A wave of youth-led protests has been sweeping Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda, ushering in a new era of political struggle. We’re seeing a new generation organize protests, many for the first time in their lives, and draw in people of all ages alongside them. Young people also led demonstrations earlier this year and last in Senegal, Mozambique, Ghana, and Zimbabwe.
The African continent is home to the fastest-growing, youngest population. Over 60% of Africans are now under the age of 25. By 2050, one in four people on the planet is projected to live in Africa. It’s often said that “the youth are the future”, but the future that African youth are facing doesn’t look very bright at all.
Many young people are taking a stand for a better future by taking to the streets. The continent is no stranger to protest; in many countries they’re a staple of election season. But the scale and geographic scope of the recent protests, which many journalists speculated might represent an “African Spring” in the making, arguably hasn’t been seen since the independence movements of the 1950s and on.
A New Generation Of Struggle
Kenya’s “Gen Z” protesters took to the streets and occupied parliament in June to oppose president William Ruto’s controversial Finance Bill which would have taxed working people for their every last penny. A day later, Ruto scrapped the bill.
A similar situation is playing out on the other side of the continent. When President Bola Tinubu came to power last year, he shocked Nigerians on his first day by removing a subsidy that kept the price of fuel low. Fuel prices tripled as a result. Tinubu’s policies have led to the worst economic crisis in a generation, and have sparked ongoing cost-of-living protests.
The example set in Kenya inspired working and young people across Nigeria to escalate with ten consecutive days of national protest in August. These were organized online under the hashtag #EndBadGovernance, a demand seen earlier during 2020’s youth-led #EndSARS movement against the notoriously violent Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in the country’s police force.
A second protest wave dubbed #FearlessInOctober is now taking place in spite of the Tinubu administration’s brutal crackdown on earlier protests. Nigerian protesters are demanding an end to hunger caused by the government’s anti-poor policies.
Young people in Uganda also felt emboldened by the protest wave and organized demonstrations against government corruption in July. Climate activists in Uganda are also waging a struggle against the construction of the proposed East African Crude Oil Pipeline.
These protests have been organized in a diffuse way on social media, led by neither opposition politicians nor NGOs. Many young protesters have rejected the leadership of earlier protest movements who went on to become politicians themselves, and see NGOs as putting the interests of Western donors above the needs of ordinary people. Gen Z is also increasingly overcoming the obstacles of ethnic and tribal divisions that have limited and divided struggles in the past, finding common cause with all working people impacted by systemic crises.
What Is Driving Africa’s Youth To Action?
Unemployment is a top concern for young people across the continent, where estimates of youth unemployment average out to about 20%, but reach as high as 80% in some countries. The cost-of-living crisis, which is affecting us all, is seeing some of its sharpest expressions in Africa. Nigeria is currently experiencing its worst economic crisis in a generation, with annual inflation at over 30% and food prices rising even faster.
Like all young people worldwide, Africa’s youth are staring down the chance of ever-increasing climate disasters upending their lives in the immediate term, not to mention in the years to come. Worsening heat waves, flooding, and desertification of previously farmable land all have deadly consequences.
A solution to curb fossil fuel emissions lies right before our eyes: Africa’s wind resources give it the potential to generate 250 times more wind-powered electricity per year than the continent’s annual electricity demand. Yet only 1% of the world’s wind power capacity is based in Africa!
Political corruption is widespread and pervasive, and nothing seems to change. A September poll of 18 to 24 year olds across 16 African countries found that around 60% felt that their government was not addressing corruption and have considered leaving the country because of it.
Working people are asked to “tighten their belts” with new taxes and cuts to subsidies in order to “balance the budget” while the political elite continue to live lavishly at their expense. Many politicians even flaunt their wealth on social media, where the majority of users are under 34 years old. This has fed a growing anger across many African countries aimed at politicians who grant themselves massive salaries and kickbacks while not providing solutions to the burning needs of today’s youth.
