The number of mostly spontaneous mass protests in Africa has grown exponentially since the start of the 2010s, and yet it still has not registered in many decision-makers’ minds that a sea change is afoot in our political economy. They are not looking at the big picture in order to connect the dots.
Why is this issue important?
Africa has the youngest population in the world. A very rapid acceleration of quality service delivery is required to make Africans unite behind some kind of social contract, but unfortunately, nowhere is there any sign that such improvements are happening quickly enough.
Last week, there were service delivery protests in Morocco and Madagascar. In both cases, they were led by Gen Zs demanding jobs, public sector reforms, stricter anti-corruption measures and access to electricity.
While the leaders of the Moroccan action have suspended theirs for two weeks – ostensibly to give the government time to show how it is responding to their demands – Madagascar is still at boiling point. The youth leaders are adamant that President Andry Rajoelina must resign.
The army has joined the protesters. One army unit is even claiming to be in charge of the country’s affairs. As I was finishing this piece, both CNN and Deutsche Welle broke the news that Rajoelina had fled the country.
Before that, the past 24 months were characterised by major unrest elsewhere on the continent:
- In July 2025, thousands of Angolans took to the streets to protest against the rising cost of living after the fuel levy was raised. Thousands of shops were looted around the country, more than eight people were killed and another 1,000 were arrested;
- Following the 9 October 2024 elections which pitted Frelimo’s Daniel Chapo against the Podemos flagbearer Venacio Mondlane, many Mozambicans, most of them young, took to the streets to demand that the latter candidate be declared the winner of the elections. More than 100 people died in the ensuing violence; and
- In June 2025, Kenyan Gen Zs took to the streets with chants of “Ruto must go” after the president sent a tax bill to parliament that would have worsened the cost of living in the country. The youth were also protesting corruption (with the signing over of Nairobi airport management to the Andani group) and austerity. A
BBC exposé recently revealed that snipers were used to kill some protesters.
So, in under 16 months, we have witnessed major protests in five countries. If we expand that time window by another half-decade or so, we also have:
- The July 2021 South African unrest;
- The End SARS protests of October 2020 in Nigeria;
- The Ras Bath-led mass movements in Mali in 2016 and 2018; and
- The Burkinabè mass youth protests in 2014.
That is a long list. I have not even mentioned Cameroon, Togo, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Uganda. Here is where it gets worse: during that period, protesters stormed parliament (on 30 October 2014 in Burkina Faso and on 25 June 2024 in Kenya). In both instances, the parliaments were set on fire.
Elsewhere, the youth of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have rejected democracy in favour of Paul Kagame-style developmentalism.
That brings us to the nub of this piece. Why are young people so restless? Can the growing unrest be attributed to the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic? How does it end?
To be sure, Covid has something to do with some of the unrest, but not to the extent that we think. After the Covid pandemic, inflation has certainly gone up in most parts of the continent, something that either brought down many incumbents (Lazarus Chakwera, George Weah, Mokgweetsi Masisi, Pravind Jugnauth, Wavel Ramkalawan) or eroded their win margins (Cyril Ramaphosa, Daniel Chapo, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah).
Service delivery vs demographic growth
The bigger crisis boils down to this: sluggish or non-existent service delivery is colliding with demographic growth. Africa’s population is very, very, very young, and the sheer size means that if service delivery does not pick up very quickly, many countries will burn.
Without universal basic infrastructure (roads, internet, hospital, water, electricity, quality education, access to government services, schools, ease of starting a business, and so on), more literal and figurative guillotines will continue popping up everywhere in Africa in the late 2020s and beyond.
There were fewer than 300 million people in Africa in 1960 when most countries gained independence. Looking at the size of the continent, we can say that the continent was, for all intents and purposes, empty. Slavery and colonialism had wiped out entire communities.
Only a handful of metropolises with more than one million people existed, in South Africa, Congo, Nigeria, Dakar and North Africa. Whereas fewer than 15% of the continent’s population was urban in 1960, today more than 45% of Africans live in cities, and there are 1.56 billion people on the continent.
You can see where this is going: in a city, you are cut off from the land and the spider network of support systems that valued you as a person and provided all your needs. There are no farms, no fruit trees, no commons (land, water, plants).
You are on your own.
Meeting needs
As the Swiss political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said: “Quand les pauvres n’auront plus rien à manger, ils mangeront les riches!” (When the people have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich).
In such contexts, governments need to be really efficient, at least in the provision of the most essential services. The job market, markets in general, and social society should offer enough opportunities for people to meet their needs.
That is not happening.
The only way to describe youth unemployment in Africa right now is dangerous and unsustainable. Youth unemployment currently sits at 62% in Senegal, 53% in Nigeria, 46.1% in South Africa, and 40% in Cameroon. It is virtually the same picture everywhere else.
The first wave of widespread unrest in Africa’s modern history happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the corollary of which was the collapse of the East-West conflict and countries aligned with the East losing their biggest donors and backers. That wave of anger in many growing cities was ended with massive IMF loans and negotiated settlements within national conference platforms.
Oppression
After that, and as one of Africa’s foremost political philosophers, Claude Aké put it, African leaders who lost their legitimacy at that time sharpened the tools of oppression and domination. They learnt to organise elections and never lose.
Aké wrote, “the foundation upon which Africa’s democracy movement is based is the bitter disappointment of independence and post-independence plans – the development project being a prime example. Poor leadership and structural constraints have turned the high expectations of the independence movement into painful disappointment, forcing many African leaders to rely more on coercion, which has deepened their alienation.”
At the same time, we are reminded by another philosopher, Gustave Le Bon, that things can get very ugly when people become a crowd, because a crowd is always angrier and more courageous than its parts.
Le Bon describes a member of a crowd in Psychologie des Foules as follows: “We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.”
Young and angry
When you travel around the continent, you see everywhere signs of people who can become the type of crowds that Le Bon writes about. Millions of young, angry people who have no perspectives, no belief that their lives are going to be better than their parents’.
They are constantly on edge, just waiting for a spark, something to start a crowd and guide it towards the source of their anger. For many of these people, the only thing they have ever received from their government is their birth certificate.
Many young people used to jump into canoes and make their way across the Mediterranean into Europe to escape the grinding poverty back home. Others would sell their family land, buy a one-way ticket to Central America and find someone to take them through the Darién Gap into the United States of America.
With the rise of ethnonationalism and paleoconservatism in the Global North, those options have vanished. That, in turn, has grown the number of idle, angry young people.
Of course, there are ways to democratise civil society and develop social contracts that people can get behind. It only requires an open mind and collaboration with all of a country’s forces vives, its active, energetic, knowledgeable members.
Earlier this month, I wrote in Daily Maverick about the socioecological transformation projects that can rapidly bring in young people and give them the skills and opportunities to participate in their communities’ development. The segues are there.
Read more: How South Africa can adapt and innovate amid rising imported car sales
However, when you have politicians who can’t resist the urge to pay each other R1.3-million for attending a couple of board meetings, even as thousands lose their jobs, it is hard not to imagine that the next couple of decades will be characterised by young people storming state institutions to kick clueless politicians out of office. DM