Voters in Gabon head to the poll field on April 12, 2025, in a vote that marks the primary election within the Central African nation since a 2023 coup ended the 56-year rule of the Bongo household.
Additionally it is the primary presidential vote to happen in Africa in 2025, to be adopted by contests later this yr in Ivory Coast, Malawi, Guinea, Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, Seychelles and Cameroon.
Of explicit curiosity is whether or not these elections will proceed the pattern of final yr’s votes. Because the continent with the youngest inhabitants, Africa’s youth was essential all through 2024 to a sequence of seismic political shifts – not least the elimination of incumbents and adjustments within the governing established order in Ghana, Senegal and South Africa.
Certainly, evaluation of the 2024 African Youth Survey – some of the complete continent-wide polls of individuals age 18 to 24 – and election outcomes of that yr present a transparent lack of optimism among the many youth.
Unemployment, the rising value of residing and corruption are main components driving youth dissatisfaction on the continent. For instance, 59% of South African youth thought-about their nation to be heading the improper course – and that’s not laborious to think about provided that the nation’s youth unemployment charge reached 45.5% in 2024. Not surprisingly, unemployment was a key issue within the election outcomes. In the meantime, widespread protests in Kenya and Uganda in the summertime of 2024 had been youth-led and sparked, respectively, by issues over tax will increase and corruption.
As a professor of political science and an skilled in African politics, I consider {that a} failure to deal with such issues might have probably critical implications for political leaders within the upcoming elections. It additionally makes it harder for nations to consolidate or shield already-fragile democracies on the continent.
Unemployment fueling instability
Whereas African political campaigns typically make observe of persistently excessive charges of youth unemployment, the coverage priorities of governments throughout the continent have seemingly failed to repair this intractable drawback.
In a 2023 Afrobarometer survey, unemployment topped the checklist of coverage priorities for African youth between the ages of 18 and 35.
Supporters of the UMkhonto weSizwe celebration, which helped unseat the long-time African Nationwide Congress, attend an election assembly close to Durban, South Africa, forward of the Might 2024 normal elections.
AP Photograph/Emilio Morenatti
However for a mess of causes – together with the shortage of funding in coaching youth and different priorities – African governments have been unable or unwilling to deal with youth unemployment.
Many governments, confronted with the continuing financial aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic and supply-chain points – which exacerbated rising residing prices, excessive inflation and exterior debt points – pursued unpopular income assortment insurance policies
Take Ghana, the place in 2022 the federal government launched an e-levy – a tax on digital money transfers. The transfer proved deeply unpopular and was dropped by the brand new authorities in 2024.
The violent anti-tax protests in Kenya additionally present an instance of determined unemployed youth tapping into a way of deep in style resentment over fiscal insurance policies.
The mix of deep dissatisfaction with authorities insurance policies and excessive youth joblessness could be a destabilizing affect. A 2023 United Nations Improvement Program research specializing in Ghana pointed to an issue that’s widespread elsewhere on the continent. It concluded that in areas with higher-than-average youth unemployment, that issue was the most typical trigger for violent extremism and radicalization.
The U.N. research underscored the significance of addressing the social and financial challenges that foster marginalization and anger amongst youth throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
The problem of youth unemployment in Africa is exacerbated by the cumulative progress within the youth labor drive – estimated to develop by 72.6 million between 2023 and 2050, based on a 2024 report by the Worldwide Labor Group.
The function that unemployment performed in Africa’s 2024 elections doesn’t bode nicely for a few of these governments heading to the polls this yr. In Gabon, youth unemployment has hovered above 35% in recent times.
A corrupting affect
Corruption stays a persistent social and political problem in a lot of Africa and continues to impede the efforts of youth to hunt significant alternatives. So it’s unsurprising that the problem was entrance and middle throughout various 2024 elections, together with in Senegal, South Africa and Ghana.
The issues in these nations mirror grievances registered across the continent extra broadly, with decreasing authorities corruption listed as a high precedence by respondents within the African Youth Survey.
Just like unemployment, excessive ranges of corruption correlated to among the political shifts of 2024.
An Afrobarometer survey of attitudes in 2024 confirmed that 74% of Ghanaians believed corruption had elevated over the earlier yr.
In Kenya, 77% of individuals view their authorities’s efforts in combating corruption as ineffectual.
Of explicit concern to many African youth is the idea that safety forces and authorities officers are sometimes thought-about probably the most corrupt and that incidents of regularized corruption are underreported.
And it’s youth that bear the brunt of a lot of this corruption. Based on a 2022 U.N. Workplace on Medication and Crime report, individuals between the ages 18 and 34 are among the many most weak to having to pay bribes to public officers in Ghana.
Supporters of troopers who launched a coup in opposition to the federal government exhibit in Niamey, Niger, on July 27, 2023.
AP Photograph/Fatahoulaye Hassane Midou
Once more, youth attitudes towards corruption don’t bode nicely for lots of the governments on this yr’s elections. Gabon, Cameroon, Central African Republic and Guinea-Bissau all rating poorly on Transparency Worldwide’s Corruption Notion Index.
The fragility of democracy
There’s an ongoing debate on the extent of slowdown of democratic progress in Africa, a pattern that’s underscored by various African army coups in recent times, together with in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Niger.
Democracy is at its strongest when it empowers governments to ship on the wants of their populations, significantly the youth.
However the expertise of incumbent governments in 2024 elections means that too many could have disregarded younger individuals’s wants, which in flip has led to anger leading to destabilizing protests and regime change – each by democratic and undemocratic means.
It additionally makes it more durable to instill democratic sentiment amongst youthful voters.
Over half of Africa’s 18- to 35-year-olds surveyed within the 2023 Afrobarometer agreed that the army can intervene when leaders abuse energy – a pertinent warning about their willingness to assist political change, even when it interrupts the democratic course of.
Whereas a majority of youth in Africa nonetheless retain an obvious choice for democracy to different types of governance, a rising proportion would embrace nondemocratic governance underneath some circumstances, based on the 2024 African Youth Survey. The highest scores on this explicit response got here from Gabon, Ivory Coast and Tanzania – all of which have upcoming elections in 2025.
