In June 2024, Kenyan President William Ruto announced that he would withdraw a fiscal bill that would have further increased the price of essential goods through increased taxes. On his hands were more than a month of biweekly street protests led primarily by Generation Z in most of Kenya’s 47 counties, the scale of which was unparalleled in the country’s post-independence history.
Police violence, including at least 65 extrajudicial executions and dozens of abductions, hampered subsequent mobilization, but we continue to live with its effects. Our political, economic, environmental and social landscapes have all been affected by this watershed in Kenya’s history and will never be the same.
“Premonition of the future”
Madagascar, Morocco, Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania, and Nigeria. Like Kenya, all these countries have recently experienced waves of protests led by young people. Indeed, this is an unstoppable flow of change. This movement is only going to grow. If you are a believer in the apocalyptic “youth bulge” narrative and fear the “premonitions of the future” that Robert D. Kaplan warned about in 1994: “overpopulation,” war, and “anarchy” induced by ungovernable African youth, then these Gen Z movements will be more fodder for your panic.
No doubt, leaders from Nairobi to Dakar to Antananarivo to Dar es Salaam to Rabat are losing a lot of sleep, but their undesirable and therefore illegal rule is being reinforced by militarized violence and being challenged by the very people who have been formally declared “swollen.” (Note that young Europeans and Americans are less likely to be taken by this nickname.)
Since at least the early 2000s, this narrative of an overflowing youth population has captured the attention of governments and organizations, spurring countless state and nonprofit programs aimed at turning that “bulge” into a “demographic dividend” that fosters economic growth. Indeed, what is required is not substantive citizenship controlled by young people themselves, but rather that young people produce economic utility for the state.
The foundations of this propensity to manipulate young people socially, politically, and economically were largely set in motion by dynamics that had both Malthusian and colonial origins. But from the African Union to the World Bank, from regional policymakers to European research institutions, this African demographic is the source of all sorts of phenomena, including crime, terrorism, riots, “illegal immigration” and war.
On the one hand, the statistics are true. At least 70 percent of Africa’s population is under the age of 30. According to the World Bank, by 2050, one in three of the world’s young people will be African. Furthermore, because Africa is urbanizing at the highest rate in the world, most of this population will live in the continent’s cities and in areas where services cannot (and often do not want) to keep up with this trend.
For these reasons, the recent mobilization of Gen Z has been predominantly urban. Not only because young people choose city streets to exercise their right to assembly, but also because these spaces represent the highest indicators of generational broken promises. It is an as-yet-unrealized (if realized) benefit contained in the story of “Africa’s rise.” Expressions of these broken vows, the “dreams deferred” in Langston Hughes’ poetry, include horrifyingly high unemployment rates, food and housing insecurity, and inequalities in mental and physical health.
As one of our recent contributors, Frank Njugi elephant A symposium on “Structural Adjustment 2.0” (austerity policies imposed by current multilateral organizations reminiscent of similar interventions in the 1980s and 1990s in Africa and the “Third World”) writes:
This country was rising in tandem with us, and it seemed like our childhood ambitions might be an inheritance from a newly opened era. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a sunlit classroom, reciting in unison the future we believed was ours. Ultimately, we all wanted to be policy thinkers, one day striding into ministries in crisp suits and speaking the language of national renewal. Nairobi, for those of us who grew up far away…it shimmered like it was far away. republic of possibilitiesa place where we boys and girls attending run-down schools in the countryside might join the ranks of those we admired… But as we grew, so did our contradictions. So many of the leaders we once recited like catechisms later became architects of systems defined by deep corruption, whether by action or inaction. In the 2010s, while the rest of us spent our teenage years watching the Gulf expand, the nation’s proximate elites grew wealthier, and textbooks still weighed heavily with the promise that the nation itself might not ultimately be able to defend itself.
And these promises were never kept. Rather, it is the deepening contradictions that have brought us to this current situation, where young people are unable to find a future and are forced to relive a history of extreme deprivation.
“Population bonus”
Over the years, many statements have been made by both national and multilateral organizations about the consequences of not increasing the productivity of Africa’s youth. These warnings, sung from many podiums, call for the need to turn young people into “dividends” lest they become “time bombs” or “tsunamis.”
Unfortunately, there appear to be only two options for young Africans in these areas: neoliberal promise or destruction.
In response, a number of formal interventions have been launched, often under the guise of ‘youth inclusion’, to make them work as an effective workforce for the capitalist apparatus. These initiatives include programs that turn this group into “farmers,” “entrepreneurs,” and “self-employed hustlers,” even as this group lacks access to land and capital and has increasingly less access to quality and affordable education. Unsurprisingly, within these plans there is no serious discussion of the structural conditions that got us here. This is another promise that will never be kept, in the words of Natasha Muhanji, another young Kenyan author of Elephant, “a place where graduates enter the economic world with no support and are told that soon their situation will stabilize.”
