Contracts in ashes: 2025, Africa’s year of betrayal of its people

By Wellington Muzengeza | Jan 13, 2026 | 11 Min read

2025 will not be remembered as the year of renewal, but as a year of broken contracts when Africa’s political elite shredded the covenant between citizens and leadership, replacing the promise of dignity with the audacity of repression.

What should have been a season of democratic affirmation became a theatre of betrayal.

Across capitals and townships, elections were reduced to hollow rituals, staged performances where incumbents entrenched themselves behind the machinery of the State, opposition voices were systematically silenced, and the youth, the rightful heirs of liberation, were met not with ballots but bullets.

The covenant of trust was torn apart in full view of the people, promises of accountability dissolved into fraud, pledges of renewal collapsed into stagnation and the dream of generational legitimacy was mocked by the arrogance of power.

2025 stands as a continental indictment, a year when the ruling class chose survival over service, coercion over consent and repression over renewal. It is the year when Africa’s leaders betrayed their own children, proving that longevity without legacy is nothing but treason against the future.

Incumbent dominance

From Dar es Salaam to Yaoundé, the story of 2025 was not one of democratic competition but of incumbent imposition. Ruling parties, armed with the full weight of State infrastructure, turned elections into coronations. Ballot boxes became props in a theatre of inevitability, where the outcome was scripted long before the first vote was cast.

Opposition movements, starved of resources and suffocated by repression, were not challengers but sacrificial lambs paraded to legitimise the charade.

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The incumbents did not compete; they dictated. They did not persuade; they coerced. Citizens were not courted as sovereign participants but treated as subjects to be managed, manipulated and subdued.

Roadsides told the tale, posters of the ruling elite plastered across cities and villages, while opposition imagery vanished under the weight of censorship and intimidation.

The ritual of elections, stripped of contestation, became a grotesque parody of democracy and a covenant broken in broad daylight, a contract shredded before the eyes of the people.

This is the anatomy of incumbent dominance in Africa today, where power is yielded without consent, longevity without legitimacy and governance without accountability. It is the audacity of rulers who mistake survival for service, coercion for consent and repression for renewal.

On October 29, 2025, President Samia Suluhu Hassan stood before the nation and declared victory in Tanzania, but the announcement was less a celebration of democracy than a coronation of fraud. The election was condemned across the continent and beyond as opposition leader Tundu Lissu was imprisoned, contenders were disqualified and violent protests erupted in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, and Arusha.

I recall vividly how my family and I were stranded in Mombasa in November 2025, unable to travel to Dar es Salaam in the aftermath of the disputed polls. When we finally crossed the Lunga Lunga border and drove through Kibiboni, Mpirani and Mheza, the roadside told its own story, only Mama Samia’s posters lined the route, a visual monopoly that spoke louder than any ballot. The audacity was monumental; she had pitted herself against no one, staging a performance of inevitability rather than an election of choice.

Hundreds of protesters were gunned down, their blood staining the streets as testimony to a broken covenant.

The European Union responded by blocking €156 million in funding and Western capitals framed this as “accountability.” Yet the truth is harsher and Tanzania has joined the dark fraternity of African States condemned to sanctions, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon, and Rwanda.

This is not a coincidence, but a pattern of contested elections, violent repression, authoritarian populism, followed inevitably by Western punishment. Tanzania’s tragedy is, therefore, not a domestic hiccup but a pan African warning that the social contract between citizens and leadership has been shredded, and the cost is continental.

Just weeks earlier, on October 12, 2025, Paul Biya, already the world’s oldest leader, was re-elected in Cameroon amid repression and manipulation. The ruling elite there resembles a political mausoleum, populated by men whose ages read like epitaphs: Marcel Niat Njifenji (91), Cavaye Yeguie Djibril (85), Rene Claude Meka (86), Atangana Clement (84), Daniel Mekobe Sone (79) and Laurent Esso (83). This cohort has presided over stagnation, paralysis and decay. Their continued presence is not wisdom; it is a denial of renewal. In a country where 41% of the population is under 14, the future is being held hostage by a dying elite. Cameroon is a gerontocracy masquerading as democracy, a nation where longevity has become a grotesque substitute for legitimacy.

The same betrayal echoed across Gabon, Guinea and Guinea Bissau, where elections were orchestrated to reinforce authoritarian tendencies. In Malawi and Seychelles, opposition parties raised transparency concerns, their voices drowned by the machinery of incumbency. In Togo, elections were postponed and manipulated, while in the Central African Republic, Faustin Archange Touadéra abolished term limits to extend his tenure, mocking the very idea of constitutional order. Egypt, too, maintained its ruling establishment’s dominance, marginalising opposition and reducing electoral participation to a ritual without renewal.

