Will Africa’s young voters continue to punish incumbents at the ballot box in 2025? We are about to find out

Voters in Gabon head to the ballot box on April 12 in a vote that marks the first election in the Central African nation since a 2023 coup ended the 56-year rule of the Bongo family.

It is also the first presidential vote to take place in Africa in 2025, to be followed by contests later this year in Ivory Coast, Malawi, Guinea, Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, Seychelles and Cameroon.

Of particular interest is whether these elections will continue the trend of last year’s votes. As the continent with the youngest population, Africa’s youth was crucial throughout 2024 to a series of seismic political shifts — not least the removal of incumbents and changes in the governing status quo in Ghana, Senegal and South Africa.

Indeed, analysis of the 2024 African Youth Survey — one of the most comprehensive continent-wide polls of people aged 18 to 24 — and election results of that year show a clear lack of optimism among the youth.

Unemployment, the rising cost of living and corruption are primary factors driving youth dissatisfaction on the continent. For example, 59% of South African youth considered their country to be heading in the wrong direction — and that’s not hard to imagine given that the country’s youth unemployment rate reached 45.5% in 2024. Not surprisingly, unemployment was a key factor in the election results. Meanwhile, widespread protests in Kenya and Uganda in the summer of 2024 were youth-led and sparked, respectively, by concerns over tax increases and corruption.

As a professor of political science and an expert in African politics, I believe that a failure to address such concerns could have potentially serious implications for political leaders in the upcoming elections. It also makes it more difficult for countries to consolidate or protect already-fragile democracies on the continent.

Unemployment fuelling instability

While African political campaigns often make note of persistently high rates of youth unemployment, the policy priorities of governments across the continent have seemingly failed to fix this intractable problem.

In a 2023 Afrobarometer survey, unemployment topped the list of policy priorities for African youth between the ages of 18 and 35. But for a multitude of reasons — including the lack of investment in training youth and other priorities — African governments have been unable or unwilling to tackle youth unemployment.

Many governments, faced with the ongoing economic after effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and supply-chain issues — which worsened rising living costs, high inflation and external debt issues — pursued unpopular revenue collection policies

Take Ghana, where in 2022 the government introduced an e-levy — a tax on electronic cash transfers. The move proved deeply unpopular and was dropped by the new government in 2024.

The violent anti-tax protests in Kenya also provide an example of desperate unemployed youth tapping into a sense of deep popular resentment over fiscal policies.

The combination of deep dissatisfaction with government policies and high youth joblessness can be a destabilising influence. A 2023 United Nations Development Program study focusing on Ghana pointed to a problem that is common elsewhere on the continent. It concluded that in regions with higher-than-average youth unemployment, that factor was the most common cause for violent extremism and radicalisation.

The UN study underscored the importance of addressing the social and economic challenges that foster marginalisation and anger among youth across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The issue of youth unemployment in Africa is worsened by the cumulative growth in the youth labour force — estimated to grow by 72.6-million between 2023 and 2050, according to a 2024 report by the International Labor Organization.

The role that unemployment played in Africa’s 2024 elections does not bode well for some of those governments heading to the polls this year. In Gabon, youth unemployment has hovered above 35% in recent years.

A corrupting influence

Corruption remains a persistent social and political issue in much of Africa and continues to impede the efforts of youth to seek meaningful opportunities. So it is unsurprising that the issue was front and centre during a number of 2024 elections, including in Senegal, South Africa and Ghana.

The concerns in those countries mirror grievances registered around the continent more broadly, with reducing government corruption listed as a top priority by respondents in the African Youth Survey.

Similar to unemployment, high levels of corruption correlated to some of the political shifts of 2024.

An Afrobarometer survey of attitudes in 2024 showed that 74% of Ghanaians believed corruption had increased over the previous year.

In Kenya, 77% of people view their government’s efforts in fighting corruption as ineffectual.

Of particular concern to many African youth is the belief that security forces and government officials are often considered the most corrupt and that incidents of regularised corruption are underreported.

And it is youth that bear the brunt of much of this corruption. According to a 2022 UN Office on Drugs and Crime report, people between the ages 18 and 34 are among the most vulnerable to having to pay bribes to public officials in Ghana.

Again, youth attitudes towards corruption don’t bode well for many of the governments in this year’s elections. Gabon, Cameroon, Central African Republic and Guinea-Bissau all score poorly on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.

The fragility of democracy

There is an ongoing debate on the extent of slowdown of democratic progress in Africa, a trend that is underscored by a number of African military coups in recent years, including in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Niger.

Democracy is at its strongest when it empowers governments to deliver on the needs of their populations, particularly the youth.

But the experience of incumbent governments in 2024 elections suggests that too many may have disregarded young people’s needs, which in turn has led to anger resulting in destabilising protests and regime change — both through democratic and undemocratic means.

It also makes it harder to instil democratic sentiment among younger voters.

Over half of Africa’s 18- to 35-year-olds surveyed in the 2023 Afrobarometer agreed that the military can intervene when leaders abuse power — a pertinent caution about their willingness to support political change, even if it interrupts the democratic process.

While a majority of youth in Africa still retain an apparent preference for democracy to other forms of governance, a growing proportion would embrace nondemocratic governance under some circumstances, according to the 2024 African Youth Survey. The top scores in this particular response came from Gabon, Ivory Coast and Tanzania — all of which have upcoming elections in 2025.

• Richard Aidoo is Professor of Political Science at Coastal Carolina University

This article was first published by The Conversation