As has become usual in South Africa, youth, under the pretext of protesting the jailing of the former president, Jacob Zuma, for contempt of court, unleashed another round of looting and violence in the province of KwaZulu-Natal and Guateng, the country’s chief industrial and financial metropolis. As at the last count, over 200 people have been killed and more than 1000 shops and businesses have been looted and destroyed.
At the root of the constant violence and xenophobic attacks in South Africa and the escalating violence and crime rate in Nigeria is the failure of leadership and inability to integrate an increasingly marginalised and angry youth population into mainstream society. It is also telling that the effects of this failure are being felt in the two largest economies in Africa.
In South Africa, although the African National Congress (ANC) inherited a badly divided and unequal society, it also inherited a fairly developed economy and capable state. And it is based on that platform that many were optimistic that black majority rule will translate into jobs, education and land reparations for the largely black population. It helped greatly that the ANC under the leadership of Nelson Mandela adopted an ambitious national identity project of a multiracial Rainbow Nation that should unite the country and assure prosperity for all its citizens.
Rather than act to translate its control of government into jobs and education for its people, the ANC bigwigs were content to just inherit the privileges bequeathed by the apartheid state
Sadly, however, that task has derailed and the ANC had damaged its moral and political authority through various corruption scandals and sheer incompetence. Today, South Africa remains the country with the highest rate of inequality in the world. Unemployment stands at 32.6 percent with youth unemployment (ages between 15 and 24 years) at a world-record of 63 percent. The rate of crime and murder is so high that South African is being referred to as the murder and rape capital of the world.
Rather than act to translate its control of government into jobs and education for its people, the ANC bigwigs were content to just inherit the privileges bequeathed by the apartheid state, empowering just themselves and their families and cronies. Under the scandal-prone tenure of the former president, Jacob Zuma, the term ‘state-capture’ was even added to the political lexicon of South Africa to describe a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage. Coupled with an erratic policing system that victimizes and is overly violent, you are sure to end up with a very angry and disillusioned youth population waiting to unleash violence at the slightest excuse.
The case of Nigeria isn’t any better. It is a country noted for its unusually high level of corruption, lawlessness, impunity and depravity that has never been seen before in governance, aided, no doubt, by the free money coming from oil. Of course, this has consequences for the economy and the well-being of the society. The economy remained largely underdeveloped, oil-dependent, import-dependent and without the capacity to create the jobs to engage its vast youthful population.
The last six years have been particularly bad. Economic growth has tanked with two recessions and growth far below the population growth. Meanwhile, unemployment rose steadily from 6.1 percent in 2014 to 33 percent (the second highest in the world) with projections that the figure will increase in 2020. Like South Africa, Nigeria also has a prohibitive youth unemployment rate of 53.4%. For a continent with a median age of 19.7 years, (Nigeria’s median age is 18.1 years), this is a tragedy beyond description.
So, both the South African and Nigerian youth remain on the margins of their societies, incapable of playing any meaningful role in the political, economic, social and cultural processes of the society and becoming what a scholar once describes as the “lost generation”; a disempowered, stunted, and now bitter youth with fewer access to the means of becoming adults and their ‘youth’ at “risk of becoming indefinitely prolonged”.
Faced with these challenges, both political leaders in South Africa and Nigeria have adopted scapegoatism as a policy to deflect from their failure to deliver. While in Nigeria, the past administrations and political oppositions are to blame, in South Africa, it is foreign nationals. Through a skilful process of projection by the political leadership, black South Africans have now come to see foreign nationals (black Africans) as the reason for their socioeconomic woes including poverty, unemployment, poor service delivery, lack of business space and opportunities, crime, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, and even deadly diseases such as HIV/AIDS. This perception is even stronger among the majority of citizens living in poor townships and informal settlements where they meet and fiercely compete with equally poor African immigrants for scarce resources and opportunities.
In Nigeria, youth restiveness takes the form of youth violence and crime. While crimes like armed robbery and kidnapping have become staples in almost all parts of the country, others – youth and adults trapped in the vortex of youthness are appropriating the space of youth as a means of accumulation and self-expression. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, for instance, where violent insurgency is shaped by the politics of extraction and rent seeking, remaining a ‘youth’ even when one is above fifty (50) years of age is essential to remaining relevant as violent youth groups have supplanted local or community elders as real sources of power in the oil producing communities.”
In the north, while Boko Haram and the Islamic State franchises in Nigeria are mainly ideological, they have also not failed to cash in on kidnapping as a means of raising funds to further their insurgency. Currently, state governors in Nigeria’s northwest besieged by bandits and cattle rustlers are busy negotiating and dolling out huge amounts of money to the gangs for some period of peace and quiet as the Nigerian state has failed to arrest the situation.
It is not surprising therefore that on the slightest prodding, illiterate youth with no knowledge of happenings in South Africa descended on businesses, looting and destroying properties in the name of protesting the imprisonment of the corrupt and morally bankrupt Zuma.
If we are not to see a fulfillment of Rebert Kaplans’s “coming anarchy” as the way of the future for Africa, its leaders must rise up to the occasion and begin to grow their economies and create jobs for their peoples. Scapegoatism can only work for a while, but ultimately, reality will catch up on all of us sooner than we think.
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