Everywhere, the contract was broken. Citizens were promised renewal but delivered exclusion. The ballot became a weapon of betrayal, the covenant of trust torn apart in broad daylight. 2025 was not the year of democracy’s triumph; instead, it was the year of democracy’s parody, a year when Africa’s rulers chose survival over service, coercion over consent and repression over renewal.

The generational vanguard

In 2025, the streets of Africa became classrooms of defiance and the teachers were its youth. From Tanzania to Cameroon and across other contested landscapes, young voters refused to accept the parody of democracy handed down to them. They marched, they chanted, they occupied spaces that regimes had long claimed as their own. Their courage was met with tear gas, batons and bullets, yet their defiance was not extinguished; it was amplified. Each protest was more than a rejection of fraudulent results and it was a declaration that the children of independence will no longer inherit decay.

The youth are no longer spectators in the theatre of betrayal as they have become the vanguard and the restless generation that refuses to be pacified by slogans of liberation without legacy. Their bodies became barricades, their voices became weapons, their presence became prophecy. In Dar es Salaam, in Yaoundé, and in countless unnamed urban areas, the young stood as custodians of renewal, demanding that ballots mean more than coronations and that leadership be more than longevity.

This generational awakening is not episodic; it is continental as it signals the birth of a new covenant, forged in the trenches of protests and carried forward through digital networks, diaspora solidarity and township economies. The youth are not waiting to be invited into history; instead, they are writing it with their courage, their sacrifice and their refusal to be silenced.

Ritual without renewal

2025 will be remembered as the year when democracy across Africa was stripped of its soul and reduced to a hollow ritual. What should have been moments of renewal became ceremonies of regression, staged spectacles where ballots were cast but legitimacy was absent. Elections, once imagined as contracts between citizens and leadership, were transformed into instruments of betrayal, contracts without legitimacy, promises without delivery, rituals without renewal. Authoritarian resilience revealed itself not as accidental but as deliberate, with incumbents fortifying their grip on power, institutions bent under the weight of manipulation and civic space shrank into silence.

Across the continent, citizens demanded accountability, but their voices were drowned out by the machinery of repression. The ballot box became a coffin for hope, the ink on the voter’s finger a symbol of futility rather than empowerment. Africa regressed, not because its people lacked courage, but because its rulers lacked conscience, as has become the norm.

The continent’s democratic experiment, as usual, was mocked by the arrogant and incorrigible ruling elites who mistook longevity for legitimacy and coercion for consent.

This regression is not episodic; it is systemic. It is the anatomy of a broken covenant, repeated from Dar es Salaam to Yaoundé, from Harare to Abuja. 2025 underscored that authoritarianism in Africa does not collapse under the weight of elections; it thrives on them, feeding off the rituals of democracy while denying its renewal.

The people marched, protested and resisted, but the ruling class responded with bullets, bans, and betrayals.

The year stands as a continental indictment as democracy was performed, but never practised; promised, but never delivered; invoked, but never honoured.

Broken contracts everywhere

Beyond the ballot box, 2025 revealed that Africa’s broken contracts were not confined to elections; they stretched across peace deals, governance structures and the very legitimacy of States.

The so-called Congo-Rwanda peace accord, brokered by Donald Trump and hailed in Western capitals as a triumph of diplomacy, was exposed almost immediately as a farce.

It was a contract broken before the ink had dried, a hollow performance of reconciliation that ignored the lived realities of citizens trapped in endless cycles of violence. What was presented as “peace” was in fact a cynical transaction, a betrayal dressed up as progress.

In Zimbabwe, the masquerade continued under the yoke of a pseudo-military State. Generals traded fatigues for suits, but governance remained unchanged. Reform was an illusion, a carefully choreographed deception designed to pacify citizens while preserving the same authoritarian machinery. The promise of people-centred leadership collapsed into dynastic politics and coercion. Zimbabwe’s rulers proved once again that longevity without legacy is treason against the future.

