From Kenya’s ‘Gen Z protests’ to the world: Youth as a global constituency

By Nanjala Nyabola

In June 2024, thousands of Kenyans took to the streets to protest plans to increase taxes on goods and services like bread, diapers and sanitary towels, and to reduce spending on public services. Dubbed the ‘Gen Z protests‘, as the majority of participants were young people, these demonstrations quickly became violent. Police and security officers opened fire, kicking off a cycle of counter-protests and increasingly draconian policing. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights estimated that by the end of June, 39 people had died and 361 had been injured.

Kenya was not the only African country to see significant youth-led unrest in 2024 – Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique and Nigeria did as well – inspiring predictions of a possible ‘African Spring‘ in news media. While the African context was certainly important, this narrative pushed aside deeper considerations of young people as a global constituency.

This is a shame because, despite their differences, many young people around the world share similar concerns. Perhaps most significantly, they have less and less reason to believe they will be able to attain the quality of life their parents achieved. They are finding that institutions of electoral politics are failing to address their grievances, and – like generations before them – are turning to protest to be heard. The question is: are policy makers prepared to respond?

Read more: From Kenya’s ‘Gen Z protests’ to the world: Youth as a global constituency

To be sure, simply being young does not guarantee moral leadership. Indeed, leaders of some of the most controversial governments in the world today – in Chad and El Salvador, for instance – are relatively young. Nonetheless, a political system that permits multigenerational governance and enables young people to enter office can indicate a healthy democracy. That is because it means that people with limited social or economic capital can use the political system to achieve their goals.

So what are the goals of today’s young people?

To start, they want to emerge from what anthropologists call waithood: a stage of life in which young people cannot attain generational and social markers of adulthood due to price increases and a lack of jobs. They are priced out of owning homes or automobiles – a state accelerated by global inflation, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic. Saddled with debt from increasingly expensive higher education, they struggle to find stable or meaningful work due to the gig-ification of employment and the loss of public sector and blue-collar jobs.

In other cases, graduates are unable to land the highly specialised digital roles to which they aspire. This is the case in Africa, for example, where a lack of infrastructural support means that over 80% of young people want high-skilled jobs, but – despite their training – only 8% get them. And all of this uncertainty sits alongside anxieties about a future under the shadow of climate change.

In this context, young men in particular are attracted to the prosperity gospels offered by the far right, and stock narratives that blame immigrants, ethnic minorities and women for their loss of opportunity. Indeed, across the Global North, more and more Gen Z men are identifying as conservative, even as women of the same generation become more liberal. Meanwhile, others hunger for values-driven leadership that offers a path to a world built on justice and equality rather than consumerism and exploitation. They are disappointed by a political system that dangles the possibility of prosperity, only to uphold structures of inequality that make it impossible to attain.

The uptick in global protest of recent years is a symptom of a constituency that has grown up with a specific set of beliefs about what electoral politics is for, colliding with a political moment in which those who hold power are keen to preserve the status quo. In many countries, this looks like political leaders literally holding on to their jobs: According to Pew, the median age of current national leaders is 62. The largest share of global leaders (34%) are in their 60s; nearly a quarter (22%) are in their 50s; 19% are in their 70s.

The end of the Cold War brought with it a narrative that democracy, reduced to electoral politics, would deliver specific social and political goods. Today’s protesters are young adults who grew up believing this to be true. It is in this mismatch that protest becomes the primary vehicle for expressing dissent.

We are entering a period of historical inflection, and this generational cleavage is a potential fault line. But it doesn’t have to be. Systems that allow young people to aspire to and work towards political power can diffuse the anxiety that makes protest desirable. This is why it is so important to foster a global politics that upholds equality, and in which youth is no longer a barrier to participation.

Nanjala Nyabola is a Kenyan writer, political analyst, and activist.