Global Affairs Expert Webinar: Youth Movements in Africa
Michelle Gavin, the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at CFR, leads the conversation on youth movements in Africa.
These webinars provide an opportunity for college and university educators and students to discuss global issues with CFR fellows, Foreign Affairs authors, and other leading experts. To register for future invitations, please complete this form or email [email protected] with your name, title, and academic affiliation.
Speaker
Michelle Gavin
Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies
Council on Foreign Relations
Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations
Transcript
FASKIANOS: Welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2026 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org if you would like to share these materials with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
We’re delighted to have Michelle Gavin with us today to discuss youth movements in Africa. Ambassador Gavin is a Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at CFR. Previously, she served as U.S. ambassador to Botswana and U.S. representative to the Southern African Development Community, as well as managing director of the Africa Center. Prior to that, Ambassador Gavin was special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for Africa at the National Security Council, where she helped originate the Young African Leaders Initiative and led major policy reviews on Sudan and Somalia. She is most recently the author of the book The Age of Change: How Urban Youth are Transforming African Politics, and has written extensively on African governance and U.S. foreign policy.
Michelle, thanks for being with us today. We’re very excited to have you give us an overview of the current landscape of youth movements in Africa, who are very important, the key drivers behind their rise and how they are shaping political and social change today. So, over to you.
GAVIN: Well, thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me to join you today. And I always love talking about youth politics in Africa because it’s endlessly interesting and dynamic, and sometimes quite surprising. So we’re probably all familiar with a number of youth-led political uprisings around the world, not just in Africa, over the past year. We’ve seen this in Nepal, for example. We’ve also seen it in Madagascar, in Morocco. And we’ve seen these movements definitely on the African continent. But Africa’s a bit of a special case.
And the reason why is partly the juxtaposition between the continent’s really remarkable political consistency in the last few decades—so the region, which is incredibly diverse, right? This is always the danger of talking about the region as a whole. But it is true that on the continent, you find an awful lot of long-serving leaders: President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea; President Museveni of Uganda, who was just reelected and came to power in 1986; Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea. There are many, many examples, but also very long-dominant ruling parties. So while the head of state may have changed, in many countries, one party has dominated politics since independence. So you have this kind of interesting political consistency juxtaposed with the youngest population in the world.
And let me just take a beat on that, because we hear a lot about youthful populations in Africa, but I think to get our minds around what’s really quite singular about African demographics it helps to take a step back and think about youth political movements that we may have some baseline for. So when we think about youth really affecting politics in the U.S., I think most people’s minds go to 1968 and, you know, protests against the Vietnam War, a sort of cultural change in America that seemed to be driven by young people who were politically engaged.
In 1968, young people aged fifteen to twenty-four—so not necessarily yet at the age of enfranchisement, but definitely the age of political awareness—those young adults accounted for about 23 percent of the total adult population. And that was a big—a big cohort, right? A noticeable one that had this impact. In Egypt during the Arab Spring—so we’re going to 2011 now—that same cohort of young adults was about 32 percent of the adult population. Really big. In a number of African countries, at least a dozen, that cohort is over 60 percent of the adult population. In some cases, over 70 (percent).
So this is not like what we’ve seen before. It’s really quite different. So you have these sclerotic governing mechanisms, individuals, and parties, and these tremendously young populations. And so I think one of the things we’re starting to see is those youth populations flexing their political muscles. And this happens in different ways. In some cases, it is at the ballot box. We’ve seen this in the last general elections in places like Zambia and Senegal, where presidents and parties who had intended to retain power and had used some repressive tactics or manipulations to try and do that, were swamped by a massive youth vote for change.
But we also see it in demonstrations, like the ones we’ve seen for the past couple of summers in Kenya, or the one that led to the latest coup in Madagascar. So we have—I think that’s happened now because it’s not just that you have these big young populations, they’ve also urbanized. So in addition to being the youngest region of the world, Africa is the most rapidly urbanizing. We’re just a few years out from more Africans living in urban centers than in rural areas. And this dramatically changes a political landscape. A lot of the ways these long-serving sort of leadership systems have retained power for many years is through some patronage and through some local control of rural areas. And you consistently find that cities become hotbeds of opposition.
