In June 2024, Kenya’s President William Ruto announced that he was going to withdraw a finance bill that, via tax increases, would have pushed the cost of basic commodities even further out of reach. His hand was forced by over a month of biweekly street protests, primarily led by Gen Z, across most of Kenya’s 47 counties – an event whose scale was unparalleled in the post-independence history of the country.
While the police violence that ensued – including the extrajudicial execution of at least 65 people and the abduction of dozens of others – subsequently stymied these mobilisations, we continue to live in their wake: all of our landscapes – political, economic, ecological and social – were impacted by this watershed moment in Kenya’s history and will never be the same.
A ‘premonition of the future’
Madagascar, Morocco, Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria. All these countries, like Kenya, have recently experienced waves of protests with young people at the forefront. This, certainly, is a current of change that is unlikely to be halted; a movement that will only grow. If you are an adherent of the apocalyptic “youth bulge” discourse, fearing the “premonition of the future” that Robert D. Kaplan warned about in 1994 – that of “overpopulation”, war, and “anarchy” steered by ungovernable African youth – then these Gen Z movements are more fodder for your panic.
Undoubtedly, much sleep has been lost by leaders – from Nairobi to Dakar, Antananarivo, Dar es Salaam, and Rabat – whose unwanted and thus illegitimate rule, shored up by militarised violence, is challenged by the very people who have been formally declared a “bulge”. (Note that it is unlikely that young people in Europe or America could ever be captured by this moniker.)
Since at least the early 2000s, this narrative of an overflowing youth population has caught the attention of governments and organisations, prompting a myriad of state and not-for-profit programmes whose objective is to turn the “bulge” into a “demographic dividend” that boosts economic growth. To be sure, what is desired is the production of economic utility by youth for the state, rather than a substantive citizenship stewarded by youth themselves.
The foundation for this proclivity to engineer young people socially, politically, and economically was mainly set in motion by dynamics that have both Malthusian and colonial origins. Yet, despite this provenance, from the African Union to the World Bank, from regional policymakers to European research institutions, this African demographic is becoming the bogeyman for all sorts of phenomena: crime and terrorism, uprisings, “illegal migration”, and war.
On the one hand, the statistics are true. At least 70 per cent of the African population is under 30; according to the World Bank, by 2050 one in three young persons in the world will, therefore, be African. Furthermore, since Africa’s urbanisation rate is the fastest in the world, most of this population will be living in the continent’s cities and dwelling in geographies whose services are unable (and often unwilling) to keep up with this tide.
For these reasons, recent Gen Z mobilisations primarily take on an urban valence. Not just because young people choose city streets to exercise their right to assemble, but also because these spaces represent the highest indices of generation-specific broken promises: the yet-to-materialise (if they ever will) bounties that are contained within “Africa rising” narratives. The expressions of these vanquished pledges, the “dreams deferred” of Langston Hughes’s poem, include frighteningly high levels of unemployment, food and housing insecurity, mental and physical health inequities, and much more.
As Frank Njugi, one of the young contributors to a recent The Elephant symposium on “structural adjustment 2.0” – a current multilateral organisation-imposed austerity that recalls similar interventions in the 1980s and 1990s in Africa and the “Third World” – writes,
It seemed possible that the country was rising in tandem with us, that our ambitions as kids were an inheritance from a newly opened era. Suddenly, we found ourselves in sun-bleached classrooms reciting in unison the futures we believed were ours for the taking. We wanted to eventually be policy thinkers who would one day stroll into ministries in crisp suits and speak the language of national renewal. Nairobi, for us growing up far away … shimmered like a faraway republic of possibility, a place where we boys and girls from dilapidated rural schools might ascend into the ranks of the people we admired … But as we grew, so did the contradictions. The very many leaders we once recited like catechism would later become architects, both by action, and by neglect, of a system defined by entrenched corruption. An elite, nestled close to the state, grew wealthier as the rest of us sat through our teenage years in the 2010s watching the gulf widen, our textbooks still heavy with promise that the country itself was increasingly showing it might not eventually honour.
And these promises were never honoured. Instead, it is the deepening contradictions that lead us to this current conjuncture, where young people are unable to find futures and are forced to relive histories of extreme deprivation.
‘Demographic dividends’
Over the years, there have been many pronouncements, by both state and multilateral organisations, about the consequences of not making African youth productive. These warnings, which have been sung from a plethora of platforms, tell of the need to turn young people into “dividends”, lest they become “time bombs” or “tsunamis”.
Unfortunately, these appear to be the only two options given to African youth in these arenas: neoliberal promise or disaster.
