African protests mirror roots of Arab Spring

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/08/2024 (428 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Anti-government demonstrations that roiled Kenya in June are echoing across Sub-Saharan Africa. The demands differ slightly from country to country yet share the same narrative. Digitally savvy youths are using social media to organize actions lashing out against the corruption and state mismanagement that are eroding living standards.

For years, the region’s governments binged on cheap credit as it sloshed around in financial markets, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. Oftentimes it simply financed the self-enrichment of political elites. Easy access to money also tended to cover up for bad policymaking that has partially squandered three decades’ worth of economic growth.

From 1990 to 2018, Latin America and South Asia reduced the share of their populations living in extreme poverty (less than US$1.90 per day) by more than half. Over that same time period Sub-Saharan Africa saw a reduction of only 15 per cent.

Now, creditors’ lifelines are receding given higher interest rates and a more uncertain global economy. The mounting fallout of climate change is also diverting state spending away from other priorities such as security, education and health care. Citizens’ purchasing power is meanwhile withering in economies reliant on imports and suffering double-digit inflation.

Make no mistake: the region still has vast potential. It possesses immense natural resources, a population that is overwhelmingly under 30 years old and forms the bulk of the world’s largest free trade zone. But electorates are increasingly impatient with leaders unable or unwilling to deliver on the promises they rode to power on.

Kenyan President William Ruto’s experience epitomizes this. Ruto got elected in 2022 by leveraging his humble roots as a chicken seller. His campaign branded him as a “hustler” in touch with the needs of struggling young people. Yet Ruto — one of Kenya’s richest men — is also complicit in running up the country’s crushing US$80-billion debt burden.

He served as deputy to his predecessor, former president Uhuru Kenyatta, for nine years before getting the top job. During this time, the head of Kenya’s anti-graft agency said a third of the state budget, some US$6 billion per year, was being siphoned off by corruption. Around three-quarters of Kenyan government tax revenue now goes toward servicing its borrowing costs.

To plug fiscal holes, Ruto’s government has steadily hiked taxes since last year. All of this while his administration has allotted close to $10 million to offices gifted to his and his vice-president’s spouses. The moves have earned Ruto, a devout evangelical Christian, the nickname “Zakayo” — Swahili for Zaccheus, a greedy tax collector from the Bible.

The final straw came in late June, when Ruto advanced a tax bill proposing new levies on a swath of consumer staples, ranging from bread to diapers, on a population where nearly 40 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds are unemployed. Thousands of anti-government demonstrators filled the streets on-and-off for several weeks. They torched government buildings in several cities and encircled parliament buildings in the capital, Nairobi. At least 61 people were killed and hundreds were arrested by security forces in the ensuing crackdown.

Ruto has since scrapped his tax proposal, sacked his entire cabinet and tried to initiate a national dialogue. But significant damage to his credibility has already been done. Indeed, credit services agency Moody’s in July downgraded Kenya’s sovereign credit rating to junk status.

This inspired demonstrations a month later in Uganda, to criticize the rule of 79-year-old autocrat Yoweri Museveni. In power since 1986 — before the majority of Ugandan voters were born — Museveni’s regime has intimidated, harassed and violently suppressed dissent for years. The country has been near the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruptions Perception Index for over a decade, ranking 141 out of 180 countries in 2023.

In Nigeria, a coalition of civil society groups then organized 10 “days of rage” in early August. With inflation sitting above 34 per cent, they demanded that President Bola Tinubu reverse sweeping reforms enacted last year that ended government fuel and electricity subsidies and abandoned a fixed exchange rate for the country’s currency. Despite consensus among economists that the moves were needed to fix Nigeria’s sclerotic economy, implementation was rushed to appease foreign investors. Tinubu still approved US$38 million in luxury perks last November for his fellow lawmakers.

In early 2010, popular youth-led uprisings against endemic corruption and economic malaise coalesced into the Arab Spring, toppling rulers in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and elsewhere. Current protests in Sub-Saharan Africa evidently share the same roots.

Whether demonstrators can maintain momentum and produce similar results is an open question.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based political risk analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.