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Supporters of coalition parties PDCI (Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire) and PPA-CI (African People's Party of Cote d'Ivoire) march to protest the removal of their leaders names, Tidjane Thiam and Laurent Gbagbo, from the electoral list calling for an inclusive and peaceful election in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, August 9, 2025.
Africa’s age gap: Young nations, old rulers, big problems
Africa is one of the youngest regions on earth, with a median age of just 19.7 in 2020 – more than ten years less than any other continent. Yet several of its most powerful leaders are in their 70s and 80s – and they’re refusing to cede power, despite growing opposition to their rule.
In recent days, thousands have protested in Ivory Coast, after the country’s electoral commission barred opposition leaders from October’s election, in which President Alassane Ouattara, 83, is seeking a fourth term. Challengers were also recently excluded in upcoming elections in Cameroon, paving the way for 92-year-old President Paul Biya to win an eighth seven-year term, and possibly rule until age 100.
The gerontocracy generation. A study of elections during the period 2018-2021 found that, out of 28 African countries that went to the polls, only one – Ethiopia – chose a president or prime minister who was under the age of 50. Nineteen of the 28 winners were over 60, and as of late 2024, eleven were over 70.
They include 82-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, in power for 45 years, and Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo, 79, who has led for 40 years. The second oldest, 83-year-old Nangolo Mbumba of Namibia, did relinquish power in late 2024, only to hand it to a 72-year old successor, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah.
In May 2025, the West African nation of Togo made headlines after President Faure Gnassingbé, 59, rewrote the constitution to give himself a term-limit-free role as president of the country’s council of ministers, leaving the country’s actual president, Jean-Lucien Savi de Tove, as little more than a figurehead. Critics, and protesters in the streets, viewed this as a “constitutional coup” meant to indefinitely extend the Gnassingbé family’s 60-year grip on power.
And looking ahead, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, 73, is already backed by his party for elections slated for 2027, while Liberian President Joseph Boakai, 80, is attempting to complete his reform agenda in a country still recovering from civil war.
What’s the political impact?
Critics say the age gap between voters and leaders is a recipe for unrest, repression, and revolution. They point to examples such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, elected again in 2013 at the age of 89, who was deposed in a coup four years later. What’s more, when long-entrenched leaders approach the end of their reign, intense and sometimes violent succession battles often break out, frequently within presidential families. Simply put, governance can become brittle when leaders never leave.
All of this could complicate the region’s ability to grapple with a range of pressing issues, including militancy, jihadist violence, a wave of coups, and intensifying external competition and meddling.
And there is a further concern: the erosion or abuse of nominally democratic institutions is fueling disillusionment with the idea of democracy itself. Although polling across African countries still show a strong majority in favor of democracy and against one-man rule, that support has flagged in recent years, while acceptance of military rule has crept up. When citizens increasingly equate democracy with gerontocracy, those trends make sense.
Fleeing office workers run from the scene of an active shooter in Midtown Manhattan, Monday, June 28, 2025, in New York City.
Hard Numbers: Shooter kills four in New York skyscraper, Deadly floods in China, Abducted Nigerians killed after ransom payment sent & More
4: A gunman killed four people, including a police officer, at a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper in New York City on Monday. The shooter, identified as Shane Tamura, was armed with an M4 assault rifle when he entered the building, which is home to the headquarters of the National Football League (NFL) and other corporations. Tamura was carrying a note claiming that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy – a degenerative brain disease common among football players – because of the NFL.
38: At least 38 people are dead after days of heavy rains and flooding in Northern China, prompting President Xi Jinping to initiate “all-out” search and rescue efforts on Monday. The extreme weather has also led officials to evacuate 80,000 residents from Beijing, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
35: Nigerian gunmen killed at least 35 hostages despite receiving a ransom payment of 50 million naira ($32,600) for the release of 56 people that they had abducted from a village in northern Nigeria. Mass kidnappings are commonplace in Africa’s most populous country, and there has been a spate of them in the first half of 2025 (read more here).
1: In a bid to better control online information and protect “moral and ethical values”, Kyrgyzstan’s government has decreed that all internet traffic will be handled by one state monopoly. As part of the move, the small Central Asian nation has also banned online “skin flicks” (sorry for the archaic term, readers, but we’ve got spam filters to beat!)
