With Their Teargas-filled Eyes, East African Youth Point to a New World

SATURDAY JULY 27 2024

In the first wave of the Gen Z protest in Kenya, before the militant urban elements jumped in, the young people were outraged that there were no garbage cans for them to throw their water bottles and other debris in. ILLUSTRATION | JOSEPH NYAGAH | NMG

Charles-Obbo

The last few years in Uganda, like in Kenya, have been swept by daily shocking stories of grand corruption and waste.

In Kenya, they exploded a month ago in the Generation Z protests, which have remade the politics of the country, led to a rare shelving of the Finance Bill, the dismissal of virtually his entire government by President William Ruto, and the resignation of the Police chief.

The Kenya protests have been one of the biggest international stories out of Africa so far this year, and it has inspired protests in some parts of Africa, and the world. In Uganda, its impact has been complicated.

There, the anti-corruption campaign had been more furious than in Kenya, with Parliament being the centre. In May the US slapped sanctions on Uganda’s Parliament Speaker Anita Among “due to involvement in significant corruption tied to her leadership.”

Mary Goretti Kitutu and Agnes Nandutu — previously ministers responsible for Uganda’s marginalised border region of Karamoja — and former state minister for Finance Amos Lugolobi were also placed on the sanctions list.

President Yoweri Museveni, who hates to have such major developments happen outside his tight control, jumped into the fray. Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds at the same time, he swung between denouncing anti-corruption campaigners as foreign agents involved in “cow talk”, to threatening to rain down fire and brimstone on the wicked mouths and stomachs of the corrupt.

Buoyed by the national wave against corruption, the youthful anti-corruption campaigners announced in early June — nearly two weeks before the Kenya Gen Z anti-high-tax and corruption protests started in Nairobi on June 18 — that they would hold a #March2Parliament in July. Their Kenyan peers took to the streets earlier, and by the time their protest came on July 23, the Kampala government had watched the developments across the border and was ready for the war.

Days before July 23, it turned parts of Kampala into a war zone, flooding them with heavily armed soldiers and armoured cars. On the eve of the protest, it laid siege to the headquarters of the main opposition National Unity Party, preventing their press conference, and arresting several of its officials. When the #March2Parliament started, the activists were hopelessly outgunned and faced with more soldiers and police than members in their ranks who had found the bravery to show up.

A good number still did turn up, and many were arrested. Their courage was admirable.

The response by President Yoweri Museveni, who had warned they would be met by “fire”, would have been surprising for someone who had closely followed his statements and actions the previous three weeks. He had raised his anti-corruption rhetoric sharply; several members of Parliament and officials had been arrested and taken to court; and he had held a retreat of the ruling National Resistance Movement party and declared corruption the great enemy of the day.

The view among Ugandan analysts is that Museveni sought to corner the anti-corruption market, and wants to be seen to have slayed the monster — which he raised and nurtured.

“You can be sure Museveni wants Speaker Among’s head”, one of them said, “but it is he, not anyone else, who will cut it off at a time of his choosing. He can’t brook the Kenya situation where President Ruto is seen responding to protests. He is a soldier, a strongman”.

Another one suggested that Museveni’s timing will be a few months away from February 2026, when he will be seeking a record-shattering ninth term in office, and when at 82, and having been in power for 40 years, “he will need a big basket of campaign props to stand. A large body count of the corrupt he has freshly put away would be a lot of help then.”

The varying responses of Ruto and Museveni speak to the differences of the two countries’ political traditions. Kenya’s is steeped in a more liberal democratic culture that has taken root from the more conventional civil society and constitutional opposition-led democracy struggle of the 1980s and 1990s. Uganda’s is born of violent politics and civil war.

At another level, however, they are similar. First, they are both driven by youth. Second, they have moved away from the broad demands for democracy, human rights, and freedom, which have been the dominant theme of African opposition and activists’ claims against states over the past 50 years.

Their focus on corruption, and particularly the arcane provisions in tax bills, is quite unusual in African political contestation, though it echoes the “no tax without representation” slogan adopted by American anti-colonialists under British rule in the 1760s.

It is an early pointer to the demands that will be made by more secular, rapidly urbanising Africa and its emerging cosmopolitan societies. In Uganda, recently there was a very creative social media campaign by young people against the pothole epidemic in the capital Kampala.

In the first wave of the Gen Z protest in Kenya, before the militant urban elements jumped in, the young people were outraged that there were no garbage cans for them to throw their water bottles and other debris in.

They sent a message to the Nairobi City authorities to do the right thing for the following week’s protest. In the meantime, they cleaned up after themselves, like those Japanese and South Korean fans at World Cups.

An old 1970s and 1980s African revolutionary would consider that the most bourgeois thing.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X@cobbo3