Nairobi’s Central Business District is where travellers queue up trucks. He was five or six years older, growing up in Nairobi’s Umoja, a city with a lower-middle-class population, and was never allowed to go beyond a certain level. ” It was like the cave, someone getting out and seeing the sun”, he says, comparing his first sight of vehicles roaring along the Waiyaki Approach to Plato’s tale of revolution. This was just the start of what the younger Kenyan calls his “awakening.” He began attending college at a young age in a course of 75 children, where the unknown homework was so high that the teacher was merely a voice emitted from behind a castle of books. He relocated in 2009 with his relatives, who is now in a better position, to a neighborhood where children can leave their bicycles on the road without having to worry that they will be stolen, and where people can keep their dogs on a leash. ” It was a completely frozen setting. The street was tarmacked. Oyange attended the University of Nairobi, where he savored training on ancient Egypt and global relationships, after a charm selling mobile air time. His desire to work as a diplomat was stymied by contacts he lacked, but he accepted a position as a material facilitator for Majorel, a Luxembourg-based offshoring company, sifting through troubling images on the TikTok system, a job that paid about$ 230 per month. He is now 27 and is suing Majorel and TikTok for unfair dismissal and failing to protect his mental wellness. These complaints are fiercely refuted by Majorel and TikTok. One of the many well-educated but frustrated citizens is Mojez Oyange, who shares the tale of how increasing knowledge and opportunities are followed by disappointment. These stories are representative of the lives of millions of young Africans who are growing up in cities that, very frequently, fail to deliver. On a trip around the Kenyan funds, with its buildings, shopping malls and Chinese-built helicopters, he says:” Nairobi has anything. The only thing that’s not here is opportunity “.Africa is the world’s fastest urbanising and youngest continent, with a median age of 19. South of the Sahara, the metropolitan community rose more than twofold from 32mn in 1960 to 458mn in 2020, according to UN Habitat. By 2030, 665mn persons, or 47 per cent of the overall, are expected to be living in cities. By 2050, when one in four people on Earth will become American, a majority will be inhabitants. However, the majority of American cities are not able to keep up. Cover and solutions are limited. Public transportation is disorganized and cheap. Most cities grow outwards more than up-wards, missing out on one of a city’s primary productive engines — connectivity.’ Nairobi has all. The only thing that’s no here is chance,’ says Mojez OyangeAccording to the World Bank, in 2010 only 37 per share of urban residents had access to piped water, downward from 43 per cent in 1990. Some people live in what are euphemistically called “informal towns”, with restricted access to clean water, electricity or spare and sewage disposal. Of Nairobi’s about 4.8mn people, about 2.5mn live in slums. According to Anton Cartwright, an analyst at the American Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, city authorities should preferably be planning for the influx of people by borrowing money to build the needed infrastructure and services, and collecting taxes to cover it. ” That unit does not plug and play in Africa”, he says. People are entering with a lower per capita money, but there isn’t a nearby power there to provide the services or collect the earnings, he claims. What has changed is, however, an “makeshift economy” and “informal spaces” in which people hustle a living in the absence of proper jobs. Generational angst and, in some cases, social movements that are challenging failing officials have been created by the difference between the knowledge and interests of millions of young people like Oyange. In Kenya next month, police shot and killed at least 39 Gen Z anti-government activists. But in the conclusion, William Ruto, the leader, was forced to sack his whole cupboard and slow taxes measures in response to demands from a relatively incoherent, but informed and well organised, youth movement. Leaders in Nigeria, Malawi, Senegal, and most recently Mozambique have been made aware that young, energetic citizens are demanding a new social contract between the governed and the governed following similar protests. According to Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and has observed a similar phenomenon in Tanzania, where he was born, “young people can see just above their heads a corrupt civil order.” ” They are profoundly marginalised. Many of them are relatively well educated, even skilled, but there’s no work”.At least 39 people died in anti-government protests in Nairobi in June 2024© Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty ImagesMinna Salami, a Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish editor of the website MsAfropolitan.com, says cities are rapidly shifting, both physically and socially. ” You are seeing these leaderless, non-hierarchical movements and that’s completely new”, she says. Salami points to the inability of authorities in cities like Lagos, the country’s commercial capital of 21 million people, to keep up with the population growth where” thousands are arriving on a daily basis.” Still, she sees something more positive emerging too. ” When you look at businesses, schools, markets, social hang-outs, they are popping up in very organic ways”, she says. ” It’s chaotic and ungoverned, but it’s a little bit exciting”.Cartwright at the African Centre for Cities also recognises the energy of Africa’s youthful cities. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s commercial capital of 5mn people, he offered a$ 3, 000 prize for solutions to urban problems. The competition was open to all, but he was “deluged” by hundreds of ideas from young people, with the oldest entrant being a 28-year-old. One young man flew blood products to clinics using drones, and another young woman collected eggshells from lunchtime restaurants and extracted calcium to sell for food supplements and for agricultural purposes. Hellena Sailas, a laboratory chemist, was the one who established Arena Recycling Industry, a business that transforms plastic waste from estuaries into paving slabs and bricks. ” I was completely overwhelmed by this youth culture”, says Cartwright. Despite all the deep-seated problems, he says, that makes urban life in Africa buzzy, and ultimately optimistic. ” Unlike in places like London, in African cities, people just know their lives are going to be better than those of their parents”, he says.
Africa n’s cosmopolitan young people are divided because of their obstinate passion.
