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Two
days of anti-government protests this week saw hundreds of thousands of people
take to the streets of Togo's capital Lome
|
Nigeria's former
president Olusegun Obasanjo has urged Togo's leader Faure Gnassingbé to
introduce limits on presidential terms, after huge anti-government protests
this week.
AFP
report continues:
Obasanjo,
a former military ruler in the 1970s who was also civilian president from 1999
to 2007, told BBC television in an interview that Gnassingbé had to respond to
the demands.
"I
believe he should have a new constitution that will have a limit to the number
of terms that anybody can be president and he should abide by that," he said
on Friday evening.
Obasanjo
side-stepped questions about whether Gnassingbé should step down, 12 years
after he became president when his father, Gnassingbé Eyadema, died.
Gnassingbé
Eyadema ruled the tiny West African nation for nearly 40 years after coming to
power following a military coup.
Obasanjo,
whose supporters made a failed bid to change the constitution to allow him to
seek a third term, questioned whether Faure Gnassingbé still had anything to
offer Togo.
"I
believe whatever he has to do in terms of development, whatever ideas he has,
he must have exhausted them by now, unless he has something new that we don't
know," he added.
Presidents
who were still in office after "12, 15 years, some of them up to 30"
were becoming a "rare commodity", he said.
Two
days of anti-government protests this week saw hundreds of thousands of people
take to the streets of Togo's capital, Lome, and other cities across the
country.
Opposition
supporters are calling for a maximum of two five-year terms for presidents and
a switch to a two-round voting system.
The government has proposed a bill on constitutional reform to parliament, which returns for an extraordinary session on Tuesday.
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