Africa’s Urban Youth Revolution, With Michelle Gavin

LINDSAY:
Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Africa's urban revolution.

With me to discuss what urbanization, a youth-heavy population, and social media mean for politics across the African continent is Michelle Gavin. Michelle is the Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies at CFR. From 2011 to 2014, she served simultaneously as U.S. Ambassador Botswana and the U.S. representative to the Southern African Development Community. Before that, she was a special assistant to President Barack Obama and the senior director for Africa on the staff of the National Security Council. Michelle is the author of a new book, Age of Change: How Urban Youth Are Transforming African Politics. Michelle, thank you for coming on the President's Inbox.

GAVIN:
Thanks so much for having me.

LINDSAY:
So first off, Michelle, congratulations on the publication of Age of Change. Before we dive into what you argue in the book, I want to let our listeners know how they can win a free copy. To do so, please go to cfr.org/giveaway. Let me repeat that. Cfr.org/giveaway. There you can read the terms and conditions for the giveaway and register your entry. We will accept entries until September 23. After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of Age of Change. If you are still searching for a pen to write down this information, don't worry. We have posted a link to the giveaway in the show notes for the President's Inbox on cfr.org. With those logistics out of the way, Michelle, let's talk about Africa, urbanization, and the political impact of young people. Perhaps we can start with you briefly summarizing the argument you make in the Age of Change.

GAVIN:
Well, the big idea of the book is that these youthful demographics and the urbanization and the rapidly approaching or recently passed expiration date of some old political narratives are all combining to create this really insatiable demand for political change all across the region in states that have very different political economies, very diverse societies, but there is this through line of grievance and searching for some kind of politics that works better. And I think that means a lot of political volatility ahead.

LINDSAY:
So do I take it you're arguing there's going to be a gap between what the public expects and what governments can deliver?

GAVIN:
Absolutely. If you just consider what is for most African societies the most salient public policy issue, which is job creation. If you have these populations increasing, there aren't enough jobs today, but the population, the urban population in particular is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And this is a very hard challenge to meet, especially for governments that are already dealing with significant debt burdens. They have very limited tools in the toolbox to do a lot of government-stimulated job creation. And so that alone I think is going to drive a tremendous amount of frustration and dissatisfaction.

LINDSAY:
So let's put all of this in context because my sense is that your message to people is when it comes to Africa buckle up, you can expect turbulence. But you're saying that in contrast to the last several decades when there has been considerable stability, some might call stagnation in African politics, and you've written about how so many African countries have been dominated by the same groups of people. You talk about forever presidents, dynasties, forever political parties, and one of my favorite phrases: churn without change. So help me understand the sort of consistency, if I can use that word, that we have witnessed across Africa, even given the immense differences in economy, structure of society, religious practices, so on and so forth.

GAVIN:
Absolutely. And it is fascinating to me because you're quite right, in these different contexts you do still find this political stasis. And I think that some of it comes from a very canny and clever adjustment that a number of leaders made when multi-party politics became all the rage in the 1990s where they adopted kind of an authoritarian democratic model where they get to keep all the power and assurance that they stay in the driver's seat, but there is this kind of theater of elections regularly. So part of it is that, and part of it is when these churn without change countries with places like Nigeria and Kenya, two very different societies, but where yes, you have different political formations, rarely with clear policy platform differences, but different kind of amalgams of political elites who might trade power. But the entire political system is in many ways sort of self-serving for one political class. And the difference felt by the population is quite minimal when that power changes course. And so while we often, I think in kind of the popular imagination, associate Africa with a lot of instability, in politics, there's been a tremendous degree of stability and there have been narratives that buttress that that are losing their salience quite rapidly.

LINDSAY:
Michelle, can I get you to put a face on that perhaps by telling the story that you open Age of Change with about your personal experience? I don't mean to date you on this score, but I thought it was a wonderful story to illustrate the broader phenomenon you're writing about.

GAVIN:
I've exposed myself in the book as a middle-aged woman, so there's no worries about that. In the mid-1990s, I was an undergraduate and I traveled abroad, actually my first time ever leaving the country, to Cameroon because I really wanted to work on my French and I wanted to understand more about African politics. And at the time, the president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, had already been in office for about a dozen years.

LINDSAY:
He came to power in the fall of 1982.

