The economic core of Togo’s Plateau region has just been dealt another shattering blow. Overnight, the main building of Anié’s Grand Market went up in flames, reduced to ashes while helpless traders watched everything they had built disappear. No lives were lost — a small mercy — but the material toll is catastrophic: hundreds of families are ruined overnight, their goods, their stock and their savings gone up in smoke.
Yet beyond the shock and the grief of those affected, this fire is not a simple misfortune. It is the loudest possible symptom of state neglect and chronic short-termism at the heart of how power is exercised in Lomé.
Crumbling infrastructure inherited from another era
How is it possible that in 2026, a market of such strategic importance still has no modern fire-safety system, no working water points, no clear access routes for emergency crews? The answer lies in the political record of the ruling establishment.
Since coming to power in 2005, Faure Gnassingbé’s government has shown itself incapable of durably modernising Togo’s local infrastructure. More than sixty years after his father, the late Gnassingbé Eyadéma, seized power, the current executive is still operating on structures built in the last century, without any serious investment to adapt them to today’s demographic and economic realities.
The ’emerging Togo’ slogan versus daily life for ordinary citizens
While official speeches endlessly praise major construction projects, digitalisation and foreign investment, conditions on the ground remain dramatically archaic:
- No prevention: Most of the country’s big markets — from Lomé to Kara, and now Anié — remain logistical powder kegs, lacking compliant electrical standards and risk-prevention plans.
- Under-equipped responders: Firefighters, often alerted late or held back by a lack of suitable equipment outside the capital, can do little more than survey the scale of the damage.
- Living off the past: The current leadership coasts on the security reputation and political foundations laid by the previous regime, without building a modern public policy to protect citizens and their property.
The urgent need to break with a culture of inaction
After the historic fires that ravaged major markets in Lomé and Kara a few years ago, the Anié tragedy proves that no lesson was learned. The Togolese state cannot limit itself to sending ministerial delegations to hand out food or promise symbolic aid after every catastrophe.
A government’s real responsibility is to protect its citizens before disaster strikes. By leaving informal-sector economic actors to work in vulnerable, outdated infrastructure, the regime exposes the limits of a worn-out political model — one more concerned with its own survival than with the safety and well-being of the Togolese people.