'Youth' is not a useful framework for thinking about African politics
Young people do not make for better leaders purely because of their youth. African politics must instead be organized around ideas and a collective vision for society.
Senegal has a new president.
On Tuesday, Bassirou Diomaye Diakhar Faye was sworn in as Senegal’s fifth president, completing a remarkable political trajectory that took him from the country’s tax directorate to jail and on to the presidential palace in roughly a year. Faye was inaugurated after winning Senegal’s presidential election by a larger-than-expected margin in the first round of voting.
A little bit about that election.
As you perhaps know, that vote looked uncertain for some time due to an attempt by former President Macky Sall to postpone the election; you can read more about that here. On Election Day, the vote went smoothly and took place without any bells and whistles. The streets of Dakar were remarkably tranquil during the early hours of the day as lines of voters rapidly formed in the polling stations I went to. Some folks told me that they arrived as early as 7am, a good hour before the polls opened. Otherwise, March 24 was another regular, uneventful day for folks in the city and across the country who cast their vote and promptly returned to their regular activities.
At various points of the day, I saw locals hanging out on Dakar’s Corniche Ouest, other folks shopping at supermarkets and malls, kids playing football in their neighborhoods and many more continuing with their Ramadan observances. For their part, Senegalese electoral officials appear to have conducted the polls above board and did nothing untoward.
Elections alone do not make a democracy, but the vote was credibly administered and can reasonably be said to have reflected the will of the electorate. Later that day, it was clear that Faye was on course to win the election and celebrations among his supporters broke out in Dakar, even as the result was not formally certified until several days later. The following day, former Prime Minister Amadou Ba — Faye’s closest challenger — conceded the election and congratulated Faye, as did Sall.
Days later, Senegal’s new president was sworn in to office in front of dignitaries that included several West African heads of state as well as other well-wishers. Senegalese citizens hope that Faye’s investiture would bring the curtain down on three years of sociopolitical tensions and deadly unrest that delayed the presidential election and put Senegal’s leadership transition at risk.
Africa reacts to Faye’s election and inauguration
Faye, a 44-year-old man who never held any previous elected office, is Senegal’s youngest president as well as Africa’s youngest elected leader. His remarkable rise to the presidency, buoyed by a landslide victory, inspired especially pointed reactions among Africans. Many observers from across the continent as well as its diaspora cheered Faye’s against-all-odds victory, commended Senegalese citizens for their conduct of a transparent and credible election that was virtually free of violence and malpractice and wished the new leader well ahead of his inauguration.
Equally, many drew unfavorable contrasts with their own countries where in their telling, a young, little-known opposition figure — who was behind bars days before the vote, no less — with seemingly little backing by the establishment had no chance of assuming the highest office in the land. From media discourses, conversations with friends and acquaintances as well as on WhatsApp and other social networks I belong to, it was not uncommon to detect a “I see what you’ve done for other people” yearning among Africans of many nationalities for a similar occurrence in their own countries.
Faye’s youth, the thinking goes, reflects Senegal’s political enlightenment and willingness to empower young leaders in ways that seem rare across the continent. The underlying premise of this argument is a refrain of popular arguments that frame more participation of youths and increasing the number of young people in elective and appointed offices across Africa as an end in itself.
This mode of thinking has always struck me as an ahistorical, short-sighted and counterproductive way to think about power, politics and society. The first problem is the imprecise, nebulous definition of “youth.” The United Nations defines “youth” as someone between the ages of 15 and 24, while the African Union describes it as “every person between the ages of 15 and 35 years.” In practice, however, the definition of “youth” has been stretched well beyond its limit to the point that “youths” in their 40s and 50s are common in many African contexts.
I remember attending a gathering in a West African country where an individual who was introduced as the leader of a political party’s youth league was a 55-year-old man. I asked an interlocutor why someone who was closer to retirement than they were to adolescence was representing “youths” and was promptly informed that “age is only in the mind.”
In any case, the pliability of “youth” and “young people” is no accident, and actually makes sense when put in some historical perspective, which is what we do over here. Let’s talk a trip down memory lane, shall we?
