In June 2024, Kenya’s President William Ruto introduced that he was going to withdraw a finance invoice that, through tax will increase, would have pushed the price of fundamental commodities even additional out of attain. His hand was compelled by over a month of biweekly road protests, primarily led by Gen Z, throughout most of Kenya’s 47 counties – an occasion whose scale was unparalleled within the post-independence historical past of the nation.
Whereas the police violence that ensued – together with the extrajudicial execution of not less than 65 individuals and the kidnapping of dozens of others – subsequently stymied these mobilisations, we proceed to stay of their wake: all of our landscapes – political, financial, ecological and social – have been impacted by this watershed second in Kenya’s historical past and can by no means be the identical.
A ‘premonition of the long run’
Madagascar, Morocco, Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria. All these international locations, like Kenya, have not too long ago skilled waves of protests with younger individuals on the forefront. This, definitely, is a present of change that’s unlikely to be halted; a motion that may solely develop. If you’re an adherent of the apocalyptic “youth bulge” discourse, fearing the “premonition of the long run” that Robert D. Kaplan warned about in 1994 – that of “overpopulation”, battle, and “anarchy” steered by ungovernable African youth – then these Gen Z actions are extra fodder on your panic.
Undoubtedly, a lot sleep has been misplaced by leaders – from Nairobi to Dakar, Antananarivo, Dar es Salaam, and Rabat – whose undesirable and thus illegitimate rule, shored up by militarised violence, is challenged by the very individuals who have been formally declared a “bulge”. (Observe that it’s unlikely that younger individuals in Europe or America might ever be captured by this moniker.)
Since not less than the early 2000s, this narrative of an overflowing youth inhabitants has caught the eye of governments and organisations, prompting a myriad of state and not-for-profit programmes whose goal is to show the “bulge” right into a “demographic dividend” that reinforces financial progress. To make certain, what’s desired is the manufacturing of financial utility by youth for the state, slightly than a substantive citizenship stewarded by youth themselves.
The muse for this proclivity to engineer younger individuals socially, politically, and economically was primarily set in movement by dynamics which have each Malthusian and colonial origins. But, regardless of this provenance, from the African Union to the World Financial institution, from regional policymakers to European analysis establishments, this African demographic is changing into the bogeyman for all types of phenomena: crime and terrorism, uprisings, “unlawful migration”, and battle.
On the one hand, the statistics are true. No less than 70 per cent of the African inhabitants is below 30; based on the World Financial institution, by 2050 one in three younger individuals on this planet will, subsequently, be African. Moreover, since Africa’s urbanisation fee is the quickest on this planet, most of this inhabitants can be residing within the continent’s cities and dwelling in geographies whose providers are unable (and infrequently unwilling) to maintain up with this tide.
For these causes, latest Gen Z mobilisations primarily tackle an city valence. Not simply because younger individuals select metropolis streets to train their proper to assemble, but in addition as a result of these areas signify the very best indices of generation-specific damaged guarantees: the yet-to-materialise (in the event that they ever will) bounties which might be contained inside “Africa rising” narratives. The expressions of those vanquished pledges, the “goals deferred” of Langston Hughes’s poem, embrace frighteningly excessive ranges of unemployment, meals and housing insecurity, psychological and bodily well being inequities, and way more.
As Frank Njugi, one of many younger contributors to a latest The Elephant symposium on “structural adjustment 2.0” – a present multilateral organisation-imposed austerity that recollects related interventions within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties in Africa and the “Third World” – writes,
It appeared doable that the nation was rising in tandem with us, that our ambitions as youngsters have been an inheritance from a newly opened period. All of a sudden, we discovered ourselves in sun-bleached school rooms reciting in unison the futures we believed have been ours for the taking. We wished to ultimately be coverage thinkers who would sooner or later stroll into ministries in crisp fits and communicate the language of nationwide renewal. Nairobi, for us rising up distant … shimmered like a faraway republic of risk, a spot the place we girls and boys from dilapidated rural colleges would possibly ascend into the ranks of the individuals we admired … However as we grew, so did the contradictions. The very many leaders we as soon as recited like catechism would later turn into architects, each by motion, and by neglect, of a system outlined by entrenched corruption. An elite, nestled near the state, grew wealthier as the remainder of us sat by means of our teenage years within the 2010s watching the gulf widen, our textbooks nonetheless heavy with promise that the nation itself was more and more displaying it won’t ultimately honour.
And these guarantees have been by no means honoured. As a substitute, it’s the deepening contradictions that lead us to this present conjuncture, the place younger individuals are unable to seek out futures and are compelled to relive histories of maximum deprivation.
‘Demographic dividends’
Through the years, there have been many pronouncements, by each state and multilateral organisations, in regards to the penalties of not making African youth productive. These warnings, which have been sung from a plethora of platforms, inform of the necessity to flip younger individuals into “dividends”, lest they turn into “time bombs” or “tsunamis”.
Sadly, these look like the one two choices given to African youth in these arenas: neoliberal promise or catastrophe.
Correspondingly, many formal interventions have been launched to make them efficient labour for a capitalist machine, usually below the guise of “youth inclusion”. These initiatives embrace programmes to direct them in direction of being “agripreneurs”, “entrepreneurs”, “self-employed hustlers”, even whereas this demographic has no entry to land or capital and fewer and fewer entry to high quality and inexpensive training. Unsurprisingly, inside these schemes there is no such thing as a severe dialogue in regards to the structural circumstances that acquired us right here – a spot the place, within the phrases of one other younger Kenyan author in The Elephant, Natasha Muhanji, “Graduates enter an financial system with no palms to carry them and are informed that, quickly, issues will stabilize” – one other promise that’s by no means honoured.
