Bassirou Faye and PASTEF's victory in Senegal in March marked the stunning, decade-long rise of a leftist party. As Africa's Gen Z protest movements challenge the established order, can the feat be repeated elsewhere?
The number of African countries falling under military rule in recent years has dominated debate about the uncertainty of the future of democracy on the continent, as is the case in other parts of the world. More recently, youth-led protests challenging the status quo on issues of the cost of living, corruption and the debt crisis are gaining popular appeal across the continent. Will this be a repeat of 1990 when street protests from Dakar to Mombasa agitating against autocracy and mismanagement ushered in poitical pluralism?
The burgeoning population of young people in many countries and the failure of existing governance structures to deliver public goods, services and jobs has, almost inevitably, created the conditions for alternative leadership and governance structures that promise to reshape African politics.
Previously fringe political actors have seized the momentum to mobilise the ordinary masses of people to challenge the elites who dominate both the political and economic spaces at the expense of most struggling people.
As neoliberal ideals took hold around the world, African countries, especially those with nascent democracies such as Senegal and Tanzania found themselves grappling with popular pressure for change and a rebirth of the ideals for which their independence was fought. For other countries like South Africa, economic inequality is the fuel of anti-establishment dissent.
The resurgence of left populist ideology in Africa has most prominently been championed by Senegal's Bassirou Diomaye Fay, South Africa's Julius Malema and Zitto Kabwe of Tanzania - the three founders of Africa's youngest Marxist-Leninist parties.
In Senegal, African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (PASTEF), won a 54 percent mandate to govern the country during the landmark March 24, 2024 elections, defeating incumbent President Macky Sall's fronted candidate, Amadou Ba.
For Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, while the May 2024 elections saw the party's popularity drop by 1.5 per cent among South African voters, the subsequent formation of a Government of National Unity between the African National Congress (ANC) and the majority white-led Democratic Alliance, has given the firebrand politician a platform to reinvigorate the opposition party's ideals.
And in Tanzania, Mr Kabwe is optimistic that ACT-Wazalendo party, founded in 2014, will turn the tables on Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the country's ruling party - also its oldest - to win the 2025 General Election in Zanzibar, the semi-autonomous island of the Republic of Tanzania, where the opposition party has its strongest following. This year's local government elections scheduled for October will signal the party's likely performance in the main contest.
2014 was something of a watershed year. As the faux-optimism of the 'Africa Rising' moment faded into the long shadow of the global recession, a new generation of youthful activists was emerging. Amid the wave of global anti-capitalist protests triggered by the global recession, the establishment of these political parties in 2014 came with lofty ideals aimed at reshaping their countries' political futures and championing a fresh pan-Africanist trajectory. They had a similar agenda regarding corruption, the nationalisation of natural resources, and in South Africa's case, the expropriation of the land.
The mixed fortunes of current Senegal Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko's ruling PASTEF on the one hand, and Julius Malema's EFF opposition party on the other, have thrust Tanzania's ACT-Wazalendo into the limelight of the pan-African left. As local government elections approach in October, and the General Election in 2025, whether the party emulates PASTEF to keep its founder's vision alive, or takes a beating that will undermine its political influence in the long run, remains an open question.
While PASTEF is under pressure to deliver on the fundamental change it promised - they are focused on asserting Senegal's sovereignty in economic, monetary, and agricultural matters, amid expectations of the Senegalese people for a reduction in the cost of living, job creation, and renegotiation of fishing agreements with the European Union - Malema is gearing up for a more strategic opposition role to recoup the losses his party suffered. Preoccupied with domestic concerns, voters appeared un-interested in his Borderless Africa campaign, which is likely to be further weakened by the entry into the government of the Democratic Alliance, accused by many South Africans of perpetuating apartheid-throwback white supremacy.
Rise of Radical Left three
With the rise of PASTEF, EFF, and ACT-Wazalendo, their respective founders gained continental prominence due to the major regional and world events that took place between 2008 and 2014. As the world reeled from the turbulence of the global financial crash, the Arab Spring, which precipitated the fall of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, the onset of the Syrian civil war and the democratic false dawns in Tunisia and Egypt, nascent movements south of the Sahara emerged in response to the crisis of the era and also to a longer democratic recession that stretched back to the 1990s.
While EFF emerged after Malema, a former ANC Youth League leader broke with the ruling ANC, ACT-Wazalendo's founder, Zitto Kabwe, had been expelled from the main opposition party, Chadema. In contrast, Sonko emerged from among Senegal's tax bureaucrats, primarily supported by the customs workers to establish an anti-establishment party movement.
In South Africa, the post-Thabo Mbeki period was characterised by a growing scepticism of Nelson Mandela's political settlement with the apartheid regime, which ended white settler minority rule in 1994. Black people felt they had only attained political freedom but remained economically marginalised, leading to the fresh push to claim for economic benefits as well.