A brief intellectual history of the modern preoccupation with “youths” in African politics.
The dawn of Africa’s democratization era was preceded by the imposition of structural adjustment programs by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The SAP era — as the period is often referred to — transformed African societies in ways that resonate to this day, by ushering in a neoliberal political economy that stripped already-weak African states of their “developmentalist” mission. This had the effect of arresting and reversing the gains many of them made since they gained formal independence from European colonizers, and it gave way to a “democratization” that shrunk the nature and terms of political competition in countries across the continent.
Under those conditions, economic liberalization and “democracy” became two sides of the same coin. But far from expanding the spectrum of options available in the political arena, the neoliberalism of the SAP era minimized it by deemphasizing the ideological component of African political parties. A neoliberal consensus was formed, in which democratic governance came to be defined in strictly technocratic, managerial terms while the privatization, deregulation and financialization of key economic sectors across Africa transferred more wealth from working- and emerging middle-class segments toward the ruling class.
It is within this context that the proliferation of middle-aged “youths” in African politics must be understood. Before the onset of Africa’s democratization wave, most countries were ruled by military dictatorships, civilians in single-party states or white-minority governments as in the case of South Africa and Namibia. The SAP era weakened key elite factions in African societies, while also enabling the rise and entrenchment of another group which subsequently created a new set of princelings who would be subservient to their overlords.
This process was institutionalized within the party systems that formed across the continent in the late 1980s and 1990s when African countries created or returned to multiparty elections. Ambitious politicos who did not belong to either the entrenched class or the rising stars had to fit in somewhere. The combination of that desire among many to become part of the political establishment and the shift in the broader post-Cold War milieu toward championing “young leaders” in the formerly colonized world created a trend of aspiring politicians across the continent pitching their tents in mainstream parties as their “youths.”
As these “youths” got older with time, they became full-fledged members of the political establishment while hanging on to the “youth” label for dear life. Invariably, political power rarely transitioned to a newer generation. At best, it moved sideways wherein lifelong “youths” contested for it with other “youths” as well as the upperclassmen who came before them.
A quick scan of the continent will suggest so, as a large portion of its political leaders — taken here to mean heads of state and government, legislative leaders and subnational executives — who currently hold power are retired military officers, generational scions of powerful families, former opposition figures or proteges of political heavyweights.
Deconstructing the virtue of “youth” in African politics
For many Africans, Faye’s rise to the presidency is remarkable because of his “youth” and is proof that Africa needs more young leaders and fewer old ones. But Faye was not elected because of his “youth.” Rather, he won the presidency because the electorate was disillusioned with the prevailing societal order under his predecessor, and Faye seemed to offer a compelling alternative.
Voters of all age groups were attracted to what they thought was a persuasive vision of society that aspired to broaden prosperity to include the millions left out of Sall’s “Plan Sénégal Emergent” initiative. This is not to ignore or downplay the remarkable support Faye got from young Senegalese voters whose current living conditions are especially distressing, but it is to argue that “youth” is not an organizing principle of politics. The verdict on Faye’s performance in office will be determined by — among other issues — the degree to which he makes tangible improvement in the material conditions of his constituents and places his country on a path to sustained prosperity. His willingness or ability to do those things will not depend on his “youth,” any more than his gender or religious affiliation.
But if “youth” were a leadership criteria, African countries have not lacked for young political leaders. Many of the independence-era figures who inherited the reins of modern African nation-states from European colonizers were “youths.” Guinea’s Sékou Touré, Upper Volta’s Maurice Yaméogo, Cameroon’s Ahmadou Ahidjo, Central African Republic’s David Dacko and Uganda’s Milton Obote all were in their 30s when they inherited power as the first “post-independence” heads of state and government of their respective countries. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Botswana’s Seretse Khama, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Mozambique’s Samora Machel were in their 40s when they became national leaders. Even so, the military regimes that replaced Africa’s independence-era civilian governments were headed by officers of similar age profiles, and some junta leaders have been younger.
