In Togo, the civil society meeting, scheduled for Saturday April 15 in Lomé, was again banned by the prefect of the Gulf (Lomé and its surroundings).
This meeting was organized by a civil society group including the Togo-Debout citizen front to talk, he said, about the shortcomings revealed in the report of the Court of Auditors on the management of Covid-19 response and solidarity funds.
A previous meeting announced for April 1 had already been banned. At the microphone of our correspondent, Peter Sassou Dogbe, Professor David Dosseh, first spokesperson for the Togo-Debout citizen front, finds this new ban shocking.
” We are particularly shocked by the ridiculousness of the arguments put forward by the prefect. With regard to the first prohibition, precisely, the prefect had required three signatures, whereas the law on the demonstrations never spoke about that.
For us, it is the demonstration, once again, that the authorities are doing everything possible to prevent public debate on this fundamental question of embezzlement, highlighted in the audit report of the Court of Auditors. We need to move forward.
We are certainly going to introduce another request for a meeting and we are also thinking of appealing to the Administrative Chamber so that justice can still give us a clear answer on the arguments that the prefect presents to prevent our demonstrations, our meetings by deciding , for example, to send us his answer a few hours before the demonstration, whereas the law clearly states that he must send his answer 72 hours before, to give us time to react. »
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