Chapter 7
The Generation That Cannot Wait
The Generation That Cannot Wait
“Patience is the virtue of those whose time has not yet run out.
The young of Africa are no longer in that category.”
There is a particular silence that falls over an African town when its young people have started leaving in numbers.
It is not the silence of empty streets — the streets are not empty. It is, rather, the silence of delayed weddings. The silence of unfinished houses. The silence of grandmothers who have stopped expecting grandchildren. It is the silence of an economic and social system whose continuity is fraying, not all at once, but in the quiet way that load-bearing beams fail before the building visibly leans.
This is the silence of a town whose generation has decided that it cannot wait.
I want to write about this generation directly, because they are the protagonists of the African century and, in many ways, the readers I most hope will find this book. They are, by the demographic structure of the continent, the majority of all Africans alive today. They are roughly between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. They are more urban, more digitally connected, more educated, more multilingual, more transnational, and more impatient than any previous African generation. They are the first African generation to have grown up with the global internet rather than to have encountered it as adults. They are the first African generation to have global cultural fluency from childhood. They are the first African generation whose ambitions are not bounded by the geography of their birth villages or the languages of their mother tongues.
They are also the generation that has, in alarming numbers, decided that the African societies into which they were born cannot deliver, on the timeline of their own lives, the futures they were promised.
This is the single most consequential political fact in Africa today.
I want to be careful about how I describe it. I do not believe this generation is selfish. I do not believe they are ungrateful. I do not believe they are uninterested in the continent. The opposite, in many respects, is true. This generation, taken as a whole, expresses more pan-African sentiment, more engagement with continental issues, more identification with African identity, than the generations immediately before them. The generation that posts on social media in defense of Sudanese refugees, that mobilizes against electoral irregularities in Senegal, that boycotts in protest of fuel subsidies in Nigeria, that builds peer-to-peer financial networks across West Africa — this is a generation that cares. The problem is not the affection. The problem is the timeline.
The current African political class operates on a timeline of decades. The current generation of African youth operates on a timeline of months. The mismatch is, in a strict sense, existential.
A young Nigerian woman in her late twenties, who has finished her university degree and her national service and has spent three years applying for jobs that do not exist, will not wait ten years for an industrial policy to mature. She will, if she has the means, leave. If she does not have the means, she will improvise — through informal trade, through digital freelance work for foreign clients, through online influence, through, in too many cases, dangerous migration attempts. Her improvisation is not a failure of patriotism. It is the rational response of an intelligent person whose adult life is not, in her own assessment, going to fit inside the policy timeline of her national government.
This generation, then, presents African leadership — and African civil society — with a precise demand: deliver visible, near-term improvements in the chain of because, or lose us. They are not asking for everything. They are asking for evidence. Evidence that effort is rewarded. Evidence that talent is recognized. Evidence that the system is, in some measurable sense, building toward them and not against them. They are asking for evidence on a timeline that matches the timeline of their lives.
The good news is that the evidence is producible.
It is producible, in fact, much more rapidly than most political establishments believe. Six months of well-designed reform in a single sector — say, in the regulation and digital licensing of small enterprise registration in a major African capital — can produce visible, near-term improvements in the chain of because for millions of young people. Six months of well-designed reform in vocational training certification, in cross-border mobility for young professionals, in tax-and-permit harmonization for small exporters, in agricultural input subsidies linked to land tenure security, can each, individually, change the calculation that a young person makes when deciding whether to invest in their own country’s future.
The barrier is not the reform’s feasibility. The barrier is the reform’s constituency.
A reform produces benefits for many and costs for few. The few who bear the costs — the rentiers who profit from the current arrangement of regulation, the politicians who profit from the current arrangement of opacity, the cartels who profit from the current arrangement of scarcity — are concentrated, organized, and politically active. The many who would benefit are diffuse, unorganized, and politically inactive. This is the universal asymmetry of reform, and it explains, more than any other single factor, why African reform has been slower than African ambition.
The generation that cannot wait is, in this sense, also the constituency that can change the asymmetry. They are the largest, most digitally organized, most communicatively coordinated generation in African history. If they choose to organize politically — at the ballot box, in civil society, in the streets, in the digital arenas of public deliberation — they have the numerical and tactical capacity to change the political price of reform. They can make it cheaper, for an African leader, to do the right thing than to do the wrong thing. This is the mechanism by which every successful reform movement in human history has eventually succeeded. The American civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement, the South African anti-apartheid movement, the various democratizations of Latin America and Eastern Europe — all of them were, in the end, victories of constituency formation over rentier asymmetry. The African reformers of this decade have the same tool available to them. The question is whether they will pick it up.
