjo Via Kope, where a small crowd of supporters outside the polling station shouted "President! President!"

Dressed in a long white tunic, Fabre told the crowd that he expected irregularities, as in all of Togo's past elections, but said he believed "the risks of fraud have been reduced" this year.

On the campaign trail, Gnassingbe vaunted his introduction of free primary schools and infrastructure projects such as new roads.

But Fabre has called for regime change after 48 years of unbroken rule by the president and his father before him.

Few people in Togo, a former French colony of roughly seven million people, have felt the benefit of recent economic growth and according to the government, unemployment is rife at 29 percent.

Years of sanctions imposed by international blocs such as the European Union during Gnassingbe Eyadema's autocratic regime have hit business and education, the administration maintains.

Ama Yambila, a mother-of-seven who queued up to vote in Lome, told AFP that the devastating lack of jobs had taken its toll and the country would benefit from change.

"I have lived nearly my whole life with this regime. The regime has to go," said the sexagenarian, who needed crutches to reach the polling centre, where she waited to cast her ballot accompanied by two friends.

Lome is considered an opposition stronghold, but Gnassingbe is expected to win huge majorities in his northern fiefdom, including the village of Kara, where many people queued at a polling station in a primary school.