Some have viewed recent protests in Kenya as the beginning of an ‘Arab Spring’ for Africa. [Picture: Brian Inganga /AP]
Amid a series of protests in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria over the past two months, experts are divided on whether Africa is about to experience an ‘Arab Spring’ moment.
Speaking in an interview with Salaamedia’s Julie Allie on Tuesday, Orapeleng Matsediso, a masters graduate at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation, University of Johannesburg, said a well-led “revolution” was underway.
“The African Union and African leaders did not learn anything from what happened during the Arab Spring of 2010-11. History is repeating itself,” he said, after drawing attention to the numerous failures of African leaders to improve the lives of their people since independence.
Deadly protests rocked Kenya in June 2024 in response to proposed tax increases. The next month, more than 40 demonstrators were arrested in Uganda when they denounced corruption. Days later, Nigerians swelled the streets in protest against poverty, corruption and bad governance.
Such youth-led protests were reminiscent of the Arab Spring that rocked the Arab world after a Tunisian vegetable seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in 2010. Now, social media sites are helping Generation Z mobilise.
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Africa’s ‘Arab Spring’ moment?
Another expert seems to hold a similar view – that African leaders ought to become more responsive to the needs of their citizens. However, he is unsure whether the Kenyan protests specifically brought the continent any closer to a revolutionary moment similar to the Arab Spring.
Moses Tesi, a professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University, said the situation in such countries was dire enough.
“Democratic governance is on the decline while unemployment, the cost of living, and inflation have skyrocketed. When you add to that government efforts to deprive ordinary citizens of their meagre earnings by taxing basic necessities, you find an explosion such as we saw in Kenya,” he said.
But Professor Nic Cheeseman, a political scientist and professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham, whose work focuses on politics in Africa, does not believe recent events can be compared to the Arab Spring.
This is because “countries such as Kenya moved away from authoritarian rule in the early 1990s and have competitive elections, so they are at very different stages of their political development”. Even if the protests forced Kenya’s William Ruto to reject the finance bill and sack his cabinet, whether this will translate into meaningful change “remains to be seen,” he said.
“Profound and sustainable change would require changes to the country’s institutional framework to empower anti-corruption bodies while enabling key legislation to be enforced, and this has not happened yet,” he said.
Tesi warned that other countries on the continent, including South Africa (which now has 8.4 million unemployed people) could be possible sites of future unrest as the conditions were favourable. All that was needed was the right moment.
“Because conditions already exist favouring economic, political, and social change, it takes only a spark to plunge a country into chaos,” he said.
“History teaches that governments that are transparent, responsive to citizens’ demands, inclusive and participatory, tend to be more effective and tend to bring about change more gradually and peacefully than governments that are not. For governments that are not transparent, responsive, or participatory, the only way those excluded feel they can be involved is by instigating radical revolutionary change.”
