Is your country at risk of becoming a dictatorship Heres how to know Farida Nabourema
A few weeks ago,
somebody tweeted during the midterm
elections in the United States
that Election Day
should be made a holiday.
And I retweeted, saying,
“Well, you’re welcome to come
to my country and vote.
You’ll get the whole week off
to allow the military to count it.”
I come from Togo, by the way.
It is a beautiful country
located in West Africa.
There are some cool,
interesting facts about my country.
Togo has been ruled
by the same family for 51 years,
making us the oldest autocracy in Africa.
That’s a record.
We have a second-coolest record:
we have been ranked three times
as the unhappiest country on earth.
You are all invited.
(Laughter)
So just to let you know,
it’s not very cool
to live under an autocracy.
But the interesting thing is that I have
met, throughout the course of my activism,
so many people from different countries,
and when I tell them about Togo,
their reaction is always,
“How can you guys allow the same people
to terrorize you for 51 years?
You know, like, you Togolese,
you must be very patient.”
That’s their diplomatic way
of saying “stupid.”
(Laughter)
And when you live in a free country,
there’s this tendency of assuming
that those who are oppressed
tolerate their oppression
or are comfortable with it,
and democracy is projected
as a progressive form of governance
in such a way that those people
who don’t live under democratic countries
are seen as people who are not
intellectually or maybe morally
as advanced as others.
But it’s not the case.
The reason why people have that perception
has to do with the way stories
are covered about dictatorships.
In the course of my activism,
I have had to interview
with so many news outlets out there,
and usually it would always start with,
“What got you started?
What inspired you?”
And I reply, “I wasn’t inspired.
I was triggered.”
And it goes on.
“Well, what triggered you?”
And I go on about how my father
was arrested when I was 13, and tortured,
all the history … I don’t want
to get into details now,
because you’ll start sleeping.
But the thing is, at the end of the day,
what interests them the most is:
How was he tortured?
For how many days? How many people died?
They are interested
in the abuse, in the killing,
because they believe that
will gain attention and sympathy.
But in reality, it serves
the purpose of the dictator.
It helps them advertise their cruelty.
In 2011, I cofounded a movement
I call “Faure Must Go,”
because Faure is
the first name of our president.
Togo is a French-speaking
country, by the way,
but I chose English because
I had my issues with France as well.
But then –
(Laughter)
But then, when I started Faure Must Go,
I made a video, and I came on camera,
and I said, “Well, Faure Gnassingbé,
I give you 60 days to resign as president,
because if you don’t,
we the youth in Togo will organize
and we will bring you down,
because you have killed
over 500 of our countrymen
to seize power when your father died.
We have not chosen you.
You are an imposter,
and we will remove you.”
But I was the only known face
of the movement.
Why? Because I was the only stupid one.
(Laughter)
And the backlashes followed.
My family started receiving threats.
My siblings called me one morning.
They said, “You know what?
When they come here to kill you,
we don’t want to die with you,
so move out.”
So yes, I moved out.
And I’m so angry at them,
so I haven’t talked to them in five years.
Anyway, moving forward …
For the past nine years,
I have been working with countries
to raise awareness of Togo,
to help the people of Togo
overcome their fear
so they, too, can come and say
they want change.
I have received a lot of persecution
that I cannot disclose,
a lot of threats, a lot of abuse,
psychologically.
But I don’t like talking about them,
because I know that my job
as an activist is to mobilize,
is to organize,
is to help every single Togolese citizen
understand that, as citizens,
we hold the power,
we are the boss and we decide.
And the punishment that the dictators
are using to intimidate them
must not prevent us
from getting what we want.
That is why I said it is very important
to cover the stories of activists
in the way that it helps mobilize people,
not in the way that it helps
deter their action
and force even more their subjugation
to the oppressive system.
During these years
that I’ve been an activist,
there are days that I felt like quitting
because I couldn’t take it.
Well then, what kept me going?
The one thing that kept me going:
I remember the story of my grandfather,
and how he used to walk
465 miles from his village to the city,
just to protest for independence.
Then I remember
the sacrifice of my father,
who was tortured so many times
for daring to protest against the regime.
Back in the ’70s,
they would write pamphlets
to raise awareness on the dictatorship,
and because they couldn’t
afford to make copies,
they would reproduce
the same pamphlet 500 times each
and distribute them.
It got to a point where the military
knew their handwriting,
so as soon as they stumbled upon one,
they’d go and get them.
But I look at that and I’m like,
you know, today you have a blog.
