Today’s protesters and insurgents do not want greater access to a corrupt and ineffective system. They want to abolish it.
Over the past decade, the current political order in Africa has faced an increasing challenge. In urban areas, what has been called a wave of protests looks more like an era of protests. In various rural areas – from the Sahel to eastern Congo and Mozambique – jihadist movements have multiplied and crossed borders.
The data leaves little doubt about the spread of political instability. According to ACLED, the number of protests in sub-Saharan Africa has skyrocketed from just 614 in 2011 to 5,900 in 2021. In the same period, the incidence of battles and violence against civilians increased by almost 480%.
Why is this happening? And why now? The usual explanations of poverty and corruption are useful, but only up to a point. These problems, after all, are not new. My research suggests that what we are seeing in Africa is not your run-of-the-mill instability. Rather, it is a sign that the entrenched patronage-based order, fragile at best, has spawned powerful new adversaries that the system can no longer tame or absorb.
The patronage paradigm
The patronage policy of some variety is almost ubiquitous throughout Africa. This is partly a legacy of colonialism. At the time of independence, many states inherited countries that European imperialists had united without regard to the communities that would be forced together or separated by their arbitrary borders. To bolster their fragile positions, regimes across the continent resorted to a combination of repression and elite co-optation. Rebellions would be violently suppressed, or their leaders would be bought off with state resources and a stake in the status quo. In some cases, such as the National Resistance Movement in Uganda, a bold reform movement seized power by force, but soon turned to patronage politics as a pragmatic way of governing itself.
Though tumultuous at times, this way of ruling persisted comfortably until the 1980s, when debt, recession, and conditional loans forced African states to contract and privatize. With fewer state resources for everyone, sponsorship networks suffered. Dissidence, insurgencies and conflicts increased. Nonetheless, the system survived despite several one-party regimes being forced to transition to multi-party democracy in the 1990s. After 2000, when commodity prices soared, the politics of Patronage stabilized and retained its effectiveness in resisting and absorbing opposition.
However, since the 2010s, something has changed again. States have continued to use repression and patronage in the face of resistance, yet the frequency of protests and insurgencies has only increased.
A new era of protest in the villages
In the cities and towns of Africa, protest is the chosen means of rebellion that the patronage paradigm has failed to capture or suppress.
There are numerous reasons for this trend. One is that these new mobilizations against the regime are being organized and led by individuals from a narrow middle class. These activists are often private employees outside the civil service or parastatals that previously absorbed this group. Therefore, they are insulated from sponsorship networks. They can riot without biting the hand that feeds them and stay in the streets even after achieving short-term victories.
Thanks to the increased flow of money and ideas across borders in the 21st century, this generation of organizers and their movements are more likely to be influenced by ideas and strategies seen elsewhere. They may be more idealistic and have significant access to the tools, knowledge, and templates to channel mass complaints into action.
The motivations of these protests may also be different from those of their predecessors. Recent mobilizations often respond to popular discontent that growth has not translated into economic benefits for the majority of people and that successive governments have failed to deliver on their promises of better governance. Their demands, unlike those of earlier times, whether openly stated or not, are not to get more patronage for their supporters or to take over the patronage-based system. In fact, several citizen movements – such as Y’en a marre in Senegal, Balais Citoyen in Burkina Faso, and the Professional Association of Sudan – have deliberately organized outside of partisan politics in favor of lobbying from the outside in. Struggle in the Democratic Republic of the Congo even goes so far as to ban members from running for public office.
Not all movements avoid formal politics. Bobi Wine and her People Power party have galvanized poor urban youth in Uganda. Peter Obi’s presidential campaign in Nigeria is tapping into the anger and hope of the youth-led #EndSARS movement. But the appeal of both figures is that they are seen, rightly or wrongly, as leaders who, if elected, would put an end to politics as it is.
All of this has led to a rise in resistance that, for the first time, threatens the post-independence African political system itself. These social movements are not based on patronage networks and do not compete for greater inclusion within them. As such, regimes can still resort to heavy-handed repression effectively, but find it much more difficult to end these waves of protest through co-optation.
A new era of rural insurgency
The dynamics described above have largely emerged around the wealthier urban centers with middle classes. The context is different in rural areas. As the CEO of a Congolese tech startup told me: “In Goma, there is money… young people get involved in entrepreneurship”; Outside, the youth can only earn a living through “politics” (ie patronage). In many countries, ruling parties that meet with resistance in the cities have nonetheless managed to maintain complete dominance in rural areas.
These regions, however, have also seen an increase in mobilizations that are more immune to cooptation and threaten the patronage system. In countries from Mali to Mozambique, and from the Lake Chad Basin to eastern Congo, jihadists have harnessed rural grievances to unleash armed insurgencies. Like some urban social movements, these religious movements too are often led by relatively young, educated, and ideologically determined organizers who have lost faith in ineffective and corrupt states. They are also influenced and supported by ideas and funds from abroad, in their case, the so-called Islamic State or Al-Qaeda.
These groups were typically founded as nonviolent organizations but, after facing state repression and being inspired by the growing transnational jihadist movement, turned to armed insurgencies. Although popular protest movements are most effective in densely populated cities, successful insurgency is almost always a rural phenomenon. Boko Haram’s urban uprising in 2009, for example, was easily crushed by Nigerian security forces. The movement only grew after retreating to the periphery, winning over segments of communities frustrated with the patronage system and waging an asymmetrical campaign.
From these rural bases, the jihadists seek the strength to defeat and replace the state, as we have seen on occasion in northeastern Nigeria and northern Mali. While urban protesters seek to break the patronage system through accountability, jihadists vow to abolish states entirely in a grand purge of the corrupt Western order. Once again, armed movements are far from new to the continent, but the crucial difference is that today’s Islamist militants do not want to control the system but to abolish it.
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New order
These new protesters and insurgents represent the gravest threat yet to an African political order that has remained in the grip of a toxic colonial legacy since independence. The results of this challenge, however, are far from predictable or necessarily positive.
These challenges have pushed the rulers into a corner where they cannot co-opt their opponents or give in to demands to dismantle the very system that keeps them in power. Therefore, the only tried and tested option left is heavy-handed repression. However, this response further delegitimizes governments and encourages more rebellions, setting off a vicious and unpredictable cycle. In Sudan, for example, violence has not solved the junta’s problem but has pushed it into a fragile limbo without effectively suppressing popular demands. In Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso, popularly backed coups have led to military governments as ineffective as their predecessors in putting down urban or rural rebellions. Protests, new coups and jihadist advances are often the result of this cycle.
African states have developed an allergic reaction to the patronage-based connective tissue that holds regimes together. Failure to diagnose this problem can, at best, result in a tenuous purgatory of perpetual instability. Either way, the system is under unprecedented pressure, and while the change that will occur will not necessarily be positive, it will not necessarily be negative either. With change comes hope and the promise of a new order. A revolutionary reinvention of African politics appears on the horizon.
Evan Nachtrieb graduated with a BA with honors in political studies from Pitzer College, where he wrote his thesis on protest and insurgency trends south of the Sahara.
