For most people in West Africa, the thought of owning any sort of hi-tech luxury goods is little more than a pipedream. A competition to win one of 50 mobile telephones, complete with an initial call charge credit, was therefore bound to be a hit in Togo, a small country wedged between Ghana and Benin above the Gulf of Guinea, where a mobile telephone costs more than a third of the average annual per capita gross domestic product.

Earlier this …