13: After a case that lasted 13 years, a Colombian lower court judge found former President Álvaro Uribe guilty of bribery on Monday, in what was the first major criminal conviction of an ex-leader in Colombia. The conservative Uribe, who led the country from 2002 to 2010, will likely appeal the ruling, meaning the case is far from over.
Members of the Bangladesh Army and the fire service start rescue operations after a Bangladesh Air Force F7 aircraft crashed into a building of Milestone College in Dhaka's Uttara around 1:30 pm on July 21, 2025 in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Hard Numbers: Bangladesh military jet crashes into school, Argentina’s economy contracts again, Texas Republicans get to gerrymandering, & More
31: A Bangladesh Air Force plane crashed onto a school campus in the country’s capital Dhaka on Monday, following a reported mechanical failure, killing at least 31 people. Most of the victims were children. The plane was a Chinese-made fighter jet called the F-7 BGI that aimed to replicate the design of the Russian MiG.
100: Around 100 mostly US and European organizations were compromised in a far-reaching cyber attack campaign targeting Microsoft SharePoint servers over the past few days, including federal and state agencies, universities, and energy companies. While the attacker has yet to be identified, Google has said Chinese-backed hackers were behind at least one of the attacks.
-0.1: Argentina’s economy contracted 0.1% in May, marking the third time this year that it has shrunk. Falling wages and rising unemployment depressed demand, leading to the drop. Although President Javier Milei has won plaudits for bringing down inflation with his “chainsaw” approach to spending, the sputtering economy could hurt him ahead of midterm legislative elections in October.
38: Texas Republicans are moving forward with a plan to redraw the boundaries of the state’s 38 congressional districts in a bid to win more US House seats. This kind of gerrymandering is usually done only in the wake of the decennial Census. The move, pushed by president Trump, comes with both legal and political risks, which may explain why Texas Gov. Greg Abbot (R) was initially reluctant to greenlight the plan.
30%: Nigeria’s GDP in 2024 jumped by 30% after Africa’s most populous nation recalibrated its statistical models Previous GDP calculations omitted the country's digital services industry, pension funds, and the informal labour market, which employs most citizens.
1: School’s out for summer, and the US House is following suit tomorrow night, after Speaker Mike Johnson announced he will shut down the lower chamber one day early. The reason: he didn’t want to put up a vote on whether to release all the files related to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s case.
Nigerian Army soldiers patrol near the scene after a deadly gunmen attack in Yelwata, Benue State, Nigeria, on June 16, 2025.
What’s behind a surge of violence in Africa’s most populous country?
Earlier this month, Nigeria’s human rights agency reported that the country suffered more killings by insurgents and bandits in the first half of 2025 alone than in all of 2024.
That level of violence in Africa’s most populous country – and a major oil producer at that – should raise alarm bells. But experts from the country caution that there are a few ways to look at this data, which has only been kept consistently since 2024 to begin with.
First, the patterns of violence in Nigeria are shifting. For years, the largest threat in the country was the jihadist group Boko Haram and its various offshoots, which terrorized the northern reaches of the country with killings and kidnappings. But Nigeria’s security services have steadily ground them down, according to Amaka Anku, a Nigeria expert at Eurasia Group.
“Boko Haram is pretty much non-existent,” she says. “ISWAP [a local ISIS offshoot] does a few things, but that’s not the majority of where [the violence is coming from].”
So who are the perpetrators?
In fact, much of the recent increase is the result instead of violence in the central states between farmers and herders, as settled cultivators and nomadic cattle shepherds fight over valuable resources of land and water.
“A lot of what’s driven the number up is the killings in Benue state” says Anku, referring to the central Nigerian state where much of this type of violence is concentrated. Of the 606 killings reported in June by the country’s human rights agency, roughly 200 were in Benue alone.
Climate change is one of the underlying factors for the violence. The desertification of once-fertile areas of northern Nigeria has pushed herders south toward the central parts of the country – like Benue – which have seen longer rainy seasons. This has put them in conflict with farmers. There is a sectarian overlay as well: herders are typically Muslim, while farmers are usually Christian.