To wit, Nigeria’s Yakubu Gowon, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Mali’s Moussa Traore all were in their 30s when they rose to power as military leaders while Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Sierra Leone’s Valentine Strasser were even in their 20s. In some instances, many “young” leaders of yesterday, like Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Cameroon’s Paul Biya, are the “old” leaders of today. The young shall grow, as the axiom goes. In other words, the continent has had its share of young leaders who headed different systems of government to varying degrees of “success.” Many have been good, others have been bad while some have been somewhere in between and their legacies hinge on the track record of their time in power—not their age.
The desire to see newer political leadership emerge across the continent is not unreasonable. Africa’s population is overwhelmingly young — the median age on the continent is approximately 19 — and much of it is disillusioned with its current situation. Far too many countries are led by old, ineffective, corrupt and autocratic leaders who do not represent the aspirations of their youthful constituents. African nation-states that were created by European colonial powers and inherited by local administrators cannot provide the basic necessities of life for their citizens.
Popular claims of “democratic regression” and a “return to coups” across the entire continent are overblown and based on faulty assumptions about important trends and beliefs, but meaningful debates about the inability of democracies to improve material conditions are genuinely taking place all over the continent. Aging, sit-tight African leaders continue to fiddle with term limits and other institutional guardrails, while some appear to be grooming their children to succeed them.
Meanwhile, young Africans are more educated, interconnected with the world, and at the forefront of cutting-edge developments in culture, technology, sport, scientific research and many other fields than they have ever been. The discord between Africa’s negligent, senescent political class and the exuberance of its overwhelmingly young population is genuinely a cause for concern and one that should be engaged in good faith.
It’s time to stop fetishizing “youths” as the solution to Africa’s challenges
Regrettably, the solution to these problems does not lie in “youth” as the magic pill that will cure all that ails the continent. It might be true that Africa’s older elites will not be able to resolve the challenges of the present and future, but it is not a given that a younger set of leaders will be able to succeed where they have failed. Youths are not inherently disposed to be entrepreneurs of social transformation, as they can — and often do — learn the wrong lessons from their forebears and make similar mistakes to them. The concept of “youth” is far too malleable and nondescript as a form of political participation and it is a mistake to hypothesize it independently of other important variables like class, social mobility and ideology.
Increasingly, there is an assortment of initiatives all over the continent intended to get more “youths” into leadership positions—in politics and otherwise. Many if not most of them are spearheaded by and geared toward upwardly mobile, middle-class youths in urban areas.
A good example that comes to mind is Nigeria’s #NotTooYoungToRun campaign, which sought to boost the number of “youths” elected to public office. The campaign, which was backed by many domestic elites as well as the usual coterie of Western diplomatic missions, international organizations, non-profit foundations and INGOs, resulted in a law that reduced the age requirement for aspirants seeking national office. It remains to be seen what effects the legislation might have in the long term, but it is safe to say that it did little to raise the number of Nigerian “youths” elected to national office at the 2023 general election.
Many of those who did win were the kin or beneficiaries of older, wealthy political elites. The law does not address the prohibitive cost of running for office in Nigeria to say nothing of the other barriers to entry for young people like the weak, undemocratic party system or the lack of trust in the electoral process. None of these issues are distinct from the very meaningful issue of youth participation in politics, but the legislation does not aim to be a holistic solution to them all. As such, piecemeal “reforms” like lowering age limits, set-asides for young people and reducing the cost of nomination forms are little more than cosmetic remedies that will not do much to make civic participation more accountable to all Africans regardless of their age.
Thus, #NotTooYoungtoRun and many other initiatives like it seeks not to overturn exclusionary, unaccountable orders but to demand a share of the spoils of political power. You could even say it would likely create another set of princelings who could potentially gain power while remaining “youths” for life.
It may be the case that many more young political leaders like Faye could emerge across Africa. It is even possible that their emergence might pave the way for the new dawn of prosperity and development that Africans want and need. This development is more likely to materialize if it is underpinned by movement-based politics that offers a compelling vision of the future and takes concrete steps to empower a broad range of individuals across society. Fetishizing “youth” as a framework for political participation is unlikely to realize that promise.