GAVIN:
That's right. And every conversation about politics, about the Cameroonian State, about how governance worked was really a conversation about Paul Biya. Since then, I went off to graduate school. I had a very fulfilling career in government. I am indeed middle-aged. I have a teenage daughter and a son who will be a teenager soon. Paul Biya is still the president of Cameroon. In fact, he's running for re-election this October in his nineties. The population of Cameroon has dramatically increased. The economy of the country has changed tremendously, and yet this political system remains, serving a very small group of people, perhaps more than serving the country at large.

LINDSAY:
And I should note that President Biya is not the longest-serving head of state in Africa. I believe the president of Equatorial Guinea came to power about a month or so before he did.

GAVIN:
Yes. Holds that distinction.

LINDSAY:
So what explains why they have been able to hang on for so long in so many countries? Again, we could add in Eritrea, whose president's been in power since '93. Uganda, who's president has been in power since 1986. Rwanda, Paul Kagame has been president since 2000, effectively running the country since the great genocide in 1994. With all of the change that we associate with the last three decades, what do you think Africa has seen such consistency or stagnation?

GAVIN:
I think part of it, again, was a very clever adaptation of electoral authoritarianism that gave the illusion of an option for change. I think a lot of it though has to do with ideas about governing legitimacy. And even in countries that have elections, it's not necessarily the case that the really fundamental idea about why some person or some group gets to govern is about popular will. In some cases, a lot of the Southern African Liberation Party cases, it's about these people liberated us from oppression from minority rule.

LINDSAY:
We see that in South Africa, Zimbabwe in particular.

GAVIN:
Absolutely. And therefore, they are the legitimate rulers. They are the legitimate decision makers and drivers of government. And in other places it's a security argument. You see this in Uganda and Rwanda, certainly, where those leaders emerged after—in the case of Rwanda, the horrific genocide. In the case of Uganda, really cycles of horrific political violence. And the underlying narrative is always about, "I keep you safe. Without me, we're going back to this terrible instability and insecurity." But as populations change, people don't remember minority rule anymore as a personal lived experience. People don't remember the era of Amin and Abote in Uganda, and it starts to work less. I think the other big changes though, really do relate to the demographic trends so that both the urbanization, which makes it a lot easier to organize politically, a lot easier to make one's own assessment about relative levels of socioeconomic comfort. People are better educated typically in urban areas. And then digitization, which is just again, compounded. The ease of political organizing, discussing, comparing. And so all of those new tools in a citizen's toolbox are making it harder to satisfy populations with sham elections or a reminder of how bad things were back in the day.

LINDSAY:
So Michelle, let's take a deep dive into those three drivers of political change that you've pointed to. The youth-heavy nature of most African societies. And I should note that here we're really talking about sub-Saharan Africa. The demographics are different if you're talking about Northern Africa. But besides the young age of the population, we're talking about urbanization and about social media and digitalization. But let's begin with your point about the youth-heavy nature of most African populations. Demography is destiny so I take it is certainly not a stretch to say that a young country is in a different position than a country that is much older. But help me understand just how young are African countries, any sort of historical comparisons or cross-cultural comparisons we can make to just give us a sense of how youthful Africa is.

GAVIN:
Absolutely. Because it really is a singular phenomenon. So if we think about U.S. politics, because we're Americans, and when you think about youth politics, my mind definitely goes to the late-1960s.

LINDSAY:
Summer of love, I think.

GAVIN:
Exactly.

LINDSAY:
1969. I'm actually old enough to remember it though, not old enough to participate in it.

GAVIN:
But maybe to remember the images and that seemed to be a high point of young political engagement. So about that time, Americans fifteen to twenty-four, so not all of voting age, but certainly a political awareness age, fifteen to twenty-four comprised about twenty-three percent of the adult population. So discounting children. In at least a dozen African states today, that same cohort is at least sixty percent of the adult population. In many cases over seventy percent. So it's dramatically different. If we think about the Arab Spring, which is often attributed in part to youthful demographics, in 2011, Egypt's fifteen to twenty-four population was less than a third of the total adult population. And if you look again at the African countries, we're talking about well over two-thirds. So it's dramatically different. A lot of the challenges that Africa faces, and certainly this idea of popular dissatisfaction with old political models and economic frustration, that's not different from other places in the world. But what's unique here is that these societies are meeting this moment when they are dominated to a staggering degree by youth.