Nigeria, Africa’s largest democracy, revealed its own broken covenant through a security emergency that laid bare a crisis of legitimacy. Ordinary Nigerians were shortchanged, betrayed by the elite who demanded loyalty while offering insecurity, corruption and exclusion in return. The State failed to protect its people, yet insisted on their obedience. The ink on the ballot became meaningless when the streets were stained with fear and across the continent, coups were sanitised, normalised, even romanticised. From Guinea-Bissau to Mali, military men hungry for power ratified their ambitions under the guise of “restoring order”. Kagame’s tasteless distinction between “good coups” and “bad coups” gave rhetorical cover to civil disobedience by soldiers who mistook coercion for legitimacy. But coups are not renewal; they are rupture. They are the violent shredding of the civic contract, proof that Africa’s elite, civilian and military alike, have chosen survival over service, coercion over consent, repression over renewal.

Thus, 2025 was not simply the year of fraudulent elections; it was the year of broken contracts everywhere. Peace was betrayed, reform was mocked, security was denied and coups were ratified. The covenant between Africa’s rulers and its citizens was torn apart in every arena, leaving behind a continent where promises dissolved into betrayal and where the future was held hostage by the elite who mistook power for legitimacy.

From broken contracts to generational renewal

If 2025 was diagnosis, then 2026 must be prescription. The lesson is unmistakable: longevity without legacy is betrayal.

Africa cannot afford another year of broken contracts, another cycle of fraudulent elections and hollow promises.

What is required now is the inauguration of a new political covenant, one grounded in accountability, renewal and generational legitimacy. The continent must move beyond the rituals of betrayal and embrace the architecture of renewal.

This renewal begins with coalition politics as liberation. Where presidencies are locked by incumbents who mistake survival for service, Parliaments must be seized as the new battleground.

Coalition building is not compromised; it is resistance. It is the strategy by which fractured opposition movements can transform themselves into instruments of relevance, reclaiming legislative power as the people’s shield against authoritarian dominance.

It continues in the diaspora trenches as frontlines. Exile is no longer escape; it is engagement.

Social media must be weaponised to win hearts and minds, remittances must be mobilised as instruments of solidarity and diaspora networks must be harnessed as custodians of renewal.

The trenches of exile are not margins; they are the new epicentres of Africa’s democratic struggle.

At the heart of this covenant lies youth mobilisation as a vanguard. The children of independence must refuse to inherit decay.

New voters must be registered in their millions, urban women must be re engaged as decisive constituencies and township economies must be elevated from survivalist margins to engines of national renewal. The youth are not spectators; they are the vanguard, the restless generation that will transform ballots into barricades of legitimacy.

Finally, renewal must be shielded by pan-African solidarity. Fragmented struggles will be defeated; continental unity will prevail. Renewal cannot be national alone; it must be continental, a shared covenant that binds Dar es Salaam to Yaoundé, Harare to Abuja, Kigali to Kinshasa. Africa’s future will not be secured by isolated victories but by collective resistance, by a solidarity that refuses to be divided by borders or betrayed by the elite.

Thus, if 2025 was the year of broken contracts, 2026 must be the year of generational renewal. The covenant must be rewritten, not in the language of betrayal but in the grammar of accountability, dignity and legitimacy. The children of independence must rise to claim their inheritance, refusing to be dismissed, refusing to be ignored, refusing to be denied.

Rallying cry

2025 was the year Africa confronted its own decay, staring into the mirror of broken promises and stalled revolutions, but 2026 must be the year we refuse to inherit stagnation. The children of independence will no longer sit in the bleachers of history, watching others squander our future. We will step onto the field, reclaim the unfinished promise of liberation and translate it to a modern, inclusive republic that belongs to all.

We are the generation that will not be silenced. We are too African to be dismissed, too relevant to be ignored, too generational to be denied.

This is not a plea; it is a declaration. The youth of this continent must rise as custodians of renewal, architects of dignity and defenders of justice. We must organise, mobilise and demand accountability from those who mistake power for permanence. We must build economies that serve people, not the elite; cities that nurture citizens, not exclude them; and democracies that breathe with the rhythm of our diverse voices.

The time for spectatorship is over and the time for inheritance without agency is dead. The torch of liberation is in our hands and we will carry it forward, not as a relic of the past, but as the fire of a new African dawn. The world must be told without ambiguity that Africa’s youth are not merely awake, they are alert, armed with clarity and unwilling to be pacified. Awake to possibility, awake to responsibility, awake to destiny. This generation is no longer content to be footnotes in the chronicles of decay, so it stands as the decisive force that will dismantle stagnation and re-script the continent’s future.

2026 is not a year to be endured; it is a rupture, a break with the paralysis of inherited failure. It is the year stagnation is buried, the year renewal is forced into being, the year history is compelled to begin again under the stewardship of those who refuse denial.

The dawn does not wait for permission. It is seized and Africa’s youth should seize it.