Demographic discontent across Africa is a ticking time bomb

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Tanzania is the latest African dictatorship masquerading as a democracy to shoot its own children. In a country that portrays itself as a stable backwater fit for surf-and-safari holidays, the ruling party has overseen a bloody crackdown on election day protesters, using live ammunition on young people objecting to an electoral farce.

In what has become known as Tanzania’s “Tiananmen Square moment”, testimony pieced together by human rights groups, including the UN Human Rights Office, suggests that several hundred people were shot in cold blood. Many of them had not yet reached their 20th birthday.

Samia Suluhu Hassan, the incumbent, was hurriedly sworn in this month for a second presidential term at a military parade ground devoid of a cheering public. Electoral authorities had declared she won 98 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 87 per cent — an exercise in magical realism that would make a novelist blush.

Even by the standards of a continent whose democracies are increasingly a winner-keeps-all charter for incumbents, it was a brazen thumbing the nose at the electorate. Tanzania’s ruling party has been in power since independence in 1961.

As in Tanzania, so elsewhere in Africa; patience is fraying. Afrobarometer, a polling organisation that provides the best snapshot of public opinion, found, in its 2024 poll of 39 countries, that support for genuine democracy remains strong. Some two-thirds of respondents said they preferred democracy to other forms of government, with 80 per cent rejecting one-man rule, 78 per cent against one-party rule and 66 per cent against military rule. But, as Afrobarometer puts it, if demand for democracy is strong, supply is weak. Overall, it says, “Africans say they get less democracy than they want.”

A rough rule of thumb suggests that the younger the population the more prone citizens are to act. Young people in Africa have higher aspirations than their parents, more information about state malfeasance and depressingly bad job prospects. For governments trying to cling indefinitely to power, it is a poisonous combination.

In Tanzania, where the median age is 18, young people in all major cities took to the streets to decry an election in which, in the months before polling day, opposition figures were hounded, banned, jailed or disappeared. To mark the hollowness of voting under such conditions, protesters attacked government buildings and burnt polling stations. Some chanted for army intervention.

Not only in Africa, but in much of the world, so-called Gen Z protesters, mobile phone in pocket, have vented their anger. This month, Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister of Bangladesh, was handed the death sentence in absentia for overseeing the massacre of 1,400 young protesters whose uprising last year forced her to flee the country. She denies the charges. This September, it took Gen Z protesters in Nepal 48 hours to dispose of their government.

But if youth is a predictor of political volatility, then it is Africa, with a median age of 19, that is a TikToking time bomb. From Uganda to Zimbabwe, young people are calling out the absurdities of performative democracies that go through the rigmarole and expense of organising pre-determined electoral contests.

In Cameroon, Paul Biya prevailed in just such an exercise last month, securing an improbable eighth presidential term at the age of 92. He is nearly five times older than the average Cameroonian.

Seven of the longest “serving” leaders in the world are African. Faith in this state of affairs is slipping fastest among 18-35-year-olds. Afrobarometer found that 56 per cent of young people would tolerate military intervention if “elected leaders abuse power for their own ends”. If that’s the pre-requisite, then up and down the continent men in khaki must be polishing their rifles.

Young people are less likely to express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box, though, leaving the street as their primary outlet. In Madagascar last month, Gen Z protesters helped topple the government — with a little help from the army. The colonel now in charge is promising to restore civilian rule when the time is right.

In Guinea, Mamadi Doumbouya, the 40-year-old former colonel who seized power in 2021, will next month seek legitimacy at the ballot box.

But in other countries — those in the “coup belt” of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger among them — military governments show little appetite for being confined to barracks. The unfortunate irony is that, in some cases at least, Gen Z’s righteous indignation with fake democracy may have opened the path to rule by junta.

david.pilling@ft.com