LINDSAY:
So this is really an opposite problem than the one facing most western societies and including some Asian societies where the issue is the aging of the population. Talk for example, of China getting old before it gets rich. I'll note that the median age in the United States with half the population above half the population below is about thirty-nine. In many African countries, you're talking somewhere in the upper teens. So very, very different there. Obviously that puts some pressure on governments. Tell me a little bit about how things change when you're dealing with a population that's overwhelmingly young versus a population that's overwhelmingly old.

GAVIN:
Right. Well, job creation is once again the name of the game. So certainly in societies that are dealing with grave insecurity, that's priority one. No one is wanting to live in the middle of a war zone. But in the absence of physical security threats, polling shows us consistently that majorities in these countries rate addressing unemployment, creating better quality jobs as the first priority they want government to address. That's a very different thing from trying to figure out how to manage a shrinking labor force. And they're dealing with this kind of existential employment question at a time when there's uncertainty globally about where jobs are going to come from. So it's a really challenging situation for governments and if you look kind of at historical examples where governments tried to deal with widespread unemployment through stimulus programs and public works, that takes money. It takes a fiscal capacity to resource those programs. And that is just not the circumstance of most of these African countries. Instead, you still have a number of countries spending more servicing their debt than they're spending on basic services for the population. So you have these leaders kind of trapped in a really difficult bind. Even the best-intentioned, most technocratically capable government doesn't necessarily have the answers to the pressing and ever more pressing demands of their population.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So that takes care of the youth-heavy nature of societies. Let's talk a bit about urbanization. You've already told us why urbanization matters. People are coming together, hotbeds of political opposition, but give me some sense of just how urbanized Africa is. Because I don't think most people look at Africa and have a vision of big cities.

GAVIN:
I think you're quite right. And for a long time that was accurate and in fact informed a lot of the political models that are now not fit for purpose.

LINDSAY:
In the '60s, '70s and '80s, it was all about development and trying to build a so-called modern economy.

GAVIN:
Right. But what you have now is a situation which we're just a few years out from the majority of the African population being an urban population and urban centers are growing exponentially. So it's not just rural-to-urban migration that's creating these bigger populations. It's also just the birth rate within urban centers. So it is a dramatic change from the way we've thought about African societies and the way African governments have thought about their societies and thought about gaining political support. Part of it is about a quest for jobs and then you have the kind of unique problem set of an urban population around sanitation, public transportation. If you find a job, are you able to get to it from wherever you have found to live? Which brings us to affordable housing. There are a whole host of public goods that come with being in an urban center that it's very difficult to provide.

LINDSAY:
Is this simply a matter of so-called mega-cities? I mean, I think for example, Lagos in Nigeria, which is a phenomenally huge city. Or are we talking about cities being more spread out? I mean, you wrote interestingly about a city called Kisumu, Kenya, which I have never thought of before. I know Nairobi, but that's about it.

GAVIN:
Right. Yes. These secondary cities are absolutely a really important part of this phenomenon. And what you recently saw in Kenya where there was the last two summers, a set of youth-led protests that made international headlines, those did not just happen in Nairobi. They were happening in urban centers that are not as big as Nairobi, but are still very much urban spaces all over the country.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So let's talk about the third driver, digitalization, social media, whatever your favorite term is here. Help me understand the role that it's playing. And I guess the most basic question is how connected are Africans to social media and the net?

GAVIN:
This is such an interesting question because I think some of the statistics are a little misleading. There's no question that people are increasingly connected, that it's a very rapid growth sector. But what researchers have found is that the kind of effect of social media is it's not just about who has access to the phone and gets the WhatsApp message. There's really good data to show that that message then gets transmitted orally at the cafe with everybody coming along behind your shoulder to read it. It has far more reach than we might imagine just by counting subscriptions. And so what certainly I've found both anecdotally and in the rigorous literature is that it's an extremely digitally conscious and connected situation. I mean, save for a few exceptions, right? If you're an Eritrea, you're not connected to much, and that's very much by design.

