Africa is experiencing a resurgence of fearless leadership in the spirit of visionary leaders of the past like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea-Conakry, Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, to name a few. These leaders were known for their unbending stance on Africa and African people.
Now in that tradition, eyes are on Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, 37; Colonel Assimi Goïta of Mali, 41; and General Abdourahamane Tchiani of Niger whose age is listed as 64 or 65.
Under a new regional bloc called the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), these leaders have brought renewed energy around a new Africa centered on self-determination, unbought sovereignty, mutual defense, and a pivot from Western influence and control.
Africa analysts say this leadership, like past stalwarts, was called into existence from the demands of the time. Observers note that there is a youth-driven Pan-African shift growing on the continent.
“Over the years, we’ve looked at the ‘Pan African milieu,’ is what I’d like to call it,” said Moya Mzuri Pambeli, former Central Committee member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), explaining the social undercurrent changing Africa.
“Where’s that energy lie … how is it moving through the diaspora and on the continent?” she said. “When we started to see a movement really start to shift is when we started seeing the activists, the youth on the ground that were protesting and demonstrating,” explained Ms. Pambeli.
African youth protests were about issues of unemployment and lack of opportunity, and the paradox of a resource-rich continent benefiting foreign powers and local minions while the people live in abject poverty. This was the backdrop; several years of seeing Neo-colonialists still making deals with imperialists and colonialists, said Ms. Pambeli.
“And who is suffering is the people, and especially the youth,” she stated. “The youth have been educated, but they’ve got no jobs to work. Their parents suffered and participated (in) independence but they see no benefits from that independence movement,” Ms. Pambeli added.
For example, in countries where France still controlled the industry, the currency and the devaluation of currency, while dominating with a military and economic presence, the people began pushing back, saying, “enough is enough.”
In Africa, the frustrations of injustice accumulated like in America—when Black people and others decided, after the police killing of George Floyd—that they were tired of being killed. And these movements sprang up, in this case, on the African continent.
These movements led to the current leadership in several African nations, one at a time, taking over their countries over the same contradictions of imperialism and colonialism and also still holding sway in post-independent nation states in Africa, explained Ms. Pambeli.
Africa has the youngest population worldwide
According to the African Union, young people are at the very heart of Africa’s development agenda. With over 75% of Africa’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 35, and 453 million Africans aged 15-35, it goes without saying that the development outcomes of Africa’s youth have a significant and lasting effect on the continent’s trajectory.
Ms. Pambeli told The Final Call that the growing dissatisfaction among the youth, along with a heightened consciousness from a Pan African perspective, were drivers contributing to active change and this new crop of leaders.
She noted that, particularly during the global lockdown of COVID-19, there was an uptick in communicating online. Because in-person meetings were paused at the time, there began to be more development of political education sites online and shared throughout the diaspora. This led to more youth participation in Pan African activities.
For the A-APRP that shared political education videos of Kwame Ture, for example, they started seeing the content and other conscious information spread, as well as people starting podcasts throughout Africa.
“We began to see this plethora of Pan African energy coming from the youth and folks having an analysis, you know, talking more about colonialism … Neo-colonialism … imperialism, and being primarily Pan Africanist and anti-imperialist,” said Ms. Pambeli.
There was a groundswell of movement in the raising of consciousness. “And so we saw this positive movement started to happen,” she said.
Netfa Freeman, organizer with Pan-African Community Action, agrees that the emergence of these leaders is a product of the people’s heightened consciousness and struggle.
“They are products of the history and the struggle of the people,” said Mr. Freeman, referring to the African youth movement. “Being like Franz Fanon talked about, recognizing a generational mission,” he added. Fanon was a French West Indian philosopher and Pan Africanist.
Furthermore, although the new leaders came to power by military coups, they were popularly supported by the people and civil society and have been responsive to the peoples’ mandate. In addition, by the leaders forming the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) they have shifted the uneven playing field.
Breaking the yoke of foreign influence
The AES was formed in September 2023 as a regional power bloc consisting of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The three nations are led by military rulers who ousted governments that held strong ties to Western powers, like France and the United States, around security cooperation, military aid, and fighting extremist groups across the Sahel region.
This region stretches from the East to the West coast of Africa. It must be noted that the extremists and a proliferation of weapons were unleashed across Africa after the U.S. and their NATO allies overthrew Libya and assassinated Muammar Gadhafi in 2011.
Fighting extremists was the pretext that the U.S. and France used to maintain their military presence in the Sahel. After failing to put down the extremists, each AES nation severed its military reliance on France, their former colonial power and the U.S., which held a strong military footprint. The alliance signifies a shift in West African geopolitics.
As the AES shifts from engaging the West, it has increasingly turned to alternative partners such as Russia. This realignment reflects the AES’s pursuit of alliances that they perceive as more respectful of their sovereignty and less intrusive in domestic affairs, say observers.
The AES was created to enhance collective security against extremist groups and insurgent threats throughout the Sahel region. Their goals include:
Mutually assist each other in case of external aggression. It exercises an attack on one is considered an attack on all.
Serve as a counterweight to ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), especially after ECOWAS threatened military intervention following the Niger coup in July 2023.
The AES has actively sought to reclaim control over its natural resources from foreign companies, particularly in the mining and energy sectors. Other moves included Niger announcing on April 10 that Hausa replaces French as the official language.
Mali did the same in July 2023, and in December 2023, Burkina Faso amended its constitution to elevate national languages as the official languages. French will be used as a working language. The decision is seen as a move to assert national identity and cultural independence.
On March 19, all three nations as an alliance quit the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF), the Paris-based “Francophone version” of the Commonwealth—bringing together countries connected linguistically by French and cooperation in culture, politics, and development. Each country formally left the OIF, adding it to the list of actions that severed ties with France.
Earlier this year the AES unveiled its flag and introduced its passport that will permit citizens of member states to freely cross borders.
From the energy driven by the youth, hope for Africa has increased with these new leaders. Their posture is the only way to forge the path of controlling their own resources, economies, currency, and industries, where it benefits the people is to kick the colonialists out, observers note.
“That’s what the people fought for,” said Ms. Pambeli. “The milieu began to coagulate into a ferment that really became more progressive, more revolutionary than we could have ever imagined.”
