The mass surveillance affair in Togo has entered a decisive phase in the ongoing political and media saga. In his latest revelations, journalist Thomas Dietrich points an accusing finger at a highly strategic alliance: Togolese President Faure Gnassingbé is allegedly working hand-in-glove with the Yatom family, whose patriarch Dany Yatom is the former head of Israel’s powerful intelligence service, through their private espionage services company. While these claims lift the veil on the dangerous liaisons of power in Lomé, they also raise a crucial question about the journalistic method employed. This confrontation highlights a double shipwreck: that of a dictatorship privatizing its security with foreign outfits, and that of instant journalism that weakens its own scoops through theatricality.
Faure Gnassingbé: privatizing repression with the Yatom family
The accusation against the Togolese regime is no longer a mere technological suspicion; it describes a concrete system of dirty tricks. By entrusting, according to these revelations, part of the country’s security and wiretapping system to the Yatom family, Faure Gnassingbé crosses a critical threshold. Calling on former high-ranking Israeli intelligence officers to lock down Togo’s public space demonstrates state paranoia taken to its extreme.
This collaboration with foreign private espionage structures meets no national defense need. It fits squarely in the tradition of desperate dynastic regimes, ready to do anything to track opponents, monitor civil society, and perpetuate power that has lasted nearly sixty years. After the global Pegasus software scandal, this alleged collusion with the Yatom clan shows that Lomé has institutionalized spying on its own citizens. By placing Togo’s security destiny in the hands of external private interests, the regime tramples national sovereignty to ensure its own political survival.
Thomas Dietrich: the risk of scoop-as-spectacle and digital noise
However, the heavier the scandal, the more the investigation must be flawless. This is where Thomas Dietrich’s position draws criticism. By releasing names as weighty as those of the Israeli security apparatus, the journalist too often chooses the codes of “clash” and buzz on social networks rather than the rigorous formality of high-stakes investigative reporting.
Launching accusations of this magnitude on digital platforms without simultaneously publishing the package of material evidence—contracts, financial flows, official organigrams, or leaked documents—weakens the impact of the revelation. Known for his lone-wolf justice methods and constant staging of his own conflicts with African dictatorships, Dietrich flirts perpetually with ego journalism. The danger of this method is immediate: by prioritizing sensationalism and privatizing the fight, the journalist offers the Lomé regime the perfect chance to dismiss the affair by crying out Western media conspiracy and manipulation. In doing so, he undermines the cause of Togolese journalists and activists who, on the ground, risk their lives to document these same abuses with silent rigor.
Two actors in the same sterile mirror
In the end, the palace in Lomé and the Françafrique reporter feed each other. Faure Gnassingbé uses the frontal attacks of expatriate journalists to wave the red flag of foreign destabilization and justify his security services’ crackdown. For his part, Thomas Dietrich finds in the figure of the ultra-connected dictator the perfect antagonist to boost his audiences and craft his white knight information pose.
While this duel plays out under the glare of social media, one victim remains in the shadows: the Togolese people. Surveilled by foreign technologies, deprived of healthy democratic debate, citizens endure the harsh reality of a police state. The fight for transparency and freedoms in Togo can be satisfied neither by the secret liaisons of a paranoid power nor by the virtual circus of emotion-driven journalism. It demands cold facts, rock-solid evidence, and a dignity that both protagonists sometimes seem to forget.