LINDSAY:
And I should just put a caveat in here because you're very careful to do this in Age of Change to note that there's just tremendous diversity across the African continent, but what you're pointing to is some trends that are likely to affect all of these countries.

GAVIN:
That's exactly right. And one of the things that's really illuminating for me in researching this book is seeing how Africans are using this access to digital information, this ability to communicate with each other in a cross-border sort of way to make comparisons and learn from each other. So now it's, "Why are our roads not as good as the roads in neighboring country? Could we learn from the protest tactics that we saw in Nigeria? Could we use them here?" These are very lively conversations and so they point to the way sort of comparison, senses of relative deprivation, which peak in urban centers as a domestic matter are amplified into both a regional and a global context, because there's plenty of very interesting dialogue about U.S. developments. Just to loop back to where we started, young Africans had a lot to say about Joe Biden stepping out of the U.S. presidential race because of age-related issues. You could imagine the salience of that idea if you're Cameroonian, for example.

LINDSAY:
So I've heard you talk about phones. I haven't heard you talk about desktops or laptops, which makes me ask is most of what we're seeing in terms of the digital space taking place on phones?

GAVIN:
Yes.

LINDSAY:
And is it the case that in many African countries, people use the phones perhaps even more heavily than they do in the United States? I understand for example in China that the phone ecosystem is such that you can conduct much of your life on a phone. Is this something similar to many African countries, mobile banking, things like that?

GAVIN:
Yes. Certainly East Africa pioneered a lot of mobile banking services that then were adopted in other parts of the world. So absolutely, this is about mobile technology that people are carrying in their pocket and sharing with one another regularly.

LINDSAY:
So what you've sketched, Michelle, seems to be an almost toxic group. On the one hand you have governments that are, for a lack of a better term, sclerotic, cash-strapped, facing a young arrested population that is demanding more, that wants government to deliver. That, usually in most situations, is a recipe for political turbulence. I think that's what you're predicting. But let me ask you the question. If those ingredients are there, and they've been around for a while, why haven't we seen more of it in Africa?

GAVIN:
Part of it is about the fact that this adoption of technology is rapidly, rapidly increasing. But while young populations are learning to use these tools to organize politically and express their demands politically, simultaneously, you see political elites developing new tools, new methods, new strategies to stay in power. It's not as if mass dissatisfaction automatically leads to political change. I think what we see is kind of a cycle of building grievance, mobilization to try and effect change, confrontation. The confrontation could lead to repression and tremendous political violence that for a while at least keeps elites in power, or it could lead to a political change, a period of hope rapidly followed by a period of disappointment and now we're right back to the grievance space. Either way, you end up back at the grievance space, you're either being repressed or you're being disappointed. And so that cycle of churn, I think we're seeing play out at different speeds in different places. But I think there's a lot of evidence for it, both in the demonstrations, expressions of dissatisfaction that we see in the polling data, and to some degree in what we're seeing at the ballot box in places where electoral results are an accurate reflection of what happened on election day.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'm glad you pointed out that social media is available not just to young people, but also to governing elites. I'm old enough to remember when we first started digitizing, we had this utopian view of these technologies empowering people to do things and then we've discovered that some authoritarian countries, particularly China, have become very adept at weaponizing these technologies to do repression, and that you can end up with a combination of repression and disappointment in terms of what the government is able to deliver. But that all leads me to ask you, Michelle, what do you think this means for U.S. foreign policy?

GAVIN:
I think what it means is that we should not expect the future to look like the past. But we do an awful lot of that in our policymaking. When we think about a Mozambique, we instantly think of two political entities, but that's really not what we see on the ground in Mozambique and the most recent contested elections were not about this fight between Frelimo and Renamo that we all remember from the Cold War and on. It's about something completely different. A new kind of third way that emerged and gained traction, particularly among urban youth. So I think first it's having to reassess some of those starting assumptions that we often kind of gloss over in the policy process. But equally important is this idea that elite bargains, which seems to be the kind of preferred approach to accompany the transactional foreign policy that we're hearing more about from the Trump administration, maybe aren't the best bet.
If there's going to be a revolving door at that elite level, it's not clear to me that those will be delivering the kinds of returns either commercially or in terms of influence and political alignment that one might like to see. And I really think that the importance of taking African opinions, that means youthful opinions, because it's the vast majority, seriously, it needs to be elevated in the policy discourse to understand what's happening. So yes, China is engaging in mass information campaigns to paint the U.S. in one light, to paint itself in another, to gain influence. But the fundamental frustrations of African populations are not driven by this Chinese discourse. They're homegrown, they're domestic. They can be manipulated and shaped and tinted in one degree or another by foreign actors, but that's not the driving force. And sometimes I think in our U.S. political discourse, we do overestimate the influence of these foreign actors and fail to grasp how persistent and deeply held these grievances are in African societies.

