The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
“Perhaps contexts are far less universal than circumstances” — S.R. Karugire
COMMENT | ANDREW PI BESI | Africa, our ancient continent, has since 2024 witnessed no fewer than twenty presidential elections. This year alone, Tanzania, Malawi, Cameroon, Gabon, and Côte d’Ivoire have all held polls. In Uganda, our electoral season is now in full swing, with presidential aspirants, MPs, mayors, and councillors fanning out across the country in search of votes.
Yet a troubling pattern shadows these rituals of democracy. Contested elections, civic unrest, and—most dramatically in West Africa—military coups have shaken what was once assumed to be democracy’s unchallenged preeminence.
The mythology of ballot-box legitimacy is fraying, and Africans, especially the young, are asking sharper, more impatient questions.
Much has been said about the rise of so-called Gen Z protests. But perhaps there is nothing especially “new” about this generation. Throughout Africa’s modern political story, it has always been the young who have confronted power, challenged corruption, and dared to say, “Enough is enough.”
It was a 42-year-old Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane—hardened by years in student movements resisting Portuguese rule—who, in June 1962, formed FRELIMO.
In 1954, a 32-year-old teacher named Kambarage Nyerere rallied compatriots to form the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). After merging with Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party in 1977, TANU transformed into CCM, one of Africa’s longest-surviving political machines.
Earlier still, a 30-year-old Pixley ka Isaka Seme, fresh from Columbia and Oxford, proposed the creation of the South African Native National Congress. On 8 January 1912, the SANNC was born—later renamed the African National Congress (ANC).
In West Africa, nearly 15,000 freed and freeborn African Americans—joined by 3,200 Afro-Caribbeans—returned to Liberia after the upheavals preceding the American Civil War. Over time, they became the Americo-Liberians. Modelling their politics on America’s Whigs and later Republicans, they formed the True Whig Party in 1869. It dominated Liberia until 1980, when 31-year-old Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and his faction in the Armed Forces of Liberia violently toppled President William Tolbert.
The history of Africa’s revolutions—both independence and post-independence—is a history of the young rising against autocratic, corrupt, or complacent establishments.
Long before Captain Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso saw another pragmatic young officer: Captain Thomas Sankara. At just 33, he seized power after a bloodless coup against the French-backed regime of Jean-Baptiste Philippe Ouédraogo. Like Mobutu, he renamed the nation—Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, the land of upright people. But unlike Mobutu, Sankara did not plunder his country. Under his brief leadership, Burkina Faso transformed from food importer to exporter, and literacy rose to an unprecedented 97%.
In February 1981, a 35-year-old Yoweri Museveni left Matthew Rukikaire’s home in Makindye with nearly 40 young men—and an even younger stowaway, Andrew Kangaho—heading toward the Luweero Triangle. From those forests, they launched a protracted people’s war against Milton Obote’s corrupt and brutal regime.
Thousands of miles away, Kenya was wrestling with transition after the death of Jomo Kenyatta. Its comparatively “old” new leader, Daniel arap Moi at 53, soon faced an attempted coup in 1982. His response was swift and severe: Kenya became a one-party state, and the repression of opponents, real or imagined, became routine.
Clearly, Africa’s political history has always been shaped—and shaken—by its youth.
So why do our aging leaders, now clinging to power well into their seventies and eighties, forget this simple, unforgiving truth?
In a twist worthy of an absurdist playwright, today’s incumbents—many of whom once rode into office on youthful energy—now behave as though time stopped the moment they took the oath. The same men who once denounced gerontocracy have become its most enthusiastic practitioners. They recite democracy’s vocabulary while quietly editing its grammar. Electoral commissions grow older with them; constitutions stretch like elastic; term limits dissolve under the alibi of “national interest”; and entire nations are told, with a straight face, that no one else is qualified to lead 45 million people.
This desperate clinging to power does more than mock the history that elevated them—it destabilizes institutions, frustrates the young, and turns the continent into a pressure cooker where the next explosion is not a question of if, but when.
The lesson should be obvious, yet Africa’s political class insists on relearning it the hard way: when leaders outstay their usefulness, the means of change inevitably shift from the ballot to the street, and from the street to the barracks. History has never been subtle on this point. When peaceful avenues are blocked, people—especially the young—create new ones, sometimes through leaders they did not elect and institutions they do not trust.
This is the continent’s most dangerous fault line: governments that refuse to renew themselves while presiding over populations that are overwhelmingly young, impatient, underemployed, and increasingly connected to global currents of defiance. In such conditions, repression becomes tinder, and any spark—stolen elections, police brutality, rising prices, a viral video—can ignite a national reckoning.
Africa stands today where history has deposited it many times before: at the intersection of possibility and peril.
The circumstances confronting us—foreign interference, internal contradictions, ideological disorientation, and leaders who fear change more than failure—are not new. What is new is the generation confronting them: younger, louder, more skeptical, and far less willing to inherit their parents’ political fatigue. If our leaders continue to ignore the lessons of our own history, they may soon be reminded—by the very youths they once were—that power on this continent has never been permanent, and those who forget this lesson do so at their peril.
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By Andrew “Pi” Besi | On X: @BesiAndrew