But there may also be a statistical anomaly in the numbers.
2024 was the first year that this data was kept, and that happened to be the first full calendar year of President Bola Tinubu’s premiership. He won power in part on a promise to rein in violence. To achieve this, the government launched a fresh security crackdown, while some state governments have even explored doing deals directly with criminal groups.
“Sometimes, the government is trying to negotiate with the bandits,” Aliyu Dahiru, a Nigerian journalist who reports for Human Angle, told GZERO. “It will give them money and say, ‘OK, let’s negotiate. You’ll stop attacking this particular location and we are going to stop attacking you.”
There’s just one problem, per Dahiru: there is no single leader of all Nigeria’s violent groups. The government may strike a deal with a head honcho, or the military may even kill one, but more groups will just spring up in their stead, says Dahiru, and the cycle continues.
“While you’re attacking [one] group, another one is getting more sophisticated, attacking more villages,” says Dahiru. “Before you know it, it’s a typical issue in that region.”
As a result, the uptick in 2025 may in fact be a reversion to the mean after a particularly successful year rather than an unprecedented spike.
Will this hurt Tinubu politically? The next election is just over 18 months away, and the most pressing problem for the president right now isn’t security, but rather skyrocketing inflation. Nonetheless, if current trends continue, violence could well become a defining electoral issue again , says Anku, meaning Tinubu will have to confront the problem again very soon.
“It ends up getting a lot more attention closer to an election, because you can whip up a lot of fear over it, right?”
U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson walks back to office, as Republican lawmakers struggle to pass U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping spending and tax bill, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 3, 2025.
What We're Watching: House folds on Trump bill, Beijing lashes out at US-Vietnam deal, Nigerian opposition unites
House holdouts bluff then fold on Trump’s budget bill
The US House is set to pass President Donald Trump’s epic tax-and-spending bill any minute now. Some eleventh hour House Republicans holdouts had signaled that they would oppose the broadly unpopular bill because it boosts the national debt by trillions while threatening to leave millions without health insurance, but they quickly fell in line after under direct pressure from Trump. The imminent final passage of the bill will fulfil Trump’s wish to have the landmark legislation on his desk by the Fourth of July holiday.
US-Vietnam trade deal angers Beijing
The US and Vietnam struck a preliminary trade deal to lower their bilateral tariffs yesterday, and China is not happy about it. Why? Because as part of the deal the US will heavily tariff any goods that pass through Vietnam from another country en-route to the US. That’s a direct swipe at Beijing, which does this frequently to skirt high US tariffs. China’s commerce ministry said it “firmly opposes any party striking a deal at the expense of Chinese interests” and threatened “countermeasures.”
Nigeria sees huge political shakeup as opposition leaders join forces
In one of the biggest shake ups since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigeria’s two main opposition leaders – Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi – have joined forces to try to oust President Bola Tinubu in the 2027 election. In the 2023 election, they won a combined 54% of the vote compared to Tinubu’s 37%, meaning a common front could win. The big question: Which of these two political heavyweights will agree to play second fiddle to the other when it comes time to pick a presidential candidate?Belarussian dissident Syarhei Tsikhanouski hugs his wife, Belarussian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, after he was released from prison, in this screengrab taken from a social media video released on June 21, 2025.
HARD NUMBERS: Belarus frees dissident, Farmers kidnap Colombian soldiers, Damascus church attacked, & More
5: Belarussian dissident Siarhei Tsikhanouski, husband of the de-facto opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, was freed on Saturday after spending more than five years in jail. US special envoy Keith Kellogg reportedly helped foster the deal. GZERO recently interviewed Tsikhanouskaya here.
57: Colombian farmers in the southwestern region of Valle del Cauca have kidnapped 57 government soldiers. Authorities say the farmers were pressured by local rebel factions that have rejected the 2016 peace deal with the government. For more on rising political violence in Colombia, see our recent piece here.
25: At least 25 were killed in a suicide bombing at a church Damascus, Syria, amplifying concerns about sectarian violence under the government of former-jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa, who overthrew the Assad regime in December. Syria’s interior minister said the attacker was affiliated with Islamic State – the group itself has not claimed credit.
