What’s Behind Africa’s Sweeping Gen Z Protests

Welcome to Foreign policyAfrica Brief.

Highlights this week: Youth-led protests Morocco and MadagascarCameroonians are preparing to head to the polls as president Paul Bea He seeks an eighth term, and United States and South Africa Tensions continue to rise.

Weeks of protests continue to roil Morocco and Madagascar, as young people disillusioned with the ruling elites take to the streets. The unrest comes amid a global wave of Gen Z-led unrest this year in Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Peru and the Philippines.

In Morocco, demonstrations have spread to more than a dozen cities, marking the country’s widest unrest since the Arab Spring of 2011. Moroccans accuse their government of neglecting public services while investing $5 billion in infrastructure for the 2030 FIFA World Cup, which Morocco is co-hosting with Portugal and Spain.

Under the slogan “GenZ 212” – named after the Moroccan telephone code – protesters are calling on King Mohammed VI to dismiss the government, investigate corruption, and improve access to jobs.

The protests began last month after several women died after undergoing caesarean sections at a hospital in the southwestern city of Agadir, which many Moroccans saw as a symbol of the country’s inadequate healthcare system. This frustration has turned into broader anger about the economy and lack of jobs.

Over the past decade, Morocco’s working-age population has increased by more than 10 percent, while employment has increased by only 1.5 percent, according to the World Bank. Youth unemployment in Morocco reached nearly 40 percent last year.

Lack of job creation is a growing problem across Africa. According to a World Bank report released this week, only 24% of jobs in the region are paid. In a February 2024 Afrobarometer poll, more than half of Moroccans aged 35 or younger said they had considered migrating for work.

So far, three people have been killed by police forces after protesters stormed a security site, and more than 1,000 people have been arrested.

The government tried to calm the situation, announcing the appointment of more than 500 doctors. But Moroccan Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch — who comes from one of the richest families in Morocco, with an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion — has shown no indication that he intends to resign.

Elsewhere in Africa, Madagascar President Andry Rajoelina ignored similar calls to step down and instead said he would dissolve the government last week. Unrest escalated in Madagascar after at least 22 people were killed in protests that began on September 25 against recurring power outages and water shortages.

Two-thirds of Madagascar’s population lives in extreme poverty. The country, which produces 80 percent of the world’s vanilla, faces high US tariffs under the Trump administration. The expiration of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which allowed the country to access the US market without tariffs, also put about 120,000 jobs in Madagascar at risk.

On Monday, Rajoelina appointed General Ruffin Fortunat Zavisambo as the new prime minister in what many Madagascans see as an attempt to cling to power through military support.

“Appointing a high-ranking soldier has often been an option for Madagascar’s leaders in times of political tension, in order to project this image of firmness but also to court the armed forces,” the Madagascar Tribune reported. The demonstrators rejected the national dialogue scheduled for Wednesday, giving Rajoelina 48 hours to resign or face a nationwide strike.

Protracted unrest in Morocco and Madagascar could spur more Generation Z demonstrations in other African countries. “[E]Risk management firm Solace Global warned last week that economic frustrations, such as unemployment and rising costs of living, are similarly being felt elsewhere on the continent.

Meanwhile, Pangea-Risk noted that Uganda could also witness unrest as 81-year-old President Yoweri Museveni intends to run for a seventh term in January.

Wednesday 8 October: The African FinTech Summit begins in Accra, Ghana.

Thursday, October 9 to Saturday, October 11: Seychelles is holding a runoff in the presidential elections.

Friday 10 October: South Africa hosts G20 trade ministers.

Sunday 12 October: Cameroon holds presidential elections.

Cameroonian elections. Paul Biya, Cameroon’s 92-year-old president, is running for an eighth term in Sunday’s elections despite popular opposition to his rule. Biya largely controls the military and appoints most of the officials in the country’s electoral college, preventing opponents from challenging his government.

In August, Cameroon’s Constitutional Council upheld a decision by the country’s electoral body to exclude Biya’s strongest rival, 71-year-old Maurice Kamto, from the ballot, saying his party also supported a second candidate. (Kamto described the ruling as “arbitrary.”) Kamto was the runner-up in the last presidential elections in 2018, when he received 14 percent of the votes.