Well, as cities come to host the majority of the population, organizing is easier, relative deprivation, it becomes much more acute. Because you might be living in an informal settlement in a city with no access to formal employment, clean water, any kind of public transportation. But you’re in the same city with the small subset of elites who seem to live a very different life from the one you live. And that can definitely affect people’s overall political satisfaction.
Last factor, and then I’m going to stop, is technology, right? So you have—not only are people urbanized, but they also have access to digital technology that does make comparison easier, organizing easier. And there is an incredibly rich, often hysterically funny, political conversation going on on the continent online, through social media, despite the many attempts to suppress it, that is giving young people a space to express themselves. Particularly in very repressive societies where that might be—might have been dangerous to do a generation earlier.
And you see even youth movements learning from each other’s tactics. You see Nigerians commenting on the Kenyan uprising and trying to learn from it, Ugandans discussing what happened in Tanzania after their election when young people took to the streets and were brutally suppressed. So, it’s this fascinating time where the structure of politics is changing on the continent. And we can talk a little bit about what the consequences of that might mean for external powers like the U.S. and for global governance.
FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
We will go to all of you now for your questions.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
All right. So the first question we’re going to—we’re going to go to Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome.
Q: Good afternoon. I’m Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome. And I’m Nigerian and also a professor of political science at Brooklyn College.
And I’ve been interested in youth protests in emerging democracies in Africa, particularly in Nigeria which is a country that I focus on. There were the End SARS protests most recently. And people talk about them as extraordinary, in the sense that they’re unprecedented and, you know. So I’m wondering about this whole unprecedented factor in youth protests, because I kind of think that if we look at the End SARS as unprecedented, as important as it is, you know, that we are missing a contextual element to youth protests, especially as a means of agitating for change. And in Nigeria, there’s a historicity to youth protests. So do you think this is unprecedented and I’m missing something, or that, you know, there are aspects of it that are unprecedented, like the use of social media and stuff? I’m sorry, you know, I could say more, but I think—
GAVIN: No, it’s a great question. And the End SARS protests in Nigeria were absolutely one of the things that captured my interest in imagination as I started this project. So one of the things that’s interesting about End SARS, right, is the trigger of police brutality as a trigger for a movement of protests that becomes about something more than police reform. But, as I think you so accurately describe, a kind of generalized desire for political change, for a change in the relationship between state and citizen. And I don’t think that that is necessarily unprecedented, but I agree that aspects of it are. Certainly the digital connection, the degree to which politics is globalized now. So it’s not just this inter-African conversation, but it’s also, you know, a conversation with Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis. And it’s a—so I do think that element is different.
And then when we step back and look at this desire for change, I think that contextually, there’s something very important about what’s happening in African political economies right now. So, again, tremendous diversity on the continent. But if we consider Nigeria, for example, right, this massive engine of the continent in many ways, but a lot of Nigerians today are worse off than their parents were. And there is limited fiscal space for a Nigerian government to stimulate the economy, to create jobs for this massive youth population. And there has been a consistent concern among the Nigerian public about elite corruption.
Which is, you know, the two elements in polling that I find to be very consistent across the diversity of these continents—this continent, with the different histories and political economies, is this desire for more employment opportunities—unsurprising given the demographics—and huge concerns about corruption. This sense that the rules are different for the elites than it is for the rest of the population. So I think when those things combine at a time where it’s very difficult—when it’s very, very difficult for governments to be responsive to popular demand, largesse is hard to come by these days, I do think it puts us into an interesting cycle of grievance, dissatisfaction.
It becomes manifest, either at the ballot box, or via protest, or what have you. In some cases, via a welcoming of a military seizure of power. And then a period of hope, if there was a political change. But that change usually doesn’t deliver the changed circumstances people are seeking. So you go right back to grievance, and round and round we go as people try to kind of figure out this really thorny problem of how you create jobs—dignified jobs—for these burgeoning urban populations. And that is a different challenge from the one that governments have faced previously.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I’m going to go next to Vance Gray, who’s the associate dean of global studies at Pennsylvania Institute of Technology.
When you think about Africa, young Africa, what is the essential book we should read to convey where African countries will be, protest and not? As a professor, I think we need to have a way to get students to think from a different frame. And I’ll put in first a plug. Michelle’s book is a good place to start. (Laughter.) So, start there. And, Michelle, any other book to add to that?