Extra not too long ago, the iterations of such a politics, the place youth are seen as instrumental within the neoliberal undertaking, are witnessed in regional decarbonisation fora. Evidencing this, the Nairobi Declaration on Local weather Change, which emerged from the heads of state discussions on the 2023 African Local weather Summit, emphasises that:
Africa possesses each the potential and the ambition to be a significant part of the worldwide answer to local weather change. As dwelling to the world’s youngest and fastest-growing workforce, coupled with huge untapped renewable power potential, considerable pure belongings and an entrepreneurial spirit, our continent has the basics to spearhead a local weather suitable pathway as a thriving, cost-competitive industrial hub with the capability to assist different areas in reaching their internet zero ambitions.
Equally, in a foreword to a latest report targeted on a continental simply transition, Kenya’s President Ruto, who can also be the Chair of the Committee of African Heads of State and Authorities on Local weather Change, writes:
Africa is bursting with potentialities and an unlimited endowment of pure sources. The continent’s renewable power potential is 50 occasions higher than the anticipated world electrical energy demand for the yr 2040. The continent additionally has over 40% of the worldwide reserves of key minerals for batteries and hydrogen applied sciences. Africa additionally has the biggest tracts of arable land, and the continent is younger, with 70% of the individuals below 30 years of age. It’s time to faucet these riches to realize the aspirations of the individuals. Alternative beckons for Africa to make this century the African Century, by which the continent’s economies leapfrog by harnessing the huge endowment of fresh power sources. We’re able to leap right into a future powered by Africa and display that the continent can industrialize in a low carbon and sustainable method.
In neither of those assertions are the aspirations of younger individuals centred. As a substitute, the “novel” politics of the inexperienced transition continues to advertise a “dividend” discourse, leveraging this “youth bulge” as simply one among many African sources – its “riches” – that must be directed anyplace however to their very own changing into(s). It’s on this means that the “African Century” is made for others, not for them; they’re solely essential as its gas, akin to the minerals and photo voltaic power – a workforce devoid of different aspirations, ideas, and embodiments.
Even so, because the protests over the previous couple of years have proven us, younger individuals produce other concepts about their location within the current, in addition to what their tomorrows ought to appear like.
Ecological futures
In April 2024, shortly earlier than the mobilisations in opposition to Ruto’s Finance Invoice, Kenya skilled flooding that led to the deaths of over 200 individuals and the displacement of near 60,000. Throughout this era, low-lying settlements in Nairobi – “slums” reminiscent of Mathare – noticed households actually swept away: from kith and kin, college books and uniforms to shelter partitions and gasoline stoves, the fast-moving flood currents weren’t selective about what they might carry.
As a substitute of providing reduction, the federal government arrived weeks later to destroy homes that residents had rebuilt after the floods. Ostensibly motivated by the necessity to “defend” residents from additional mercurial climate patterns, the bulldozers tore down houses that sat within the path of the earlier month’s flood waters.
Most of the younger Mathare residents who later participated within the 2024 protests have been motivated by the converging results of anthropogenic local weather change on uncared for communities and the militarised abandonment that was supposedly responding to this phenomenon. These occasions have been, finally, inseparable.
What’s extra, the excessive meals costs that added to their grievances (the results of each IMF and World Financial institution money owed and unpredictable climate), in addition to the water and electrical energy shortages that have been key flashpoints for the 2025 Gen Z protests in Madagascar, all gesture in direction of the ecological potencies of what are sometimes taken solely as political and financial questions. That is additional evidenced by the truth that each one the African international locations the place protests have taken place are ranked as “extremely weak” to local weather change, although Africa as an entire contributes lower than 4 per cent of worldwide greenhouse gasoline emissions.
Now, oscillating between droughts and famine, flooding and excessive temperatures, cyclones and desertification, capricious climate patterns compound the corruption, decline in providers and price of residing crises that took and maintain taking younger individuals to the streets. Whereas a lot has been fabricated from the digital instruments that allowed for the unfold of those protests – legitimate, but in addition definitely technophilic, preoccupations – , their ecological dimensions are not often foregrounded.
Seeds for tomorrow
As I write this within the spring of 2026, following the deepening of a gas and price of residing disaster in Kenya, extra protests are being organised. As soon as once more, ecological questions are on the coronary heart of those mobilisations, and so they layer onto the sedimentations of a local weather emergency.
Most of the outcomes of the Gen Z uprisings from 2024 and 2025 stay inconclusive. But of their calls to interrupt from enterprise as common, to chorus from the systemic violence that intersects with and prompts ecological pressures and creates “youth bulges”, seeds for different political, environmental, and financial tomorrows will be glimpsed.
This isn’t the “African Century” that instrumentalises this demographic, nor the “tsunami” or “time bomb” anticipated. Fairly, within the methods they signify and reply to the present second by means of extra people-centred articulations, this demographic could be pointing us to the “republic of risk” described by Njugi.
This might be our solely likelihood.
This text was first printed on 8 June 2026 in Inexperienced European Journal, Life Traces: Navigating Demographic Shifts, Vol 31.
