Africa’s Gen Z may yet drive out the continent’s despotic leaders

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Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation. His latest book is Overcoming the Oppressors: Black and White in Southern Africa.

Things fall apart. At least Gen-Z Africans think so, as signalled by the youth-driven soft coup in Madagascar earlier this month, disturbances over the summer in Kenya, youth discontent in South Africa, opposition to the continued influence of francophone colonial rulers in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Gabon, and a youth-propelled election in Senegal last year that brought younger leaders to power.

Youth power is palpable, if still not fully realized in Africa. The continent is full of young people, many without schooling and jobs. Sub-Saharan Africa’s youthful population is surging and will keep expanding until 2100. After India and China, the African continent will soon number more people than any place else. Critically, the median age in much of Africa is now about 19, and will remain in the low 20s for the next 30 years. A demographic dividend is not about to arrive.

Not all the autocrats who rule much of Africa are taking note of Gen-Z rumblings. In greatly corrupt Zimbabwe, yet another authoritarian head of state is proposing arbitrarily to extend his presidential term by fiat. His second five-year elected term officially expires in 2028, yet President Emmerson Mnangagwa is omnipotently extending his term to 2030.

Earlier: Gen Z protesters, waving pirate flags, force Madagascar’s president to flee country

Mr. Mnangagwa led a military coup in 2017 against then-president Robert Mugabe, and went on to win elections in 2018 and 2023. He was a cabinet minister during the 37 years that Mr. Mugabe reigned. The two of them grabbed Zimbabwe’s wealth and demanded personal payoffs while impoverishing its citizens.

Mr. Mnangagwa’s plan to exceed stated term limits echoes similar manoeuvres by Rwandan President Paul Kagame, and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Mr. Kagame intends to rule well into the 2030s.

Another president, Paul Biya of Cameroon, is 92 and spends long periods of time in Switzerland. He has controlled his country for 43 years, and stood for election on Oct. 12 with every expectation of continuing his many despotic decades in power. His official electoral commission disqualified his biggest rival, Maurice Kamto, before the polls, but Issa Tchiroma Bakary, one of Mr. Biya’s former close associates, now claims a solid victory; the “official” results, however, say that Mr. Biya received about half of the votes, and Mr. Bakary only a third. Cameroonians, like the youth of Madagascar, have already taken to the streets of Yaounde, the capital, and other cities crying “fraud.”

They conceivably may do so with equal fervour in Zimbabwe, to try to thwart Mr. Mnangagwa’s preference to rule without testing his popularity at the polls. The younger generation in Ethiopia, especially in the state of Oromia, has for several years been opposed to Prime Minister and Nobel laureate Abiy Ahmed’s wars against the people of the province of Tigray. Moroccan young people have also recently demonstrated against the inadequacies of their government.

The results of a pivotal election in Tanzania on Oct. 29 could bring out another robust Gen Z protest. President Samia Suluhu Hassan, a Zanzibari woman, acceded to the presidency when autocrat John Magufuli died in 2021. She first scrapped his imposed constraints on freedom of the press, but has since reimposed those restrictions and her likely re-election may arouse yet another Gen Z explosion.

We call many of the regimes in today’s Africa “electoral autocracies.” Citizens go to the polls, often with hope, but in too many cases the results are already predetermined. Voters have an ostensible choice, but behind the scenes, the incumbent regime has already ensured or manipulated the result that it wants. Mr. Biya has done so in Cameroon, as has Mr. Kagame in Rwanda, and Mr. Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe.

Wholesale corruption is prevalent, too. In Zimbabwe, where inflation runs high, Mr. Mnangagwa and his cronies have gained their illicit take from the mining of diamonds and gold.

The Gen Z protesters in Madagascar were tired of political and business elites stealing state funds. They blamed corruption and gross mismanagement for the very limited availability of both water and electricity. That is a common complaint in other parts of Africa, including Zimbabwe and even South Africa. In Madagascar this year, as in Zimbabwe, many days went by without enough power to light a bulb or run a stove. (Droughts have curtailed the hydropower on which so many African countries rely.)

Gen Z is showing the way, possibly toward more accountable and more participatory governance in Africa. They retain a democratic impulse, which conceivably could eventually prevail.