GAVIN: Sure, sure. Yes, I do—you know, give it a—give it a whirl. I wrote my book, The Age of Change, aimed at a reader who is interested in the world, but not necessarily specifically an Africanist. So it’s intended to be approachable for readers who aren’t necessarily steeped, you know, checking out the headlines from various African papers every day. But there’s also, you know, been some really excellent work about just kind of the fundamental dilemma of youth in Africa.
Marc Sommers has done some of this work. You know, the kind of cultural and socially constructed definitions of youth, right, where to become sort of a full-fledged adult it requires certain signifiers. It might be owning property or an ability to get married, and how distant some of these things are for vast populations. And those kind of more sociological and anthropological takes take a look at, in a really, I think, empathetic way, how difficult it must be to feel trapped in youth. So that’s interesting. And then there’s a great book called Africa Uprising, Zachariah Mampilly is either the sole author or one of the authors. Forgive me for not being able to remember off the top of my head. But couldn’t recommend that highly enough. That’s more specifically about kind of the surge of political activism in the form of demonstrations, you know, sort of popular movements, which is just terrific.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Gary Prevost.
Q: Yes. Gary Prevost, speaking to you from (Nelson) Mandela University (NMU) in South Africa, where I teach and do research on youthful political attitudes, both student and nonstudent.
And just an observation for you to react to. Speaking, of course, from one of Africa’s established democracies, what we’ve seen in the youth is primarily a turning away from the primary liberation party, the African National Congress (ANC). In my most recent survey of the NMU students here, they are trailing now far behind the Economic Freedom Fighters, the party of the left. And when you go into the townships, where I do the research among youth, the same pattern is there. And it contributed to the defeat of the African National Congress, forced it into an awkward coalition government with its party—you know, with its opponent from the right. So it’s interesting. The observation is that it’s happening in a different way, but youth breaking with the traditional political parties that you’re seeing, where they’re not given the opportunity even to vote them out, is happening here in South Africa.
GAVIN: That’s such a great point. And I find South Africa fascinating because even though it’s further along in its demographic transition than much of the rest of the continent, some of these dynamics are so clearly manifest in South African politics, as you point out. And I found it so interesting in the last general election, the one where the ANC did lose its absolute majority, so interesting to see that early on in the campaigning, the framing was often about, vote for the ANC because do you remember how bad things were under Apartheid? But for the, you know, young South African with no lived experience of Apartheid, the choice, right? Or really, the choice for any voter, the choice was not the ANC, or let’s go back to Apartheid, right? It was the ANC or these alternative political models. And so I do think that—I also believe that part of what’s going on here is sort of an inflection point in political narratives. So the ANC, as party of liberation, I think was dominant for so long because that narrative, that idea about why they have a legitimate claim on leadership in South Africa, made sense.
And you see this as well in particularly other Southern African states. You see it certainly in Zimbabwe, where ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front) has been the dominant party, and is quite explicit that the reason they will win every election is because they delivered the country from the injustice of minority rule. Most Zimbabweans, again, did not—they’re too young to have a memory of minority rule. But this, much more than we get a majority of votes, is the legitimizing narrative there. And then this takes different forms. You know, if you look at an Angola or a Mozambique, the narrative is about having won the civil war that came when the Portuguese pulled out. So we were the victors there, and therefore we will continue to run the show.
And there again, it’s harkening back to a past that now for the majority of these societies is so distant, and not really speaking to their lived experience right now, which increasingly is one of urban poverty, inadequate opportunity. Often, these young people are better educated than their parents were, because sort of the development industry, for all of its flaws, poured a lot of effort into healthcare and education, but now, almost no effort into job creation. And now, these young populations are struggling with that dilemma. So I do find this notion of political narratives totally fascinating.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question written from Bashir Aminu Bello, who’s a graduate student in Canada and born in Sokoto: From the perspective of someone born in Africa, one unresolved tension is brain drain. Even highly engaged youth still rationally pursue opportunity abroad. If the American dream continues to exist, what would it actually take for African states or partners to retain talent without framing departure as betrayal?
