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CWA # 1527, 31 October 2024
NIAS Africa Studies
Protests in Africa: Successful and Unsuccessful Stories

  Ayan Datta

Between July and August 2024, Kenya witnessed massive protests against President William Ruto’s financial bill. With their decentralised mobilisation strategy and wide support base of youth, students, trade unions, civil society and churches, the anti-Ruto movement made significant initial gains, forcing Ruto to withdraw the finance bill and remove his corrupt cabinet colleagues in a snap reshuffle. Despite the protesters’ demanding Ruto’s resignation, the protests dissipated by the fifth week. The anti-Ruto movement failed to make a long-term impact because they lacked formal leadership and a political formation to represent them.  

The anti-Ruto protests’ short-term gains and long-term failure mirrored the fate of major protests in Africa. In Nigeria, President Bola Tinubu conceded to the #EndSARS protests by dissolving the controversial police unit. However, he undermined the people’s demands for political and economic modernisation by ordering the Lekki tollgate massacre of 2021, which killed around 50 Nigerians and injured hundreds more. In the case of Egypt’s Arab Spring protests (2011), the military government initially responded to protesters by removing President Mohammed Bouazizi but denied their long-term vision of a democratic Egypt by conducting another coup in 2017. The Sudan Revolution (2019) reflected a similar picture, with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s government sharing power with civilian leaders in 2019 following mass protests but reverting to authoritarian rule in 2021. The sporadic protests in Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Tanzania also made initial impacts but were eventually diffused by their respective governments using preventive detention, beatings, abductions and online surveillance.

Protests in Africa: Reasons behind immediate success
First, the protests had a mass character, allowing them to use the strength of numbers to cripple the day-to-day functioning of the government and bring crucial urban centres to a standstill. The movements were often led by the countries’ young “Facebook generation” and supported by crucial economic classes, including labour unions, white-collar professionals, and lawyers. The youth and working classes put pressure on their governments through massive and decentralised mobilisations, strikes and work stoppages. In Kenya, the protesters used Twitter to amplify their agenda, organise rallies, and share news of police excesses, reflecting social media’s role as the new catalyst for mass protests. 

Second, the growing unpopularity of African leaders. With democratic deficits, economic mismanagement, endemic corruption and widespread nepotism, the governments in the protest-ridden states were growing increasingly unpopular. Individual grievances, like Kenya’s finance bill, footage of brutality by SARS officers in Nigeria, excesses by mining corporations in Uganda, and Muhamad Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia and northern Africa, became triggers that revealed the people’s deep-rooted grievances.

Third, regional inspiration. The protest mobilisation in one country (for example, Kenya and Tunisia) against the government’s political repression and economic mismanagement inspired frustrated masses in neighbouring countries (for instance, Uganda, Egypt, and Libya) to challenge their government on similar issues. Furthermore, the simultaneous protests contributed to their political momentum, increasing the chances of success. 

Protests in Africa: Reasons behind long-term failures
First, police and military repression. Faced with mass protests, African leaders relied on their powerful police and military apparatuses to suppress and disperse the impassioned crowds after making minor concessions. The unarmed crowds could not withstand the state’s violence, the protests collapsed, and the leaders successfully avoided long-term political and economic transformation. The cases of Nigeria, Sudan and Egypt most aptly demonstrate the repression factor behind unsuccessful protests.

Second, protesters’ failure to form a united political front. Africa’s protesters rarely formed broad-based political parties. They rallied around a single set of leaders, creating space for illiberal and undemocratic groups but more organised to capture power and reverse the gains of the protests. The absence of a civilian political alternative would often lead to militaries capturing the government in the name of providing stability. In Egypt, the Arab Spring protesters did not form any political party to replace the toppled military ruler, Hosni Mubarak. The resulting power vacuum led to the rise of the Islamist group, Ikhwan ul-Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood) and, eventually, to the return of army rule.  

Third, autocratic legacies and weak opposition forces. The protesters rarely formed a united front and were vulnerable to state repression because opposition forces in African countries were weakened by decades of autocratic one-party or military rule, which prevented strong opposition groups from emerging and developing strong support bases. Consequently, as the people’s grievances intensified, there were few strong organisations to articulate and aggregate the people’s concerns and work as alternative power centres to the government. In Zimbabwe, for instance, there is no major opposition to President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) party, giving him the freedom to monopolise the political space and refuse any accommodation with the opposition parties, who have been protesting sporadically since July.

African protests face long-term challenges in repressive militaries, lack of political formations for protesters, and autocratic legacies. These difficulties indicate that future protest movements in the continent if they are to be effective, will have to focus on building institutions rather than limiting themselves to mobilisation. 

About the author
Ayan Datta is a Postgraduate Student at University of Hyderabad.

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