Youth-led protest movements are challenging the subservience of African governments to the neocolonial policy agenda. Michael Nelson Byaruhanga looks into the politics of the challenge they pose and considers their future direction
At Kariako cemetery in Nairobi, the dream of Edith Wanjiku rests with the hope that her son Ibrahim Kamau would become an electrical engineer. Nineteen-year-old Kamau was a high school graduate when he was shot two times in the neck by Kenya’s armed forces on June 25, 2024, during the protests against William Ruto’s finance bill at Kenyan Parliament. A report by Human Rights Watch in November 2024 put the number of those killed in the protests by the government forces at more than 135 people, based on their investigations and the figures from the Kenyan Human Rights Commission.
According to the Human Rights Watch report, the leaderless millennials and Gen Z protesters mobilised themselves through social media using the hashtag ‘reject the finance bill’ and took to the streets to express their discontent with the Finance Bill 2024 that would raise taxes on basic goods and services to meet International Monetary Fund revenue targets.
“Colonialism never really ended”, read a placard held by one of the protesters as he marched on the streets of Nairobi. This message was a clear criticism of the continuous role global north countries play in shaping developing world economies—it renews the conversation about global north organisations like the IMF and World Bank being used as neocolonial tools to protect and promote the geopolitical interests of wealthy countries such as the US and Western Europe, who hold more than half of the voting power in the IMF.
The December 2025 IMF data ranks Kenya second to Egypt as the leading IMF debtors in Africa, owing around $4.09 (USD) in outstanding credits. Ruto, who was forced to withdraw the bill by the youthful protesters, had thought that Nairobi needed to take austerity measures in line with the international body. However, pan-African economists argue that Ruto’s finance bill was a neocolonial design to reorient the Kenyan economy and hand it over wholesale to the global north powers and focus entirely on the exports of raw materials on terms acceptable to their interests.
Dictating terms
British Journalist Richard Dowden, in his book Altered States, Ordinary Miracle, makes the observation that ‘our tip for the waiter for bringing us that coffee pot will be more than a week’s income for a family in Africa who grew the coffee’. Critiques contend that IMF and World Bank loan conditions dictate the exportation of raw materials on terms that suffocate Africa’s manufacturing sector. This reduces African leaders to the role of commission agents on their own national resources, rendering governments unable to fund key priorities to afford quality social services for their people. The result is young people turning up on the streets to fight for their stolen futures—unemployment, poor social services, corruption, debts and human rights violations.
United Nations Industrial Development Organisation 2025 data shows Africa’s manufacturing output (Manufacturing Value Added-MVA) is 2% of the world’s total, yet the continent accounts for 18.83% of the total world population. A vibrant manufacturing sector on the continent would absorb the youthful labour and foster innovation for economic transformation. Lessons from history teach that when resources are not enough to fund national interests, democracy becomes kleptocracy—leaders plunder the available meagre resources and use it to pay the military to protect them from the populations they are robbing.
Youth-led protest
Al Jazeera news agency in 2024 reported protests in Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. Kenyan demonstrators set the Kenyan Parliamentary building on fire in the capital, Nairobi, while in Nigeria, roads were blocked with protestors burning tyres. In Uganda police and the military were quick to quash similar protests, arresting more than a dozen youths on the streets of Kampala. All these protests, premised on the demand to fight corruption, unemployment and abuse of power, started peacefully but ended up with spikes of violence and the demand for regime change.
Most recently in Tanzania, Joseph (not his real name) — an activist in Dar es Salaam – still fears for the life of his friend who went missing on October 29, 2025, during the youth-led protests to reject the re-election of Samia Suluhu. For Joseph and his friend they joined the protesters not merely contesting who won the elections. They were rejecting what he categorises as the ritual of democracy—an election that does not represent the will of the people.
Tanzania has been led by a single party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), since independence in 1961. On November 3, 2025, Samia Suluhu was sworn in for her second term to become the seventh President of the Republic of Tanzania, in an election where the leading opposition leader, Tundu Lissu, was excluded from the ballot paper and remained in prison over charges of treason. Rights groups report that more than a thousand people were killed during the protest in what is regarded as the biggest political crisis in the East African country.
The scenes of protests charged by the youths demanding regime change on the African continent—using social media to mobilization and organisation without leadership-guided political ideology is causing analysts to relate the phenomenon to the Arab Spring. In the last decade, the world has seen youth-led demonstrations change regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunisia to Sudan, discarding some of the world’s lethal dictators like Omar al-Bashir of Sudan.
No support from Global North
While these protests receive support from global north rights organisations and countries to uproot rulers like the case in Sudan, Libya, Sierra Leone, Egypt, and Tunisia , among others, the failure to have a clear, holistic international policy to help such countries stabilise and realise democracy after popular uprisings has had a cost on the governance future of these nations. The world has seen dictators fall, only for power to be captured by military leadership. These countries end up being plagued by civil wars. The ongoing genocide in Sudan due to a vicious struggle for power between the army and a paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), is a perfect example.
In relation, the argument by political commentators on the continent is that global North powers would prefer chaos and unrest on the African continent than support a process for sustainable peace through democratic governance. The argument is that chaos in Africa is an opportunity for the global North powers to negotiate for minerals and other natural resources in compensation for military support and peacekeeping missions. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the latest example of this trajectory. In December 2025, Donald Trump brokered what he regards as a historic peace agreement between the DRC and Rwanda, which includes a significant ‘minerals-for-security’ component. It is reported that the Washington Accords give American companies ‘right of first offer’ to access the Congo’s $20-24 trillion mineral trove, including cobalt, lithium, copper and tantalum, in exchange for US security support to counter Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
In Uganda, the opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi (aka Bobi Wine), who is preferred by the young people, is leading a campaign under the slogan ‘the protest vote’—ahead of the January 15, 2026, elections. Mr Wine is seeking the people’s mandate to oust 81-year-old Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power for four decades. Wine’s protest vote campaign involving youthful supporters has been met with brutal force by the government military in the capital Kampala and the northern City of Gulu, among other areas. In Gulu, the brutality caused the death of a 16-year-old student who was attending Mr Wine’s rally at Awere Sports Ground in Bar-Dege-Layib Division.
Leon Joshua Otim succumbed to injuries sustained from the attack by youthful criminal gangs hired by the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) and government security apparatus, reported the national paper, the Daily Monitor. It has been observed across the campaign period that the ruling NRM party is facilitating unemployed youths from the ghettos and rural areas to violently disrupt Mr Wine’s rallies and portray an impression that not all youths are in support of the National Unity platform candidate. These youths are deployed to intimidate, disrupt gatherings, and create a visible, threatening outlook that signals power and control.
Violence as a livelihood
F W Lukwiya, a local resident of Gulu City, in his opinion article about the Gulu violence on social media, argues that the real cost of such a transaction is not just monetary; it is the validation of violence as a viable livelihood. Lukwiya borrows a historical leaf from Sierra Leone, Haiti, Brazil and Sudan to offer a grim playbook—arguing that political militias and unguided youthful movements are teaching generations that their power does not lie in their intellect, their skill, or their civic voice, but in their capacity for disruption.
In Haiti, political militias evolved into criminal enterprises, protection rackets and autonomous armed groups. Lukwiya reasons that African youths are a generation of immense potential, forged in adversity, waiting for a real change to build their nations. He argues that using them as a shortcut for political mobilisation is an act of profound national sabotage, warning African leaders against chaos as a political strategy.
Lest the world forget that the whirlwind we reap tomorrow may be one we can no longer control—African leaders have a choice—to work with youth to build a better future, or watch them become the force that will bring down their empires and disrupt nations.