GAVIN: Hmm. Such an interesting and rich question. And I think, you know, it’s fascinating in the Nigerian context to see some of this social media discourse around the exit option, which, of course, really is only an option for those with some degree of social capital and access to privilege. So I’m not suggesting only, you know, economic elites or the very rich, but it’s not that easy, actually, to leave and go to where there’s more opportunity. And polling suggests that most young Africans would prefer to stay at least on the continent, if they can’t stay at home. But I think that the number one issue is jobs. It’s dignified jobs.
And there is no labor economist I have met who has—who’s been able to answer this question of, given what the demographic profile of the continent looks like, where do all these jobs come from? What sector? Because these, you know, old development plans where there’s going to be a period of industrialization, and these are all going to be manufacturing jobs, I just don’t think is the reality of the way the world works today. Things are increasingly automated. And those jobs are losing a lot of dignity as we kind of race to the bottom in a globalized order. So, I think the jobs piece has a lot to do with it.
But the flip side that I also wanted to note, that your question brings up, is the relationship between dissatisfied young people within African countries and societies and the diaspora, which is sometimes tense and fraught, but sometimes cooperative. So if you think about little Gambia’s surprise capacity to get rid of a long-serving leader, the diaspora played a very significant role in helping to kind of hold the line when the election results were about to be ignored. Or in the case of Nigeria, not that I think the Peter Obi Obidient Movement was representative of all Nigerian youth, but I will say it was compelling to see how many in the diaspora were photographing themselves flying back home to vote, and tagging it in ways that brought it into this broader Nigerian conversation about a desire for political change. In this case, kind of a third option. So I do think that it’s not necessarily the case that physical exit means exiting the dialogue about a need to see a change in the system.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.
I’m going to go next to raised hand from Francis Adika, if you could identify yourself.
Q: Yes. I’m Francis Adika from Kenya. And I’ve lived in Eastern Africa. I’ve worked in Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
So I was just raising the question about we have seen a lot of repression of late, whereby young people come out to vote and exercise their democratic right, but there’s so much repression around. We are still waiting for a body of one of our own that was killed in Tanzania in the mayhem that happened. And they buried the bodies and we cannot even retrieve the body. We have tried diplomatic means, but it has failed.
So my question is, before we experienced change in the 1990s, democratic change in Africa, because also of the fall of the Eastern Bloc countries and the Western powers, America being on the lead, for democracy. But of late, it seems that we have been abandoned. And many of us are left to fight on our own. And if you try to raise a finger against the government and its tenets, you are repressed. And there’s so much corruption that is happening. And that is why we cannot move. There’s so much corruption. That’s why we don’t have jobs.
We buy jobs in Kenya. You have to pay a lot of money to even enter the military services, the police. Those are real jobs. So you need to bribe to get a job, even for teachers. So there’s so much frustration. And we don’t see any help, especially from the Western world, in terms of sanctions, because it doesn’t work, because our leaders will just go east, go to China. China does not care. It will just take resources and the business continues. It doesn’t interfere in internal framework of countries. So how can we move and have real change in Africa?
GAVIN: I wish I had all the answers. But I think you make an excellent point. And there’s a chapter in my book called “The Status Quo Strikes Back” about this, right? About the repression, about the way that political elites have tried to address this kind of emerging threat to their position. And I think there’s something of a race between grassroots tactics to try and effect change and elite tactics to try and suppress the population.
But I think your question also draws attention to a couple other points I think about all the time. One, as you rightly point out, there was this wave of democratization that swept across the continent at the end of the Cold War. But it has become really quite brittle. And people are quite disenchanted. So if you look at polling, in many cases you find that African populations—and, let’s be honest, if that cohort of very young adults is, you know, more than half the population, the public opinion is youth opinion. A lot of these populations are kind of falling out of love with democracy because—not because they don’t want to hold leaders accountable, not because they don’t want the agency of being able to make decisions about their leadership and political system—but because what we have called democracy in many cases has nothing to do with the rule of law or accountability.