Biya took office in 1982. He faced early challenges to his rule, including an attempted coup in 1984, and won only narrowly – with just 40 percent of the vote – in 1992, the first election to include candidates other than himself. Since then, he has won all subsequent elections by a landslide, receiving at least 70% of the vote. These elections are widely considered fraudulent.

In the capital, Yaoundé, some residents expressed their dissatisfaction with Biya’s rule by removing and vandalizing election campaign posters. Despite these disappointments, Bea will almost certainly win this weekend.

Russian cargo plane. South Africa reportedly allowed a Russian cargo plane on a US sanctions list to land with heavy loads in the country last Thursday and leave later with an empty load. South African authorities insisted the plane was carrying general cargo and civilian helicopters, and that they had “no knowledge” that Washington blacklisted Abakan Air last year for transporting Russian military equipment.

Pretoria is under threat of US sanctions by the Trump administration, which has falsely accused the South African government of committing white genocide. This latest incident is likely to further strain relations and deal a blow to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s attempts to strike a trade deal with Washington.

Last month, Republican senator John Kennedy introduced a bill seeking to review US diplomatic relations with South Africa, citing Pretoria’s moves “to move closer to Russia and China.”

Storming a Somali prison. Somali government forces said they killed seven Al-Shabaab militants on Saturday, ending a six-hour siege on a prison in the capital, Mogadishu. In recent months, Al-Shabaab attacks have increased as the country’s federal government becomes increasingly fragmented and regions such as Puntland and Jubaland threaten to secede.

The issue of paternity in the United Kingdom. Seven Kenyans won a case last Friday in a family court in London that ruled they were the children of British men stationed at a Kenyan army base. This is the first time paternity has been established using commercially available DNA databases in a British court, and the ruling has opened the way for claimants to British citizenship.

The legal victory comes amid separate investigations by Kenya and the British Ministry of Defense into allegations of sexual exploitation and rights abuses committed by British forces deployed in Kenya. Last month, a Nairobi court charged a former British soldier with the murder of a 21-year-old Kenyan woman in 2012.

Sudanese conservationists are struggling to trace an estimated 4,000 ancient artifacts seized during widespread looting amid Sudan’s ongoing civil war.

In June 2023, fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces raided the National Museum in Khartoum; At least one artifact was later listed on eBay for $200. Most of the stolen items date back to the ancient Nubian Kingdom of Kush, which was founded around 800 BC.

“Only large and heavy items that cannot be carried were left behind,” Rawda Idris, a member of the Sudanese Committee for the Protection of Museums and Archaeological Sites, told AFP. The thieves may have smuggled some of the artifacts to neighboring Chad, Egypt and South Sudan.

Meanwhile, fighting continued in the country, with little prospect for peace. At least 91 civilians were killed in ten days last month during the Rapid Support Forces attack on the city of El Fasher, according to the United Nations. More than 260,000 people may be trapped in the city, which has been besieged by the Rapid Support Forces for more than a year, without access to sufficient food and water. The conflict led to the deaths of more than 150,000 people and the displacement of about 14 million.

Rave culture in Nigeria. in New lines Abioye Damilare examines the disparity between Nigeria’s average income—nearly half the country’s population makes less than $32 a month—and the exorbitant fees paid at Lagos’ popular nightclubs, where a bottle of tequila typically costs more than $600.

A night out at a Lagos nightclub is “a spectacle of wealth, status and performance that revealed how Nigerian nightclubs have turned into elaborate theaters of ostentatious spending,” Damilare wrote. “As Nigeria struggles with extreme poverty rates, I felt that this artificial exclusivity was a deliberate mockery of the economic reality that most citizens face daily.”

South Africa mourns Charlie Kirk. in Africa is a countryThe outpouring of grief in South Africa over the killing of American far-right influencer Charlie Kirk – a figure most people have never heard of – reflects the influence of US evangelical ministries in Africa, says Poncho Bilan.

“This paradox, of a mysterious man sparking widespread controversy, speaks to the global cultural reach of American evangelical media and ideology,” Bellan writes. “The surprise was not that South Africans mourned a stranger; rather, it was natural that some felt reverence for his memory.”