Against this backdrop, protests have also reached beyond the initial concerns moving protesters into action and taken aim at the system as a whole. Protests in Nigeria and Kenya were a response to Tinubu and Ruto’s austerity measures, but they didn’t stop with demanding a return of subsidies or a repeal of the Finance Bill.
They have called for these politicians and their cronies to be replaced, and pointed to the role of capitalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. This new generation’s parents lived through the stress and poverty created by the IMF and World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs of the 80’s and 90’s, where funding for services like health and education were slashed, resulting in a “lost decade”. Gen Z is determined not to repeat that process.
In order to put an end once and for all to “IMF puppet” politicians—as protesters have dubbed president Ruto—all African workers, youth, and oppressed people must unite in a fight against the plundering of the continent’s wealth and resources by the capitalist class, both foreign and local.
Colonialism & Neocolonialism
Africa composes a landmass larger than India, China, the United States, and Europe all put together, containing one-third of the earth’s mineral resources. There’s no shortage of young, highly-educated people looking to work. Yet unemployment rates are staggering, and about 40% of Africa’s population lives below the poverty line. European capitalists’ colonization of Africa created this dynamic by looting the continent of its resources, exploiting labor, and enslaving millions.
Independence movements from the 1950’s-1970’s drove out colonial armies, but foreign capitalists maintained control by installing their own political puppets or buying off politicians. This process accelerated after the collapse of Stalinism when colonial liberation movements that previously looked to the Soviet Union for a challenge to capitalism and imperialism now embraced neoliberalism.
The deliberate underdevelopment and destabilization of Africa’s economy obligated countries to take out loans from the U.S.-controlled IMF and World Bank, creating another method of control and resource extraction via draconian loan terms. These included requiring the selling off of national industries to the private market and lowering barriers to foreign investment. This lending creates debt traps where huge portions of countries’ budgets are dedicated to repaying debt, requiring additional loans to function.
Right now, nearly two thirds of Kenya’s annual revenue is spent on interest payments on debt. Ruto’s Finance Bill was an attempt to place the burden of paying that national debt onto working people with increased taxes. But even if Ruto were forced out of office, the next president would be faced with the same budget dilemma and neocolonial dynamics.
In Nigeria, President Tinubu himself joined the Occupy Nigeria protests of 2012 which opposed the elimination of fuel subsidies. Once in office he abandoned this aspiration entirely in order to appease Nigeria’s debtors. Instead he implemented the most radical cuts to fuel subsidies in the country’s recent history!
A Lesser Evil?
These debt traps aren’t set up just by the IMF. China in particular has long replaced the U.S. as the world’s creditor. From 2001 to 2022, Chinese lenders provided more than $170 billion in credit, loans, and grants to African nations, primarily to fund infrastructure projects such as roads and railways as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. A slowing down of funding for infrastructure projects, due to China’s own economic troubles, has left many of these construction projects unfinished and compounded debt crises across Africa.
Through diplomacy and investment into Africa and beyond, China’s so-called Communist Party dictatorship attempts to portray China as the “leader of global south”, a “fellow victim of Western imperialism”. Given the history of colonialism, U.S.-backed coups, and military intervention from former colonial powers like France and Britain, it’s very understandable that many workers and youth in the neocolonial world have a more favorable view of forces claiming to represent a rejection of Western imperialism.
The alliances China is brokering, however, are not ones of equals, but a continuation of the same imperialism with a new face.
China’s economic and military rise has put it into direct competition with U.S. imperialism. As a consequence, we’re witnessing a new scramble for Africa, with the two imperial powers vying for influence in the region and control of its natural resources, particularly the “critical and strategic” minerals needed to make advanced semiconductors. Other capitalist governments have tried to stake their claim as well.
Many across the neocolonial world are looking not just to China but also to Russia as a “lesser evil”. Some protesters in Nigeria’s #EndBadGovernance protests this August were seen waving Russian flags and calling for the military to take over the government.