I don’t have to copy
the same thing 500 times.
I blog and thousands of people read it.
By the way, in Togo, they like
calling me the WhatsApp girl,
because I am always on WhatsApp
attacking the government.
(Laughter)
So it’s much easier.
When I’m angry at the government,
I just make an angry note,
and I send it out
and thousands of people share it.
I’m rarely this composed.
I’m always angry, by the way.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So I was talking about the necessity
to showcase our stories,
because when I think about
the sacrifices that were made for us,
it helped me keep going.
One of the very first actions
of our Faure Must Go movement
was to come up with a petition,
asking citizens to sign
so that we can demand new elections,
as the constitution allows.
People were scared to put their names
because, they said,
they don’t want to get in trouble.
Even in the diaspora, people were scared.
They were like, “We have family at home.”
But there was this woman
who was in her 60s.
When she heard about it,
she took the petition,
and she went home,
and by herself she collected
over 1,000 [signatures].
That inspired me so much, and I was like,
if a 60-year-old that has
nothing more to gain in this regime
can do this for us, the young ones,
then why should I quit?
It is the stories of resistance,
the stories of defiance,
the stories of resilience,
that inspire people to get involved,
not the stories of abuse
and killings and hurt,
because as humans, it’s only natural
for us to be scared.
I would like to share with you
a few characteristics of dictatorships
so that you can assess your own country
and see if you are also
at risk of joining us.
(Laughter and cheers)
(Applause)
Number one thing to look at:
concentration of power.
Is the power in your country concentrated
in the hands of a few, an elite?
It can be a political elite,
ideological elite.
And you have a strongman,
because we always have one guy
who is presented as the messiah
who will save us from the world.
The second point is propaganda.
Dictators feed on propaganda.
They like giving the impression
that they are the saviors,
and without them,
the country will fall apart.
And they are always fighting
some foreign forces, you know?
The Christians, the Jewish, the Muslims,
the voodoo priests are coming for you.
The Communists, when they get here,
we’ll all be broke.
These kinds of things.
And our president, in particular,
he fights pirates.
(Laughter)
I am very serious.
Last year, he bought a boat that’s
13 million dollars to fight pirates,
and 60 percent of our people are starving.
So they are always protecting us
from some foreign forces.
And this leads to point three:
militarization.
Dictators survive by instigating fear,
and they use the military
to suppress dissident voices,
even though they try
to give the impression
that the military
is to protect the nation.
And they suppress institutions
and destroy them
so that they don’t have to be
held accountable.
So do you have a heavily
militarized country?
And this leads to point four,
what I call human cruelty.
You know when we talk about animals,
we say animal cruelty
when animals are abused,
because there’s no charter
acknowledged by the UN
saying animal rights charter.
Point one: all animals are created equal.
So you don’t have that.
So whenever animals are abused,
we say animal cruelty.
But when it comes to humans,
we say human rights abuses,
because we assume
that all humans have rights.
But some of us are actually still fighting
for our right to have rights.
So in that condition, I don’t talk about
human rights abuse or violation.
When you live in a country
and you have an issue with the president
and the worst thing that can happen
is he bans you from the presidency,
you are lucky.
When you come to my country
and have an issue with the president,
you just run, disappear;
you vanish from the universe,
because they can still find you in Turkey.
So people like myself,
we don’t get to live in Togo anymore.
And people like myself,
we don’t get to live in the same place
for more than a month,
because we don’t want to be traced.
The way they abuse people,
the type of cruelty that happens
in all impunity under dictatorships
are beyond human imagination.
The stories of some
of the activists that were killed,
their bodies dumped in the sea,
that were tortured
to the point where they lost
their hearing or their sight –
those stories still haunt me.
And sometimes, as an activist,
I am less concerned about dying
than how it will happen.
Sometimes I just sit down
and I imagine all scenarios.
What are they going to do?
Are they going to cut my ears first?
Or are they going to cut my tongue
because I’m always insulting them?
It sounds cruel, but it is the reality.
We live in a very cruel world.
Dictators are cruel monsters,
and I am not saying it to be nice.
So yes, that is the final characteristic.
The list goes on,
but that’s the final thing that I want
to share about autocracies,
so that you look at your country
and see if there are risks there.
It is important that you acknowledge
the gains of freedom that you have today,
because some people had
to give their lives for you to have it.
So don’t take this for granted.
But then at the same time,
you also need to know
that no country is actually
destined to be oppressed,
while at the same time,
no country or no people are immune
to oppression and dictatorship.
Thank you.
(Applause)