So if you look at these electoral exercises, like the one in Tanzania where the opposition was not given the opportunity to even run, it was a coronation exercise. And even then, there were manipulations on election day that led so many Tanzanians to come out into the streets where they were, as you rightly characterized, so violently repressed, in a way that, I think, shocked Tanzanians and people who’ve known and watched Tanzania for many years. Or the elections that just occurred in Uganda. You know, where in the run up to them you have opposition figures being abducted, tortured, beaten. And you have the president’s son making online threats—very graphic threats against probably the most significant challenger to the president. So we go through these exercises. There’s an election day, right? And that is getting called “democracy.” So, if that’s what was called democracy for me, then I wouldn’t be excited about democratic governance either. You know, this is not working is the sense. And so there’s this kind of deficit of delivery on democratic principles and a real disillusionment. And I think it’s incredibly dangerous.
If you look at the coup belt in the Sahel or even a case like Guinea, which has a military junta that just legitimized itself via elections, what we see is that the young people who came out to celebrate when the military seized power were not necessarily celebrating this idea that I want to be governed by people in camouflage with guns, but that a change had occurred. These celebrations looked almost exactly like the celebrations that accompanied the election of the now-deposed civilian leader, right? So there’s this desperate hunger for change, kind of by hook or by crook. And democracy doesn’t seem to—what’s being called democracy doesn’t seem to offer a pathway to it. I think it’s incredibly worrisome.
Last thing I’ll say, and I’m sorry to go on too long, but if we think about a case like Sudan, which was an extraordinary example in a very violent and repressive society of the population rising up to demand change, and being effective—it became unsustainable to continue with the Bashir regime—but you had these security actors swoop in and seize power. You know, no one was protesting in the streets saying, put the military in charge, or, God forbid, the RSF (Rapid Support Forces). But, you know, they created—they effected change. But then in that jump-ball moment, where it wasn’t clear what was going to happen next, no one referred to the constitution or really to the will being expressed on the streets. And we end up with the absolute tragedy of Sudan today. So I think those jump-ball moments are also very dangerous. I think about this in the context of Cameroon, what happens when Paul Piya goes. Not because I’m wishing him ill, but because he’s not immortal and he really doesn’t appear to be very well. I’m not so sure that there’s going to be reference to the constitution there either.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
Let’s go next to written question from Ed Webb at Dickinson College, currently visiting at University of Limerick: Are we witnessing a new kind of pan-Africanism in the way youth movements are interacting around the continent, including north and south of the Sahara?
GAVIN: I definitely think there are strains of that. I was struck by the degree to which young Moroccans were taking cues from Kenyans, which is not, kind of, I would say, conventionally the direction in which Moroccans have looked for different political models. So, I think there is an element of that, that’s been enabled by social media. And, you know, I don’t think it’s ever going to be possible to push aside the very different kind of political histories, some of the political norms of these different places, the different political narratives that are breaking down. But I am struck by how much conversation happens. I’ve been blessed to have wonderful research associates kind of comb through social media, you know, spoof an Angolan address so the algorithm will feed them the content a young Angolan might see. And I’m really struck by the engagement with developments on other parts of the continent, the comparisons, the learnings. And the unifying theme, both, you know, above the Sahara and below, of this tremendous desire for political change that is linked to, consistently, demand for employment and frustration with corruption.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Edou Agbehonou.
Q: Thank you so much for this important presentation. (Inaudible)—the ambassador.
I’m originally from Togo, West Africa. That is a French-speaking country. And when I look at the topic, I was thinking whether you are going to do some kind of a comparison on the movement in terms of, like, French side, versus the British side, versus the Belgian side. And if you look at them, things look, like, a little different. The level of repression in English-speaking countries is a little lower than the level of repression in the French-speaking countries. If you look at it, going to early 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, those are French-speaking countries. The youth revolution tended to work, especially in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and to some extent Guinea. That led to the change of regime in all those places and multiple coup d’etat.
But if you look at the three countries in the Sahel, those movements maybe worked because of the failure of the international system, at least the UN MINUSMA (Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali) was there. Over there, the French helped with all those forces for more than a decade. And nothing really happened when it come to alleviating the problem in terms of terrorism activities and so on and so forth in the area. So the youth were fed up. And if you look at those leaders now, those military leaders, they are also part of the youth. They are in their forties and some of them are in their thirties. And that seems to—
FASKIANOS: Thank you. Can you respond to that, Michelle? Yeah.
