A French-trained Sara Catholic officer,[1] his first prominent assignment came in 1966 when, still a lieutenant, he was made by President François Tombalbaye prefect of the key Bourkou-Ennedi-Tibesti (BET) region, which France, Chad's former colonial power, had evacuated only in 1964, four years after the independence of the country.
All the same, under Tombalbaye Djogo made a fast career and became general and Chief of Staff of the Chadian Armed Forces (FAT), when he was arrested by the President on March 23, 1975, in what was yet another of many purges in the army.
Immediately freed from jail, the coupists offered him the presidency of the new military junta, but when he declined they asked Félix Malloum, who on April 15 assumed the position of new head of state of the country.
[1] Malloum's military government crumbled in 1979 when the Prime Minister Hissène Habré, a former Muslim warlord, broke with the President on February 12 and attacked the capital N'Djamena with his militia, the Armed Forces of the North (FAN).
The government did not live long, principally for the exclusion from the GUNT of important Libya-supported militias, which promptly formed a counter-government, the Democratic Revolutionary Council (CDR), led by Ahmat Acyl.
The occasion came on March 1, 1980, when he promoted in N'Djamena a manifesto for the formation a unitarian decentralized state, but he obtained little support for it, mainly some officers that had not followed Kamougué in 1979 and also some functionaries tied to the former Tombalbaye Regime.
But Habré was able to win over the party in peace talks held at Libreville in Gabon under the patronage of the President Omar Bongo, which included also Alphonse Kotiga's Codos and Acheikh ibn Oumar's CAC-CDR.