Suluhu, Africa's strongmen have met their match in youth protest

Tanzanian police stop a man accused by electoral officials of attempting to taint the voting process at a polling station in Stone Town on October 29, 2025, during Tanzania's presidential elections. [AFP] President Samia Suluhu Hassan has blamed the electoral disorder in her country, last week, on foreigners. She has vowed to crush them. They will know that she is a true lioness, she says. A number of thoughts spring up from this, none of which bodes well for Africa's ruling elite. The most important lesson is that protest in Africa can no longer be contained within national borders. By their very nature, in the first place, these borders are porous. If you should be walking about in the neighbourhood of the little town of Kibondo in north-western Tanzania, you will easily run into billboards in the middle of the bush, bidding you farewell from the United Republic. And just immediately ahead is another one, welcoming you to Burundi. Right there in the bush, no immigration personnel, no customs people, nothing, just the billboards. This border is a metaphor for African borders. The entire continent of Africa has porous boundaries, with numerous illegal and unmanned crossing points. In East Africa we call them "panya routes," which is to say pathways for rats. The challenges pertain to geographical factors that speak to hundreds of miles of extensive borders impossible to manage. There are other factors, too; from families' community ties across the borders, to historical and cultural ties. Then there are matters of corruption at regular entry points, and even poor demarcation. There exist ambiguous border communities that do not know which country they belong to, all over Africa. And even the governments do not know, either. Moments of unrest can suck in families and relatives across borders. But is Africa now entering the age of protest without borders, protester sans frontieres? In the past, foreigners, even those in the contiguity of border spaces have kept off crises across the border, only receiving refugees, and especially family members. But is youth-led protest energy redefining activism, as to spill it over into the next country? Is the Kenyan Gen-Z energy spilling into Tanzania? And if it is, is it just the contagion of the energy, or have Kenyan youth actually crossed the border to wreck protest havoc in Tanzania? It is most likely both. It starts with shared grievances among African youth; against unemployment, taxation injustice, corruption, cost of living, and allied grief. But the youth have also melted the borders through digital platforms. They are talking to each other seamlessly in cyberspace, comparing notes and planning together. That is how they suddenly erupt into the streets almost everywhere, all at the same time, right up to the minute. If President Ronald Reagan was in 1989 telling Mikhail Gorbachev to bring down the wall of Berlin, African youth have broken through national colonial borders fashioned in Europe in 1884. Going forward, it is going to be impossible to confine conversations within national borders. People who still see themselves in four-legged images of dreaded wild beasts are living in the dim past. Transnational youth networks are way ahead of you. The protest energy has hopped across the borders. It is sitting pretty in your capitals, and in other small places in the villages and hamlets. In the 1970s, my generation was familiarised with the thinking of Frantz Fanon of Martinique, and especially of his dreams of an African Revolution. Fanon wrote profusely on African liberation from colonialism, in its numerous guises. He advocated civil unrest, as a necessary tool to free yoked people from physical and psychological bondage. Yet, not even Fanon could have imagined the seamlessness of youth protest in Africa today. Those who dream about crushing these young people are daydreaming. They will not succeed. And Tanzania should have known this, from May, when the youth attacked the government's social media accounts, in what was clearly a coordinated operation. Now that is the meaning of "external interference." To date, it is doubtful that the authorities in Dar-es-Salaam know who attacked their systems. Together with the rest of Africa's political elite, they will do well to remember the bird called Eneke, in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Asked why he was always on the wing, Eneke said, "Since men have learned to shoot without missing, I have learned to fly without perching." The hunter in these games easily ends up becoming the hunted. Africa's strongmen will need to rethink the objectives of government, and to address popular expectations, grievances and unrest. Self-enrichment, scapegoating and witch hunting will no longer help them. -Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke

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