GAVIN: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s super interesting. So the first thing I would say is that I am not so sure that I agree with you that Anglophone countries are less repressive in general. And I would just cite the examples of Uganda, what just happened in Tanzania, where, unfortunately, our colleague earlier who was noting the difficulties of recovering a body. This is, sadly, the experience of thousands of Tanzanian families. Or Zimbabwe, which is an Anglophone country and tremendously repressive.
And then I would cite on the Francophone side, the example of Senegal, which is—you know, Senegal is special in a lot of ways, but this is a place where when Macky Sall was trying to cling to power unconstitutionally, and you had a largely youth-backed opposition movement, and you did have people being shot in the streets, ultimately, the Senegalese electorate prevailed and was able to vote Sall out, vote PASTEF (Patriots of Senegal)—the PASTEF party in. And did so despite tremendous information campaigns directed at young Senegalese aimed at suggesting to them they needed to go the way of the Sahelian states, that only a military seizure of power, a pivot toward Russia, could deliver the change that they sought. And I was struck by the savvy of young Senegalese online rejecting that just as much as they reject French influence, like their compatriots in these other Francophone countries, and insisting on a way forward that was neither one of those, but rather a Senegalese expression of self-determination. So I think it’s hard to lump by colonial experience.
On the Sahelian states, I do think that absolutely the grievance base of frustration that I see across the continent was unquestionably an enabling factor for these military coups. And part of that grievance absolutely was frustration, particularly with the heavy hand of France, but frustration with the status quo generally. I think this is actually a huge vulnerability for the U.S. If you feel like the system is rigged and stacked against you, and you note that the United States has probably been the most powerful country in the world for quite some time—it’s debatable now—but it’s a very short jump then to, well, the system is stacked against me because the powers that be wish it to be so. And suddenly that narrative, where the U.S. becomes a villain, is very easy to flesh out. And certainly adversaries, other external actors, particularly the Russians but also the Chinese, have capitalized on this.
But I would just—I think it’s important to note that, you know, for all the pan-African posturing and the Sankara nostalgia of somebody like General Traore in Burkina, he’s not getting the job done, right? Burkina is less secure today than it was even before they kicked out the French, right? The metastasizing security crisis in the Sahel is getting worse, not better. So you now have these military regimes kind of protecting themselves in capital cities, but it turns out that they don’t have the answers to the security crisis either. And while I think they get a lot of the rhetoric right, particularly around the importance of dignity, I’m not sure I’m buying what they’re selling.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Michael Strmiska, who’s a professor of world history at Orange County Community College in New York: I have an interest in new religious movements. And I’m curious if you have had contact with religious movements seeking to revive indigenous African religious traditions.
This may be more of a question for Ebenezer Obadare, another fellow on staff, but, Michelle, you want to take a—
GAVIN: All I can do is refer you to my extraordinary colleague. Yes, Ebenezer Obadare spends a lot of time focusing on, kind of, the relationship between religious movements and political outcomes. And he would be far better positioned to speak to that than I.
FASKIANOS: Great. OK.
I’m going to go to Lucio Correa, who is an Argentinian freshman at Gettysburg College: How do you think this uprise of youth-led revolutions can shift the political party’s dominance? Is there going to be an erosion of the authoritarian regimes to turn into more democratic approaches? And how do you think they can sustain this change to avoid falling in a gray area and not stabilize a coordinated and sustained government with a new political ideology?
GAVIN: Hmm. So I think we’ll probably see a range of outcomes. And in some cases, sadly, I think the forces of repression will stay one step ahead of the forces of change. But at the end of the day, the numbers are pretty compelling. There is a huge base of young adults demanding political change. And that won’t go away just because it’s repressed. It will continue to simmer. It might find expression in some ways that are less civically minded. And it might surprise us with some unexpected successes. I think, you know, Zambia, again, you know, we can talk about how hopes have been dashed. But the movement that brought President Hichilema to power was quite extraordinary, youth based. Awful lot of work happened on Facebook, but also young people going door to door. And, you know, this is an opposition figure who’d run five times. But they did succeed.