Correspondingly, many formal interventions have been launched to make them effective labour for a capitalist machine, often under the guise of “youth inclusion”. These initiatives include programmes to direct them towards being “agripreneurs”, “entrepreneurs”, “self-employed hustlers”, even while this demographic has no access to land or capital and less and less access to quality and affordable education. Unsurprisingly, within these schemes there is no serious discussion about the structural conditions that got us here – a place where, in the words of another young Kenyan writer in The Elephant, Natasha Muhanji, “Graduates enter an economy with no hands to hold them and are told that, soon, things will stabilize” – another promise that is never honoured.
More recently, the iterations of such a politics, where youth are seen as instrumental in the neoliberal project, are witnessed in regional decarbonisation fora. Evidencing this, the Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change, which emerged from the heads of state discussions at the 2023 African Climate Summit, emphasises that:
Africa possesses both the potential and the ambition to be a vital component of the global solution to climate change. As home to the world’s youngest and fastest-growing workforce, coupled with massive untapped renewable energy potential, abundant natural assets and an entrepreneurial spirit, our continent has the fundamentals to spearhead a climate compatible pathway as a thriving, cost-competitive industrial hub with the capacity to support other regions in achieving their net zero ambitions.
Similarly, in a foreword to a recent report focused on a continental just transition, Kenya’s President Ruto, who is also the Chair of the Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change, writes:
Africa is bursting with possibilities and a vast endowment of natural resources. The continent’s renewable energy potential is 50 times greater than the anticipated global electricity demand for the year 2040. The continent also has over 40% of the global reserves of key minerals for batteries and hydrogen technologies. Africa also has the largest tracts of arable land, and the continent is young, with 70% of the people under 30 years of age. It is time to tap these riches to achieve the aspirations of the people. Opportunity beckons for Africa to make this century the African Century, in which the continent’s economies leapfrog by harnessing the vast endowment of clean energy resources. We are ready to leap into a future powered by Africa and demonstrate that the continent can industrialize in a low carbon and sustainable manner.
In neither of these assertions are the aspirations of young people centred. Instead, the “novel” politics of the green transition continues to promote a “dividend” discourse, leveraging this “youth bulge” as just one of many African resources – its “riches” – that need to be directed anywhere but to their own becoming(s). It is in this way that the “African Century” is made for others, not for them; they are only important as its fuel, akin to the minerals and solar energy – a workforce devoid of other aspirations, thoughts, and embodiments.
Even so, as the protests over the last few years have shown us, young people have other ideas about their location in the present, as well as what their tomorrows should look like.
Ecological futures
In April 2024, shortly before the mobilisations against Ruto’s Finance Bill, Kenya experienced flooding that led to the deaths of over 200 people and the displacement of close to 60,000. During this period, low-lying settlements in Nairobi – “slums” such as Mathare – saw households literally swept away: from kith and kin, school books and uniforms to shelter walls and gas stoves, the fast-moving flood currents were not selective about what they would carry.
Instead of offering relief, the government arrived weeks later to destroy houses that residents had rebuilt after the floods. Ostensibly motivated by the need to “protect” residents from further mercurial weather patterns, the bulldozers tore down homes that sat in the path of the previous month’s flood waters.
Many of the young Mathare residents who later participated in the 2024 protests were motivated by the converging effects of anthropogenic climate change on neglected communities and the militarised abandonment that was supposedly responding to this phenomenon. These events were, ultimately, inseparable.
What’s more, the high food prices that added to their grievances (the result of both IMF and World Bank debts and unpredictable weather), as well as the water and electricity shortages that were key flashpoints for the 2025 Gen Z protests in Madagascar, all gesture towards the ecological potencies of what are often taken solely as political and economic questions. This is further evidenced by the reality that all the African countries where protests have taken place are ranked as “highly vulnerable” to climate change, even though Africa as a whole contributes less than four per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, oscillating between droughts and famine, flooding and high temperatures, cyclones and desertification, capricious weather patterns compound the corruption, decline in services and cost of living crises that took and keep taking young people to the streets. While much has been made of the digital tools that allowed for the spread of these protests – valid, but also certainly technophilic, preoccupations – , their ecological dimensions are rarely foregrounded.
Seeds for tomorrow
As I write this in the spring of 2026, following the deepening of a fuel and cost of living crisis in Kenya, more protests are being organised. Once again, ecological questions are at the heart of these mobilisations, and they layer onto the sedimentations of a climate emergency.
Many of the outcomes of the Gen Z uprisings from 2024 and 2025 remain inconclusive. Yet in their calls to break from business as usual, to refrain from the systemic violence that intersects with and prompts ecological pressures and creates “youth bulges”, seeds for other political, environmental, and economic tomorrows can be glimpsed.
This is not the “African Century” that instrumentalises this demographic, nor the “tsunami” or “time bomb” anticipated. Rather, in the ways they represent and respond to the current moment through more people-centred articulations, this demographic may just be pointing us to the “republic of possibility” described by Njugi.
This could be our only chance.
This article was first published on 8 June 2026 in Green European Journal, Life Lines: Navigating Demographic Shifts, Vol 31.