This echoes a mood that existed among many in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, where coups over the past few years that expelled French and U.S. troops also meant a forging of closer ties with Russia and its infamous paramilitary Wagner Group. In exchange for providing various coup leaders with its mercenary services, Wagner (now known in the region as Africa Corps) has seized control of valuable natural resources in every country in which it operates.
As a result, Russia has extracted $2.5 billion worth of gold from Africa in the past two years. It is also working to change mining laws in West Africa in order to dislodge Western companies, aiming to swap one imperialist force’s parasitic control of the industry for another.
Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, among others, have also increasingly strengthened their diplomatic relationships with African states. We must be clear that none of these governments are acting in the interests of youth or workers in Africa, or anywhere else.
The ruling class, no matter which country it operates in, looks toward the masses across Africa as a rapidly-expanding labor pool to exploit, an “emerging market” to sell products to, and, if united in struggle, a liability to the very system of capitalism.
Fight For A Socialist Future
In order to address the multiplying crises wreaking havoc on young and working people, to truly end bad governance and smash the imperialist stranglehold, in order to provide for the needs of the billions, not the billionaires, workers and youth need to break with the capitalist system as a whole.
A myth has long been perpetuated that the path to a better standard of living in so-called “developing countries” will be achieved by “catching up” to Western capitalism through a steady march of progress and by opening up their economies to the free market.
In promoting this myth, the Biden administration held up Nigeria and Kenya as model, Western-style democracies. But the domination of their economies by foreign capital limits what’s possible. Decades of bitter experience with neoliberal austerity and no end in sight to the continued hyper-exploitation of the African working class has left the “catch-up” myth hanging on by a thread.
The current crises in both countries show that the native capitalists, because of their ties to imperialism, can’t fulfill the role that the Biden administration imagined. Neither does Chinese or Russian investment point the way forward, it just perpetuates the subordination of local capitalists to another imperial power.
African capitalism, by facilitating a great wealth transfer to imperialist forces and looting for itself whatever remains of the continent’s spoils, has proved incapable of guaranteeing a decent living or basic democratic rights and freedoms to the majority of Africans.
Rather than pushing African economies to “catch up”, capitalism has very consciously held them back. This has developed the continent in a very uneven way, expanding industries and introducing new technologies in urban centers, while also leaving the majority of the population to scrape by with informal work or small-scale farming of land that they must rent.
Despite the contradictions and underdevelopment imperialism has created, a working class has still developed across the continent that plays a key role in the economy, and is the only force capable of fundamentally changing the balance of the situation.
While local capitalists are helplessly subordinated to the imperialist powers, the working class has the real power to shake them off for good. Workers mine the minerals that the U.S. and China need for their weapons of war, transport the commodities being exported abroad every day, educate the next generation of workers, and keep society running—not the politicians or the bosses!
By withholding their labor, joining with unemployed youth and students in protest, and with farmers to drive out the landlords, the united working class has the power to put Africa’s vast resources under the democratic control of the majority.
A society run in the interests of ordinary people, a socialist society, must extend beyond national borders in order to end corporate domination and imperialism that are the pillars of global capitalism. While Nigeria and Kenya have recently taken center stage in the class struggle, the conditions are ripe for youth and workers across Africa to follow suit.
Discontent is stirring in Tanzania and Zambia, where reformist presidents are struggling to fulfill their promises. South Africa’s largest trade union federation called for a national day of strike and protest action against unemployment on October 7. While union leaders in Ghana have suspended a proposed national strike set for earlier this month amid talks with the government, the strike could erupt if the government does not meet the unions’ demands to end illegal mining.
The spread of protests from Kenya to other countries across the continent earlier this year shows how quickly struggle can take on an international character, as well as the role that young people can play in inspiring wider mobilizations of the working class.
Just as protests against economic policies have reached further and pointed blame at the inner workings of the capitalist system, they can reach even further toward conclusions about the need to overthrow that system and replace it with a better one. To change the system these struggles must take up the task of socialist revolution, across Africa and across the world.