12: A suspected female suicide bomber killed at least 12 people at a fish market in Borno state in northeast Nigeria on Friday night. Borno is the center point of Boko Haram’s insurgency movement – an insurgency that has been going on for 16 years.
1.8%: War, huh, what is it good for? The Israeli stock market, evidently. The country’s main index reached record highs on Sunday after rising 1.8% following the US attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Since Israel began wider airstrikes on Iran last week, the index is up a total of nearly 8%.
Men are seen on a farm in Makurdi, Benue, Nigeria November 29, 2018.
HARD NUMBERS: Attack in northern Nigeria, Toilet stolen from Churchill’s home, and more…
100: At least 100 people were killed in an attack on a village by armed cattle herders in the north of Nigeria. The region has long been plagued by overlapping ethnic and sectarian tensions, as well as land use conflicts between nomadic herders and settled farmers.
13: Niger’s armed forces killed 13 insurgents during raids of jihadist-controlled gold mines near its western border with Burkina Faso. The Liptako-Gourma region in the Sahel – which includes parts of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger – has become an epicenter of extremist violence in recent years, as Al Qaeda and ISIS linked groups compete for control.
7: Saudi Arabia has executed a blogger who was jailed for seven years on treason and terrorism charges. Press freedom groups say the charges against Turki Al-Jasser, who had accused the government of corruption via an anonymous X account, were trumped up.
15: The Catholic Church will soon have a gamer saint. Nicknamed “God’s influencer,” Carlos Acutis – who died from leukemia at 15 – will become the first millennial to be canonized this September. The Italian teenager was known for building websites documenting Eucharistic Miracles and his love of Halo, Super Mario and Pokémon.
6: Two men were arrested for stealing a $6.4 million golden toilet from an exhibition at Winston Churchill’s birthplace. The 18-carat toilet – designed by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan – was part of an contemporary art exhibition at Blenheim Palace.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivers remarks during a reenlistment ceremony for Medal of Honor recipient in the Hall of Heroes at the Pentagon last week.
Hard Numbers: Hegseth’s other Signal chat, Americans protest Trump, Foreign students sue over F-1 visas, Deadly farming clashes plague Nigeria, Japan charges tourists more
2: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly shared classified details about looming US airstrikes in Yemen in a second unclassified Signal group -- this time including his wife, brother, and personal attorney. On March 15, he disclosed flight plans for F/A-18 Hornets targeting Houthi positions. That was the same day Hegseth sent similar information to another Signal chat that included The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, raising serious concerns about mishandling of sensitive military intelligence.
50: Protests were held in cities across the US on Saturday to protest the “anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration and its plutocratic allies,” according to the group 50501, which organized many of the events. From Portland, Maine, to Los Angeles, thousands took to the streets to protest what they see as Donald Trump’s civil rights and constitutional violations.
329,196: Five foreign students are suing the US Dept. of Homeland Security over the loss of their F-1 visas, which they held as international students. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit, says the Trump administration has terminated F-1 visas for “hundreds, if not thousands, of international students.” One of the five involved in the suit, Chinese national Hangrui Zhang, invested a whopping $329,196 into his US studies, and he now faces the prospect of not being able to finish his degree.
56: Suspected violence between Muslim cattle herders and Christian farmers over land use and grazing rights turned deadly again in central Nigeria. At least 56 people were killed on Thursday and Friday in Benue state in the latest clash to plague Africa’s most populous country — fighting in north central Plateau state also claimed more than 100 lives in recent weeks. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar condemned the killings and publicly blamed President Bola Tinubu for not doing enough to stop the violence.
4,000: Whether it’s because they’re shunning the US amid Donald Trump’s tariff war, reading how wonderful Japan is to visit, or simply enjoying how far their dollars go against the weaker yen, Canadians are increasingly vacationing in Japan. More than 550,000 Canadian tourists visited last year, a 37% jump from 2023. But the Japanese, concerned with overtourism and housing affordability, are starting to push back by raising tourism prices. From July, foreigners looking to climb Mount Fuji, for example, will pay 4,000 yen, roughly CA$40, double last year’s cost. But the price may not be steep enough to keep adventure-seeking hordes at bay.