So there are these cases where they get somewhere. But then the question is, what do these new leaders do, right? So the best-intentioned, most full of integrity, most technocratic government on Earth, if they’re voted into power and then—as happened in Zambia and Senegal—then suddenly discovered that their gruesome debt burden is even worse—even worse than thought, because there was hidden debt. And now that they’ve come in to really look at the books, there are extra billions of dollars owed. How, in that situation, where you’re scrambling to stay afloat and service these creditors, are you able to affect the kinds of changes that really make a difference for the populations that voted you in? I think it’s nearly mission impossible. Which speaks to the urgent need to do something around these African debt burdens.
But also, the need to take these African publics’ sentiments into account when we think about lending. One of the things that I’ve found most striking recently has been the movement among the young Kenyans who’ve taken to the streets to resist President Ruto’s finance bill, to demand political change. When they were marching, calling on the IMF not to offer relief to the Kenyan government until there were anticorruption measures in place, because their position was, look, this is just going to be more money we have to pay back that’s going to get frittered away to self-dealing elites. And this is a really, I think, powerful sign of how sophisticated these movements are.
These are civil societies in desperate need of financial relief, but here are young people saying, don’t just provide it no strings attached, because we’ve seen this movie before and we know that assistance is not going to find its way to us. This is tremendous—there’s a tremendous amount of learning going on. I have so much respect for how savvy and sophisticated a lot of these movements are.
FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you.
I’m going to go next to raised hand from Nicole Mbuse. And you correct my pronunciation, please. And give us your affiliation.
Q: Hi. Yeah. My name is Nicole Mbuse. I am a recent grad from Suffolk University. I was born in the U.S., but I grew up in Zimbabwe.
So my question is, with this shift in the West to, like, far-right movements, exclusionary nationalism, it kind of—and then the departure of USAID in a lot of African countries—it forces African countries to bear the burden of their problems. And I believe in a lot of countries there is the money to do it. The government just funds it incorrectly. So what would you say are productive ways for the youth, and even citizens in general, to hold their governments accountable for state funds that they are letting leave the country, either be it in national resource trade or things of that nature? How do we then hold them accountable to close the gap? Because this is—I think USAID leaving is a prime place for us to start and point fingers at the government and say, OK, here you’re funding us incorrectly. How do we begin to have that conversation?
GAVIN: It’s a great question. And I do think, you know, it begins with advocating for more budgetary transparency. And this is, you know, at every level, from the kind of ringfenced security spending, that is often awash in corruption, to these kind of, you know, in the case of Zimbabwe, right, the command agriculture sector that, because it’s a top-down system, is uncompetitive and rife with corruption as well. But I think also, you know, in the context of lending. So I think often the sort of Western complaints about Chinese debt trap diplomacy are overstated. The Chinese have funded a lot of urgently needed infrastructure. You need infrastructure to grow jobs and attract investment.
But the lack of transparency around Chinese financing is a huge problem from a governance perspective, because, you know, a set of elites sign a deal that puts the whole population on the hook. And people don’t even know about it, right? And then it turns out nobody gets to stay forever. A new government comes into place that didn’t sign this deal, maybe didn’t even know about it, but everybody’s still responsible and left to clean up the mess. And I think that transparency in private and public financing is incredibly important to give citizens any say in how their country is going to be governed going forward, because the situation we have now is in many of these countries there is more money spent servicing debt, basically paying interest payments, than is being spent on educating this incredibly young population for the jobs of tomorrow.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to written question from Zoe Hughes, a British Nigerian medical student at Stanford, visiting healthcare financing researcher at the University of Nigeria: Could you speak about how patron-client relations might be preventing Nigerians from holding the government accountable to delivering on their responsibilities? And what are your thoughts about the impact of increasing illiteracy and proliferation of misinformation on youth-led movements?
GAVIN: OK. Two questions there. So, yes. I do think, you know, one of the first tools in the toolbox that most of these long-serving political elites—Nigeria, I think, falls into this. Though they’ve had transfers of power between parties, right, it’s the same cast of characters at the top. And the nature of governance doesn’t really change depending on what party is in charge. So I think that—oh, lost my train of thought. It’s going to come back to me in one second. We are talking about—
FASKIANOS: We were talking about delivering on the responsibilities for patron-client relations—
GAVIN: Patronage, thank you. That’s it. That’s it. I’m with you. I’m so sorry.
