Issue 109

Youth, Inequality, and Unrest in the Horn

Last week, Oxfam released a damning report detailing the scale of Kenya's wealth disparity, revealing that just 125 individuals control more wealth than 77% of the population-- 42.6 million people. The report, entitled 'Kenya's Inequality Crisis: The Great Economic Divide,' outlined that since 2015, those living on less than KES 130 a day had risen by 7 million, while the wealthiest 1% had captured nearly 40% of all new wealth created between 2019 and 2023. Such glaring inequalities are self-evident across much of Kenya, with gleaming new highrises jutting up against slums throughout Nairobi. But so too are these patterns of wealth inequalities reflected across the broader Horn of Africa, driving a surge in youth discontent that has bubbled over in Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia. 

In nearly every capital in the Horn today--barring the eviscerated Khartoum-- extreme wealth rubs up against extreme poverty, with rapid urbanisation and the youth bulges producing evermore insecure urban workers with limited social mobility. The political manifestations of this wealth divide are numerous and vary from nation to nation. In Kenya, it has been embodied in widespread protests and demands for fiscal justice, uniting both disillusioned middle-class youth and impoverished peri-urban underclasses. In Somalia, meanwhile, protests and grievances over the government's uprooting of displaced persons on public land this year have been fanned and preyed upon by Al-Shabaab. And so, such predatory, extractive, rent-seeking behaviour from governments is driving a heady cocktail of political foment across the region.

Elements of the broader financial climate are no fault of these elite, with their economies still weathering the painful after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and remaining on the sharp end of global market fluctuations. And with much of the national economies falling into the informal sphere, an inability of African governments to reach or tax their populations has led to cyclical debt and borrowing, trapping them in an unproductive cycle of mild growth and significant busts. Kenya's debt servicing now consumes 68% of tax revenues – double the rate it was in 2017 – while Djibouti's external debt has surged past 70% of GDP, and Ethiopia's ratio has climbed alongside currency devaluation. Even so, those with access to levers of economic change have repeatedly failed to prioritise economic transformation or social mobility, preferring to invest in their personal financial futures.

Much of this narrow band of elite from Uganda to Eritrea to South Sudan is ageing as well, contrasting against their overwhelmingly youthful populations. Africa has the largest youth population of any continent, with almost 60% under 25, and with the working-age population of Sub-Saharan Africa set to expand by over 600 million in the next 25 years. In theory, such an age gap could yield a demographic dividend in which working adults vastly outnumber dependents. But this relies on the conducive political-economic conditions for a labour force to acquire the necessary skills and find productive employment, which currently feels a tall ask in the highly personalised and insecure political economies of Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, and the now-collapsed Sudan. And while none are perhaps as advanced in age as Paul Barthélemy Biya, the 92-year-old Cameroonian president, several are in their 70s, with succession crises looming in the not-too-distant future.

In Ethiopia, between two and three million youth are entering the labour market each year —but with much of the economically productive regions of Oromia, Amhara, and Tigray still riven by conflict and insecurity, there are few opportunities here. Indeed, many of those who have taken up arms with the Fano insurgency in the Amhara region are disenchanted urban youth as well as farmers furious with the lack of fertiliser provision. To the south in Kenya, only a fraction of new entrants-- between 5 and 10%-- secure formal work, while the remainder join an informal sector that absorbs nearly 85% of the labour force. These dynamics further accentuate the migration from the region, with many tens of thousands leaving each nation for Europe and the Gulf, aspiring to send remittances to their families back home.

And while young men and women are increasingly struggling to find steady employment, corruption amongst the national elite has soared-- supercharged by the clandestine financing from the Gulf that sustains these regimes' intricate patron-client networks. Corruption has long been endemic in the political economies and marketplaces of the region, yet infrastructure in Ethiopia and Tanzania was nevertheless produced. Today, though, in Ethiopia, particularly, the transformation of not only elite graft into 'corruption without production', but with active disintegration of the state apparatus, should be of immense concern. On the most extreme end of the spectrum is South Sudan, of course, where Salva Kiir's cabal has stripped the country of much of its worth, consolidating wealth into the hands of a privileged few at the centre. With the country in such painful disarray, it is arguably ripe for revolution, with around 9 million people out of 12.7 million requiring humanitarian assistance this year, yet it stumbles on, with the theatrics of Juba's court continuing apace. Here, the social contract of taxation in exchange for service delivery and political representation has long since collapsed.

But so is the region's inequality reflected spatially as well, with the capitals of Nairobi, Addis, Juba, and Mogadishu all sucking investment to the core. Despite the outsized importance of these capitals, the Horn remains a predominantly rural society — just 27% of its population is urbanised — which has not translated into proportional investment in infrastructure or service delivery. Rapid urbanisation is also being exacerbated by the climate crisis, with devastating droughts and floods displacing whole communities to the peripheries of towns and cities. 

With Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya all supposedly headed to the ballot in 2026/27, these elections will no doubt serve as an acid test of the growing inequalities in each country and the legitimacy of the ruling elite. Rising young populations and the failure of the state to deliver basic services have forged a combustible mix if their grievances are not adequately addressed-- and there is little indication that they will be.

More probable is a circling of the wagons, reaching out to the Gulf for patronage and a securitisation of the state apparatus that will surely accentuate the fracturing of these political settlements. Even so, one might still hope that the Horn's youthful, entrepreneurial populations could be better harnessed, transformed into engines of economic growth and democratic innovation. But for that to happen, there must be genuine political and economic reform; otherwise, this demographic dividend risks becoming a demographic time bomb.

​The Horn Edition Team