I want to address the young African reader directly for the remainder of this chapter, because the rest of the book will speak to a more general audience, and there are sentences I want to say to you, specifically, while I have the chance.
You have been told, by many of the loudest voices around you, that your continent is hopeless. That it is corrupt beyond reform. That its leaders are uniformly self-serving. That its institutions are uniformly broken. That your only viable path to dignity is to leave. I want to tell you, as someone who has spent enough years inside the African political and economic structure to see both its rot and its capacity for repair, that the louder voices are wrong.
They are wrong not because the rot does not exist. The rot is real. The corruption is real. The institutional failures are real. The despair is real and is rational. I will not insult you by pretending otherwise.
They are wrong because the trajectory is not the same as the state. The state of a continent today is the snapshot. The trajectory is the movie. The snapshot of Africa today is, in many dimensions, painful. The trajectory of Africa, if certain alignments hold, is the most extraordinary positive story in the global economy over the next thirty years. There is no other continent with as many young people, as much unexploited land, as much mineral wealth, as much digital adoption, as much cultural export momentum, and as much room to grow. The same conditions that, in your daily lived experience, manifest as frustration are, in the continental aggregate, manifesting as latent capacity. The frustration and the capacity are two sides of the same coin. The frustration becomes destructive if it stays inside you. The capacity becomes generative if it gets organized.
I want to say something more direct. You, who are reading this, are not a victim of African political failure. You are a candidate of African political renewal. This is not a slogan. This is a description of your demographic and historical position. The political institutions of your country need new entrants — not just as voters, but as candidates, as civil servants, as journalists, as judges, as entrepreneurs whose enterprises generate the tax base that funds the institutions, as artists whose work shapes the cultural mood that shapes the electorate, as activists whose organizing changes the political price of reform. You are the recruitment pool. The continent’s institutional renewal cannot happen without you. It will not happen without you. And the most consequential decision you will make in your twenties is whether to make yourself available to that recruitment, or to make yourself unavailable to it by leaving — physically, professionally, or emotionally.
I do not blame anyone who chooses to leave. The right to leave is one of the foundational human rights, and any policy that restricts it is unworthy. I am also not naive about the conditions some of you are facing. There are circumstances under which leaving is the only morally defensible decision — for your safety, for your family, for the survival of your own conscience. I would not, sitting at my desk, presume to lecture anyone in those circumstances.
But I will say this. If you can stay, if it is within the range of your real possibilities, the continent needs you. Not as a sacrifice, but as an investment. The decade from your twenty-fifth year to your thirty-fifth year is the decade in which institutions are built, careers are compounded, networks are formed, reputations are established, and revolutions are organized. If a meaningful proportion of the most talented young Africans deploy that decade inside the continent — even with frustrations, even with disappointments, even with detours — the continent will, by 2040, become something that no honest forecaster today is yet projecting.
If, instead, that decade is deployed elsewhere, the continent will compound the interruption that this book has described.
The choice, in the truest sense, is not Africa’s. The choice is yours.
I want to close with a single image.
A friend of mine, an architect, recently designed a small civic centre in a town in northern Ghana. The building was modest. It contained a library, a computer lab, two classrooms, and a community hall. The total budget was less than the price of a single mid-range European apartment. The building was constructed in eight months, by local builders, using locally produced materials, with the assistance of two young Ghanaian engineers who had returned from postgraduate studies in Britain to manage the project. The building was opened with a small ceremony. There were no foreign dignitaries. There was no international press. There was, however, a small ceremony at which a sixteen-year-old girl was given the first library card. Her name was read aloud. The crowd applauded.
That building will, over the next forty years, produce — by reasonable projection — at least one university student per year, at least one small entrepreneur every three years, and at least one regional civic leader every decade. The cumulative effect of those alumni, compounded across the lives of all the small civic centres that could be built in northern Ghana for the budget of one European apartment, is the African future. It is not built in palaces. It is not negotiated in foreign capitals. It is built, building by building, town by town, library card by library card, by the generation that cannot wait but has finally decided not to give up.
That is the work of your decade.
If you take it on, your grandchildren will read about it in textbooks that have not yet been written.
If you do not, your grandchildren will read about it anyway — in textbooks written, more probably, by the descendants of those who did.
You get to choose which.