He was Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity from 1978 to 1983; later, in Togo, he was a prominent opposition leader after the introduction of multi-party politics.

[3][4] After completing his studies in France, he was an administrator at the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française[4] from November 1964 to June 1967.

[8] One of the key issues facing the OAU during Kodjo's five-year tenure was the status of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), which claimed independence for the former colony of Spanish Sahara, at that time partly occupied by Morocco.

Kodjo controversially allowed the SADR to be seated as a member of the OAU on February 28, 1982, over the objections of Morocco and various other African countries that supported the Moroccan position.

[13] In 1991, a few months before the National Conference, Kodjo returned to Togo and founded a new opposition political party, the Togolese Union for Democracy (UTD).

[12] On July 20, 1993,[14] he was designated by the Collective of Democratic Opposition (COD II) as its sole candidate for the presidential election of August 25, 1993,[4][14][15] although Gilchrist Olympio of the Union of the Forces of Change (UFC) did not accept this decision.

[17] His acceptance of the position of Prime Minister, in addition to his earlier role in the establishment of the RPT regime, discredited him in the eyes of many opposition supporters.

[25][26] Kodjo criticized Eyadéma for not honoring his pledge to step down in the 2003 election and again called for the opposition to put forward a single candidate.

[35] At a CPP congress in late April 2009, Kodjo announced that he was retiring from day-to-day politics in order to make way for younger leadership.

According to Kodjo, he had lost interest in "internal politics" and preferred to devote himself to Pan-Africanism by working to facilitate a cooperative approach to finding solutions to African problems.

[38] In 2016 he acted as the African Union's mediator during the dispute between the government and the opposition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo regarding the timing of the next election.