FASKIANOS: (Laughs.) that’s OK.
GAVIN: Yeah, I think that co-opting is one of the very first strategies that elites reach for, right? And it’s typically a short-term transaction. But you see it, you know, manifest in different ways in different societies. It’s access to jobs, or youth entrepreneurship funds, or it’s as simple as buying votes. And it does peel off significant portions of what would otherwise be a coalition for change because people are desperate and in survival mode. And how to combat that? You know, I really hesitate to wade in, because if I’m hungry and my family’s hungry, you know, I’m not standing here to tell somebody that they should just deal with the hunger pangs for some very distant political change.
But I do think there are some interesting examples from around the continent of strategies that involve accepting the co-option deal, while still expressing a desire for change. So, you know, in one case wearing the t-shirt of the ruling party when they give it out, because it’s a free new t-shirt, and voting opposition. So I think that there are—you know, it’s not always so easy in patronage strategies to hold people accountable for their commitment to support the status quo. And I think that creates space. I also think just shining a light on these strategies so everybody can see what’s happening is helpful as well. But, absolutely, the more—you know, the more you’re dealing with an urban underclass, as opposed to an emerging middle class, the easier it is to use small bits of largesse[JG1] to buy people off.
And the second part of the question—I’m so sorry, Irina, help me.
FASKIANOS: The misinformation, social movements.
GAVIN: Oh, yes. Yes. yes. I think we’re going to see more and more of this—around the world, frankly, right? And we already see a great deal of it. You know, photos purporting to show grand battle victories that are actually photos of completely different geographies from different times, this sort of thing. But, again, I think that young populations, at least for now, still often have the advantage, because they’re digital natives. They’re very savvy. They can—you know, I’m shocked at how often people can recognize messaging that’s clearly coming from someone on Moscow’s payroll, for example. And I think this’ll, you know, unfortunately, be a real space of contestation, will be this digital space and trying to find truth.
But in urban societies it becomes hard to hide truth for too long. So I think we saw this with the truth trickling out from Tanzania in the wake of the elections, you know, despite an effort to have a very, very different narrative. And even in Mozambique during the last electoral cycle we saw some of this as well. So I think geographic, sort of, density, to some degree, helps. The majority of the population have kind of a shared reality to work off of.
FASKIANOS: Great. There are a lot of questions and I’m sorry we can’t get to them all, but I’m going to use my prerogative to ask the last one. Michelle, you have studied these issues. You served in government. And we’d just love you to leave the group with some thoughts about public service, the field of Africa studies, and however else you want to close it out. And, of course, everybody should read Michelle’s book.
GAVIN: That’s so great of you. I guess what I would say is Africa is, as you all probably know because you’ve taken the time to tune in here, endlessly interesting. It’s also incredibly consequential, right? By 2035, one in four people on earth will be African. And I think in the U.S. we have plodded along for far too long with a very undifferentiated and anachronistic view of the continent. So I think, you know, scholars who work with Americans or work in America are doing a service right now by helping America get smarter about this.
We’re in an interesting time in our politics, but when I served my country, I was proud to do it, and I never went to the secret meeting where we were trying to keep Africa poor or suppressed. What we were—but we missed a lot of opportunities by not paying adequate attention to this very important part of the world. So the more people learn, and try not to make it a field steeped in jargon that keeps people out but try to open the door to bring people in and talk about the way the issues we see on the ground on the continent can connect to issues we see all around the world, I think we’re—it can only be for the good to have a better understanding.
FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Well, with that we will close. And, again, I’m sorry, we couldn’t get to all of your questions. Indeed, I think this is why Michelle Gavin wrote the book The Age of Change, it is really to shine a light on what’s happening in Africa and how consequential it is. So I commend it to you all. So thank you, Michelle.
The next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, February 11, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. And we will hear from Neil Richards, who is at the Cordell Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, on surveillance and privacy in the digital era. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. And visit CFR.org—we are doing an overhaul to the website so you will see it changing, but please continue to visit it—ForeignAffairs.com and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. And, of course, go to education.CFR.org for free expert-informed teaching and learning resources.
Again, thanks to Michelle Gavin. Thanks to all of you. Enjoy the rest of your day. And we look forward to having you join us again on February 11.
(END)