FRICA is the world’s youngest continent, and has the potential to realise the economic
benefits experienced previously in other regions and countries that have
undergone similar demographic shifts.
A surge in youth population
leads most nations in one of two directions: Economic boom or social
bust. Policy makers have argued for the urgency to create structures to
give opportunity to the
rapidly growing numbers of young people, without which the region risks
social
unrest, conflict and instability.
The relationship
between large pools of idle, disaffected young men and a rise in conflict is
often presented as an obvious, and inevitable risk – but research backs these
sentiments.
A study from
Population Action International reveals that between 1970 and 2007, 80% of all
new civil conflicts occurred in countries with at least 60% of the population
younger than age 30.
PAI’s findings are
reinforced by empirical analysis by Henrik Urdal at the International Peace
Research Institute, who found that even after controlling for level of
development, regime type, total population size and past outbreaks of conflict,
countries with a large “youth bulge” were 150% more likely than those with more
balanced age structures to experience civil conflict in the last half of the 20th
century.
The effect is
particularly strong for countries with ongoing high fertility rates, as in much
of Africa. While the relationship between age structure and instability is not
one of simple cause and effect, the pattern is consistent.
Emerging trends
Looking at
historical data from the UN Population Division on median ages in various African countries from 1950, a number
of trends emerge.
The most significant
is that when a country reaches its lowest recorded median age – often between
age 15 and 18 – is the time when a war or rebellion is most likely to break
out.
In Eastern Africa for
example, Rwanda had its youngest median age recorded in 1990, when half the
population aged below 15.1. That period coincided with widespread social unrest
and an insurgency, culminating in the genocide of 1994.
Burundi’s youngest
median age was recorded in 1995, at 15.3. That was in the second year of a
civil war that would last 12 years, only formally ending in 2005.
Eritrea’s youngest
time was around 1995, two years after the end of a bitter 30-year war of
independence from Ethiopia. It should have been a time for rebuilding and
forging a way forward for the nascent country, but Eritrea soon plunged again
into war, first with Yemen and then with its old adversary, Ethiopia over a border strip.
Due to a higher
population density and relatively more developed institutions, West and North Africa has tended to reach this peak earlier than
East Africa, but the trend remains the same.
Liberia was youngest
in 1985 when half its population was younger than 17.3 years. In that decade,
the overthrow and execution of President William Tolbert in 1980 by Sergeant
Samuel Doe – aged just 29 – led to spiraling social unrest.
By the late 1980s,
arbitrary rule and economic collapse culminated in civil war when Charles
Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) militia overran much of the
countryside, entering the capital in 1990. The war ended up lasting 13 years,
until Taylor’s stepping down as president in 2003.
The same could be
said of Sierra Leone, which was youngest in 1990, with a median age of 17.5. In
1991, former army corporal Foday Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front
(RUF) begun a campaign against President Joseph Saidu Momoh, capturing towns on
border with Liberia, sparking off a 10-year civil war.
Sudan was youngest
in 1980 with a median age of 16.5 years. In three years, a civil war with the
south would break out, and end up lasting 22 years.
Algeria reached its
youngest median age in the early 1960s, just at the tail end of a long and
brutal war of independence from France. Zimbabwe, too, was youngest in 1980, at
15.5, just as it was winning independence after a long guerilla struggle.
Restive populations - even in France
Even relatively
peaceful countries have seen their most unstable and repressive eras coincide
with a youth bulge, as governments try to tighten the reigns in the face of a young,
restive population.
Kenya was the
youngest country not just in Africa, but also in the world, between 1980 and
1985, when 50% of the population was younger than 15. The country faced its
first – and only, so far – attempted coup in 1982, and the rest of that decade
was characterised by widespread political repression, a contraction of civil
liberties, targeting and harassment of dissidents.
Ghana too, was at
its most unstable in the 1970s, when coups and counter-coups were the modus
operandi of politics in the country – Kofi Busia was ousted as president in
1972 by Colonel Ignatius Acheampong, then in 1978 Acheampong was forced to
resign and General Frederick Akuffo took over, and he was in turn deposed in a
coup led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings in 1979. It also was youngest
around that time, with a median age of 16.9 in 1975.
South Africa’s case
is slightly different, because the extremely heavy-hand of the apartheid state
was able to forcefully put a lid on restive youth, at least for a number of
years.
The country was youngest
in 1970 when the median age was 18.8, and it was high school students who took
to the streets on 16th June 1976 to protest the introduction of
Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in school, the start of the Soweto
uprising.
It would take nearly
another 20 years for the apartheid edifice to come down, but the increasing
frustration of those high school students who grew up to be young men and women
in the next few years with no hope and no prospects meant that the struggle
turned increasingly violent and desperate in the 1980s.
Scholars have even seen a link between youth and revolution in eighteenth-century France, a spike in
population boosted demand for food, which in turn drove up inflation, reduced
the purchasing power of most citizens, and sparked social unrest.
To
some extent,
others say the rise of fascism in Europe, and the two World Wars were
due to a pool of young people, particularly in the Balkans around 1914.
Others even suggest Japan’s invasion
of China in the 1930s can be partially explained by its large number of youth,
while others attribute Marxist insurrections in Latin America during the 1970s
and 1980s to the swelling population of the region’s unemployed youth
(guerilla-related violence quelled as the number of young people declined).
While countries with
youthful populations may achieve democracy, they are less likely to sustain it
until their age structures become more balanced.
Still, demographers
are quick to stress that youth bulges do not solely explain these civil
conflicts—corruption, ethno-religious tensions, poverty, and poor political
institutions also play contributing roles—but nor do they rule out as
coincidence the tendency toward social unrest among states with large youth
populations.
Angola and Somalia…are getting younger!
Today, most of
Africa is getting slightly older now, having reached their youngest points a
few years or decades earlier. But there are a few exceptions, and these are
countries that need to be on a “revolution watch-list”.
Angola is one of the
few countries in Africa that is actually getting younger; in 2010, its median
age was 16.0, the youngest that the UN Population Division has recorded so far.
Uganda, too, seems
to be hovering at a median age of about 15 years since 1995.
The most worrying,
though, is Somalia, because it is getting younger in an environment of
entrenched instability, porous borders, easy access to weapons and religious
extremism. The median age was 16.1 years in 2010, compared to 17.5 years when
its central government collapsed in 1991.
Sociologists say the
solution is to create jobs for the youth, broaden access to family planning,
and improve child survival – which reduces the need for young couples to have
many children as some may not survive infancy.
But there is a
darker proposal – do nothing. German sociologist and economist Gunnar
Heinsohn
observes, that using the violence that plagued Latin America as an
example, youth-bulge-related bloodshed often burns itself out once the
youths grow
up or kill off one another. In a few decades, we might find that Africa
has
turned a corner on its conflict-ridden history.
But it may cost us
many lives along the way – and the chance to reap from the demographic dividend
that “Africa Rising” affords us.
THE leaders of Djibouti and Ethiopia will oversee the completion of a
railway linking their two capitals on Thursday, with the ambition that
the link might eventually extend across the continent to West Africa.