More recently, a political iteration in which young people are seen as the driving force of the neoliberal project has been witnessed in regional decarbonization forums. As proof of this, the Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change, which emerged from discussions among heads of state at the 2023 Africa Climate Summit, emphasizes:
Africa has both the potential and the ambition to be a key component of the global solution to climate change. Home to the world’s youngest children, a rapidly growing workforceCoupled with large-scale untapped renewable energy potential, abundant natural assets and entrepreneurial spirit, our continent has the foundations to lead the way in climate adaptation as a thriving, cost-competitive industrial hub. Other regions are also working towards achieving net-zero goals..
Similarly, in the foreword to a recent report focused on the continent’s just transition, Kenyan President Ruto, who is also chair of the African Commission on Heads of State and Governments on Climate Change, wrote:
Africa is full of potential and vast natural resources. The continent’s renewable energy potential is 50 times greater than the world’s projected electricity demand in 2040. The continent also has more than 40% of the world’s reserves of critical minerals for battery and hydrogen technologies. Africa also has the largest area of arable land and is a young continent with 70% of its population under 30 years of age. It’s time to utilize these wealth to achieve people’s aspirations. Africa now has an opportunity to make this century its century and make great strides in the African economy by utilizing vast clean energy resources. We are ready to leap into the future with the power of Africa and demonstrate that Africa can industrialize in a low-carbon and sustainable way.
Neither of these arguments center around the aspirations of young people. Instead, the ‘novel’ politics of the green transition continues to promote a ‘dividend’ discourse, capitalizing on this ‘youth bulge’ as just one of Africa’s many resources, its ‘wealth’, that needs to be directed elsewhere than its own making. In this way, the “African Century” is created for others, not for others. They, like minerals and solar energy, are a labor force that is important only as fuel and has no other aspirations, thoughts or embodiments.
Yet, as the protests of the past few years have shown us, young people have a different idea of where they stand today and what their tomorrow should look like.
ecological future
In April 2024, just before the mobilization against Ruto’s finance bill, Kenya experienced floods that killed more than 200 people and displaced nearly 60,000. During this period, households in “slums” such as Mathare, a low-lying settlement in Nairobi, were literally swept away with everything from relatives, school books and uniforms to shelter walls and gas stoves, choosing not to be carried by the fast flood waters.
Instead of providing relief, the government arrived weeks later and destroyed the homes that residents had rebuilt after the floods. Ostensibly motivated by the need to “protect” residents from further capricious weather patterns, bulldozers demolished homes in the path of last month’s floods.
Many of the young Mathare residents who later took part in the 2024 protests were motivated by the converging effects of anthropogenic climate change on neglected communities and the militarized abandonment that was likely in response to this phenomenon. These events were ultimately inseparable.
Furthermore, rising food prices (a result of IMF and World Bank debt and unpredictable weather) that have exacerbated their dissatisfaction, and water and electricity shortages that were key flashpoints for the Gen Z protests in Madagascar in 2025, all point to the ecological potential of problems that are often seen as solely political and economic. This is further evidenced by the reality that all African countries where protests occurred are ranked as “highly vulnerable” to climate change, even though Africa as a whole accounts for less than 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, capricious weather patterns that oscillate between drought and famine, floods and high temperatures, cyclones and desertification are exacerbating a crisis of corruption, poor services and the cost of living that continues to force young people into the streets. While much has been made about the digital tools that have enabled the expansion of these protests, and rightfully so, their ecological aspects are rarely foregrounded, although they are certainly technocrats and obsessions.
seeds for tomorrow
As I write this in the spring of 2026, more protests are being organized in response to the deepening fuel and cost of living crisis in Kenya. Once again, ecological issues are at the heart of these activities, overlapping with the precipitating climate emergency.
Many of the outcomes of the Gen Z uprising in 2024-2025 are still inconclusive. But in their calls to break away from business-as-usual, intersect with and promote ecological pressures, and refrain from the systemic violence that generates the “youth bulge,” we glimpse the seeds of other political, environmental, and economic tomorrows.
This is not an “African century” that takes advantage of this demographic, nor is it a predicted “tsunami” or “ticking time bomb.” Rather, in the way they express and respond to the present moment through more anthropocentric expressions, this demographic may simply be showing us the “republic of possibilities” described by Njugi.
This may be your only chance.
This article First published June 8, 2026. green european journal, Lifeline: Surviving demographic change31 volumes.
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
