Gilchrist Olympio

Gilchrist Olympio (born 26 December 1936) is a Togolese politician who was a long-time opponent of the regime of Gnassingbé Eyadéma and was President of the Union of Forces for Change (UFC), Togo's main opposition party from the 1990s til 2013.

[1] He worked at the United Nations in fiscal and financial studies from 1963 to 1964 and then as an economist for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 1964 to 1970 and later returned to Africa to pursue business.

[4] On 5 May 1992, his convoy was attacked in an ambush in Soudou, in the north of Togo;[1][2] 12 people were killed,[1] and Olympio himself was seriously injured, spending a year recovering in hospitals in France and the United Kingdom.

[5] An investigation by the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) found that Eyadéma's son Ernest Gnassingbé was in charge of the commandos who perpetrated the attack.

[5] In 2003, Olympio was deemed ineligible to run in the June 2003 presidential election by the electoral commission on the grounds that he did not have a certificate of residency and a recent receipt of tax payments.

Olympio said on this occasion that he accepted the "responsibility to lead the Togolese people to victory", and he denounced the RPT regime, saying that it had brought Togo to ruin through four decades of mismanagement and repression.

In 2010, in the aftermath of the presidential election, while the FRAC leaders and activists demonstrated for several weeks to claim victory for Jean-Pierre Fabre, Gilchrist Olympio signed a political agreement for participation in a government of national recovery in a spirit of power sharing with the ruling party.

[16] In the aftermath of 2013 legislative election, Fabre's ANC emerged as the main opposition party when its coalition (Sauvons le Togo) won 19 seats in the National Assembly.