Revolutionaries Then, Repressors Now: Africa’s Generational Trap

On December 13, during a UBC Live radio talk show aimed at addressing national issues, President Yoweri Museveni turned his attention to Uganda’s youth. “You Gen Z, what have you done so far?” he asked. “When I was 26, we started the FRONASA movement to liberate this country. But for you Gen Z, all I hear is ‘vibe, vibe.’ What is your vibe doing for the country?”

At first glance, the comment seems like a critique of youth disengagement. But given Africa’s current political climate, it is a far sharper jab. By invoking FRONASA, the armed movement he led in his twenties, Museveni defines what he considers legitimate political action, while also acknowledging — whether intentionally or not — that his government has become unpopular enough to make revolt conceivable, even as he has spent decades dismantling the avenues through which it might occur.

FRONASA emerged in the early 1970s as a militant, left-leaning group of Ugandan intellectuals responding to the brutality of Idi Amin’s regime. Alongside other rebel movements and with Tanzanian military support, it played a decisive role in Amin’s overthrow in 1979. Amin’s rule had been marked by mass killings, torture by secret police, ethnic purges, and economic collapse, with hundreds of thousands dead and countless others forced into exile. The groups that helped bring his government down were celebrated as liberators, and rightly so.

Yet the lessons Museveni draws from that history are selective. The political environment that produced FRONASA no longer exists. Today’s Ugandan youth confront a government that has criminalized protest, broken up assemblies with force, detained opposition figures, harassed journalists, and monitored online spaces. Even speech is subject to surveillance and punishment. The conditions that once made mobilisation possible have been methodically eliminated.

This erosion of rights is striking because it mirrors the abuses Museveni once fought against. In 2024, the United States removed Uganda from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, citing gross human rights violations. Both the US and UK have sanctioned senior Ugandan officials over corruption and serious abuses. Reports of excessive force, arbitrary arrests, restrictions on expression and assembly, and the stripping of LGBTQI and refugee rights are no longer exceptional — they are structural.

Against this backdrop, youth apathy is often misrepresented as laziness or moral failure. In reality, it is a rational response to repeated suppression. Young people have witnessed manipulated elections, protests met with violence, and promises of accountability go unfulfilled. Participation has repeatedly become a liability, rather than a right. Disengagement is not the absence of civic concern; it is a strategy for survival in countries where political participation is heavily policed.

What makes Museveni’s remark particularly troubling is the contradiction it exposes. The state shuts down protest in all forms — from street demonstrations to digital activism — and then ridicules young people for their caution. The contempt is systemic: the youth are denied avenues for action, and then blamed for not acting. This is not a failure of imagination or energy; it is a deliberate narrowing of political space.

This pattern is repeated across the continent. Many African leaders who now posture as elders of the state were once activists themselves. Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu built his political identity on the pro-democracy struggle following Sani Abacha’s dissolution of the Senate in 1993. Yet his administration has treated youth mobilisation and political dissent with suspicion. In 2018, then-President Muhammadu Buhari’s claim that young Nigerians “do nothing” entrenched a narrative of youth as burdens rather than stakeholders. When young people mobilised in 2020 for #EndSARS, demanding an end to police brutality and corruption, the response was repression: protesters were attacked, journalists arrested, and civic space further constrained.

Similar dynamics exist in Tanzania, Cameroon, and elsewhere, where leaders who once opposed authoritarianism now govern through its tools. Revolutionary history is invoked to assert authority and legitimacy, while contemporary dissent is policed, delegitimized, and punished. Peaceful protests, cultural expression, and online organising are treated as threats.

Museveni’s question, then, is not a genuine call for civic engagement but a provocation. It celebrates a past defined by rebellion while enforcing a present designed to prevent it. Young people are scolded for disengaging from systems that have repeatedly demonstrated that participation carries risk without reward.

The crisis is not a lack of seriousness or political participation among young people. It is the crisis of leadership that demands engagement while punishing it, that romanticizes resistance while extinguishing every possible form of it today.