A ghost is haunting Africa, and it is the ghost of youth political activism in the continent’s political space. Historically, the continent’s youth have played an active role in the political arena although this activism has seen boom and bust over time.
This youth political activism is evidenced by Kwame Nkrumah’s use of the so-called Varenda Boys to fight for the independence of Ghana, the African National Congress (ANC)’s use of the second cycle and tertiary student movements and Civics in the Townships – which were mainly young persons – to defeat the apartheid regime and countless others across the continent.
This pre-independence era of youth political participation and activism ebbed in the post-independence era. This development coincided with the ascendancy of the neo-colonial ideology of the so-called Washington Consensus or market economy which ensured the continuity of the social and economic exploitation under the colonial project.
Several scholars have argued that South African youth’s apathy is mainly because they are now more concerned with their “education, getting a job, and getting their lives started.”
This observation is not a mere speculation because it is most certainly borne out by empirical evidence. Study after study has established that consistent with global trends, youth in South Africa and elsewhere in the continent are apathetic, unlike their parental and grandparental generations.
In an empirical study I undertook while at the University of Johannesburg, I found that even though higher education institutions play a critical role in youth engagement with politics, the political participation rate of the students, who were the offspring of the architects of the 1976 Soweto uprising, was shockingly low.
In a similar study, we conducted at the University of Ghana, a low political participation rate was observed among the students; in fact, the students attributed their antipathy of politics to “official corruption and pervasiveness of discrimination based on age and gender” by the mainly gerontocratic and inept political leadership.
Against the background of widespread disinterest in politics by the continent’s youth, how does one explain the youth’s participation in politics—albeit—a violent one, in recent years as exemplified by the situation in the Arab Spring, and lately, in Kenya and a developing one in Malawi?
The fact of the matter is that following the Arab Spring which started in Tunisia and spread to countries like Egypt, Africa’s youth have been in the vanguard of violent politics, especially, in sub-Saharan Africa.
The re-emergence of youth participation in politics in the continent has led to outcomes such as the unintended re-alignment of politics in South Africa through the spreading of the youth across multiple political formations, leading to the formation of a so-called government of national unity (GNU) in May because none of the political parties in that country secured an outright majority to form a government on their own.
In Kenya, while youth unrest has been festering in that country following a controversial election last year, last week it erupted in a volcanic-like fire that continues to consume the country’s body politic, the concession made by the president, Bill Ruto, notwithstanding.
Even though the immediate cause of the youth unrest in Kenya was the government’s controversial Finance Bill which sought to increase the tax burden of the citizenry, the ongoing conflagration was always going to happen due to a crisis of legitimacy arising out of election outcomes, official corruption, and misgovernance by the ruling classes over the years.
In Malawi, a historically peaceful country, due to the fear instilled in the citizenry by the repressive Kamuzu Banda regime, the youth angst domino appears to have fallen, with protests taking place throughout the country.
Meanwhile, the youth-induced domino is on the brink of falling in Uganda and a few other countries in the rest of the continent for reasons not dissimilar to those in Kenya and others that are already smouldering.
The question at this juncture is: Why the sudden outburst of youth anger that is accompanying the re-emergence of their participation in politics in the continent?
Even though there may be variations in the youth grievances in the individual African countries as far as their restiveness in the political space in recent years is concerned, the commonalities of the causes of the violent protests cannot escape observation by any keen scholar. I will attempt to address only two for the sake of brevity.
First, and fundamentally, the restlessness of Africa’s youth is a function of their numerical strength vis-a-vis other demographic groups in almost every Africa country. This fact is borne out by the following empirical evidence.
In Africa, about 40 per cent of the population is under 15 years of age, while nearly 70 percent is under 30 years. The World Bank estimates that Africa’s share of the world population aged between 15 and 29 years, may reach 28 per cent.
In some African countries, almost three-quarters (75%) of the population is under 30 years old, while a large share of the 15–29-year-olds is estimated to persist for decades to come. In Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country, the youth population represents about 60 percent of the total population of that country.
The second reason for the youth unrest, which, like a domino, is spreading throughout the continent, is the fact that despite the youth being a demographic majority in almost every country in the continent, they are discriminated against based on age and gender as far as decision-making structures are concerned.
Specifically, the youth are led by octogenarian leaders who are not only corrupt to the core but are bereft of ideas that are in sync with the values and interests of most of their population, the youth.
When seeking office, these leaders resort to making wild promises of job creation to employ the youth, but often woefully fail to fulfil these promises to them. In contrast, the few job opportunities they often inherit are given only to their relatives and friends much to the chagrin of the youth.
The inability of the ruling classes in African countries to fashion out realistic policies to provide labour markets with the ability to absorb the teeming youth lies at the heart of the incipient insecurity, urban social unrest, and political instability we are now witnessing on the continent.
In conclusion, the domino of youth anger in the face of the above-mentioned problems facing the African youth will continue to fall as long as the current crop of African leaders continue to sleep on the job and fail to put the youth at the centre of socioeconomic policies that they seek to change their life chances.
Acheampong Yaw Amoateng is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology and an Expert on Youth Development. He is a co-author of the just-released book, “Youth in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Sociological Perspective” (Routledge, United Kingdom, 2024).