Malema's EFF seized the opportunity to front for the restitution of African land that, the party argued, would guarantee the people economic freedom. Malema positioned himself as the champion of black economic empowerment, criticising the ANC's reluctance to redistribute land from the white minority to the Black majority as a deliberate step to empower expectant Black South Africans. The EFF would also benefit from the anti-Jacob Zuma sentiments, as the ANC, subjected to the political consequences of grand corruption and state capture, suffered factional infighting, a plunge in its popularity, and economic hardships that ultimately led to its disastrous showing in the May 2024 elections.
In French-speaking West Africa, countries were advocating for currency sovereignty and an end to la FrançAfrique, the neo-colonial arrangement Paris has long employed in its relations with its former colonies. In Senegal, sentiments against the pre-independence CFA franc gained prominence as citizens railed against French imperialism. Sonko, a former tax collector with support from the tax workers' unions, capitalised on the moment to build a narrative against the French whom he accused of exercising overriding power over the Senegalese economy.
For PASTEF, anti-France resource nationalism and anti-corruption were key factors in helping them win the presidency. The Senegalese and people in other parts of the continent await to see how the party would transform the country. Its performance will have a wider implication on whether the model can work and transform other African countries.
For Tanzania, 2014 marked the height of resource nationalism, with protests over the exploitation of natural resources in southern Tanzania that left several demonstrators dead by police bullets. The military was deployed to quell the deadly protests. In the following months, a $250 million electricity generation scandal led to a flurry of high-level resignations from the government. Mr Kabwe then positioned himself as the public face of the agitation, speaking against grand corruption in government, and championing the public's interest in natural resources' exploitation. When he was eventually expelled from Chadema, he carried the spirit to ACT-Wazalendo which he founded in 2014.
Trajectories
After South Africa's 2014 elections, the EFF secured six percent of the total votes and 25 seats in the National Assembly to establish itself as the first pro-Black opposition party in the country. The party grew its influence in the 2019 elections, raising its share of the votes to 11 percent and the number of MPs to 44. Mr Malema has indicated that despite dropping in performance in the 2024 elections, mostly due to the disruption of the political terrain by former President Jacob Zuma's new MK party, EFF would provide an effective counter-narrative against the Government of National Unity - it brings together the ANC and Democratic Alliance as the dominant parties in the GNU - to regroup and expand the party's core base among Black voters.
Despite initially making itself available to coalition talks with the ANC, EFF recused itself from the GNU, which they termed an "elite pact", in which the EFF interpreted the involvement of DA as contradicting EFF's radical militant economic emancipation movement. In the short term, not being part of the GNU gives Malema a vantage point to continue as the voice of the Black masses who are looking for someone to hold the government to account and speak up about the poor state of the economy and deteriorating provision of social services. The EFF will likely gain from any potential disagreements and even the collapse of the GNU primarily due to opposing economic policies of the DA and ANC. Malema stands to further raise the EFF's long-term standing by offering an alternative voice to the GNU's untested administration and its policies.
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In its first-ever election in 2015, Sonko's party secured one parliamentary seat. In the following elections in 2019, Sonko garnered 16 percent of the total votes to build his momentum, followed by crafting a coalition called "United in Hope" in 2021 which was instrumental in helping the party win council elections in the 2022 polls, in addition to increasing its parliamentary tally to 56 of the 165 house seats.
In Tanzania, Kabwe's party also secured only one seat in Parliament in the 2015 elections, a year after it was formed. But in a surprising turn of events, the top leadership of Zanzibar's long-serving main opposition party, the Civic United Front (CUF), defected to ACT-Wazalendo in 2019, making the young party the largest in the Isles. In 2020, elections in Zanzibar were marred by massive rigging, which saw the party win only five seats in the Zanzibar House of Representatives and none in Mainland Tanzania. The party would later join the Government of National Unity (GNU) in Zanzibar in early 2021, making it the official opposition party.
Changing ideology as a vote-winning strategy?
For ACT-Wazalendo, the shift from a party advocating for resource nationalism to one with a more liberal orientation, appears to have been a tactic to win over the CUF membership and become a political force, especially in Zanzibar. Unlike their colleagues on the mainland, the Isles has for long advocated market liberalism as a means to a thriving economy. They were opposed to policies such as resource nationalisation.
While Kabwe may have in the period raised the status of the party to become a partner in the GNU, the shift in its ideology will likely hurt its influence, as has been witnessed in mainland Tanzania where resource nationalism remains a strong political appeal. In the long term, ACT-Wazalendo risks suffering the same reputational damage as the ruling party.
The test for ACT-Wazalendo will soon be clear as the country embarks on campaigns for local government elections in October to be followed by the General Election a year later. How Kabwe and the governing coalition party's leadership respond to concerns of corruption in government and other economic hardships facing Zanzibaris will determine the level of support and endorsement they get from the people.
Erick Kabendera is a researcher in transitional justice and the International Criminal Court at King's College London.