LINDSAY:
I want to focus on that point, Michelle, because if I understand you correctly, you are arguing that we should not focus on what I'll call the new scramble for Africa school of thought, which argues that the great powers are once again repeating what the European powers back in the 1880s did in carving up in Africa. And today it's Russia, China, and the United States in this competition to stake their flag, metaphorically at least, around the continent. But that something else is going on. Do I have you right there?

GAVIN:
Absolutely right. And when you look at the discussions of these geopolitical dynamics on the continent, yes, some of them are clearly funded by certain major powers, but by and large, these are discussions that are skeptical about all major powers, extremely skeptical about international institutions that were created before African states had any kind of say in the international system. And so as we're thinking about, well, what kind of order is going to emerge, we're seeing the old one crumble around us it feels like daily. There are going to be African equities at the table this time, and those voices are going to be young.

LINDSAY:
So in closing, Michelle, would you say that U.S. foreign policy should be looking at Africa through the lens of what its governments want or through the lens of what its societies want?

GAVIN:
That's a wonderful and pithier encapsulation of what I'm trying to say than what I've managed. Definitely through the lens of what its societies want. We're blessed to have good polling in many of these countries, and it's really quite startling when you step back from those polls. And then you look at the messaging that's come from the U.S. government for years to see the two totally different conversations that we seem to be engaged in where the U.S. wants to talk about infectious disease and public health issues, and African populations want to talk about jobs and fighting corruption.

LINDSAY:
But that doesn't seem to be the direction the current administration is going in if I understand it correctly.

GAVIN:
It does not appear at all to be the direction the administration is going. I think some of the things that could have been helpful to the U.S., particularly our reputation for not tolerating a tremendous amount of corruption, particularly in our private sector, I'm not quite sure where we're at on this issue today.

LINDSAY:
And you're referring to the fact that the Trump administration has suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corruption Practices Act?

GAVIN:
That's right. Just as an example of something that I see as quite out of step with the clear demand signals coming from African societies.

LINDSAY:
So if you had advice to give the Trump administration, what might it be? Is there one particular thing that you think is the biggest low-hanging fruit, if I can put it in those terms?

GAVIN:
I would say pause before you imagine that the U.S. political or commercial relationship with any given state is going to be transformed by agreements you have with that country's president. I think of the Democratic Republic of Congo as an example where this administration, to its credit, has devoted significant time and energy, and they're right that we need access to critical minerals that Congo is rich in. But the notion that President Tshisekedi represents a sustainable bet for where Congo is going, I think is something that needs to be questioned.

LINDSAY:
And this takes us back to your point that it's important to invest in societies because presumably that's more sustainable or robust.

GAVIN:
Absolutely. And this issue of job creation is one that's not going to stay in Africa, right? We've already—

LINDSAY:
Already here in the United States, I think that's part of the source of so much unhappiness in America in sort of the surge in populism is over having good—not just jobs—but good paying jobs that allow you to live a life of dignity and respect.

GAVIN:
This is exactly right. This is exactly right. And we already have the tragedy of young Africans taking very dangerous journeys to try and find access to a more dignified way forward. And so I don't think this is an issue that just Africanists or friends of Africa need to be aware of. This is about what's going to happen globally and what it's going to look like when we get to the point, which is rapidly coming up when Africans account for a fourth of the world's population, and we're not going to be able to effectively engage in any kind of global governance or a new multilateral system without reckoning with these big challenges.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up this episode of The President's Inbox. My guest has been Michelle Gavin, the Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Michelle, thank you for joining me, and again, congratulations on the publication of Age of Change.

GAVIN:
Thank you so much.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to the President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us a review, we love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on the President's Inbox are solely those are the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster with recording engineers Molly McAnany and Robert Michaels and director of podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.