The internet raised Generation Z, more so than Millennials. This is the first truly digital generation, one that came of age not just with the internet, but in it. As a result, their political consciousness is wired into global trends, memes, information cascades, and protest movements. Around the world, young people are rising, sometimes with slogans, sometimes with Molotovs, as they respond to a constellation of grievances: stagnant economies, rising living costs, limited access to public services, and governments that speak the language of democracy while practicing repression.
We are witnessing a generational challenge that cuts across continents: from Kathmandu to Casablanca, Nairobi to New York. In Nepal, youth protests erupted in September 2025 after the government banned social media platforms. What began as a digital rights protest escalated into urban uprisings, with buildings torched and the prime minister resigning under pressure. In Kenya, youth-led protests over tax hikes and police brutality galvanized a cultural revolution, with artists and musicians turning the streets into platforms of defiance. In Morocco, the Gen Z 212 movement emerged in protest against youth unemployment, mismanaged public services, and government spending priorities that favored spectacle over substance.
But nowhere has the darker edge of this generational wave been more evident than in Tanzania. Once lauded as a relatively stable multi-party system since the 1990s, Tanzania has now become a cautionary tale of democratic backsliding. The ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has entrenched its power to such an extent that the 2025 general election proceeded without real opposition. The main opposition party, CHADEMA, was legally barred from participating after being accused of procedural violations. Its leader, Tundu Lissu, was arrested in April 2025 and charged with treason. As of this writing, his whereabouts and condition remain unverified.
The backlash was immediate and fierce. Youth-led protests spread across Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, and Arusha. Yet instead of conceding to public outrage, the state responded with overwhelming force: internet blackouts, military deployment, enforced curfews, and, according to opposition sources, extrajudicial killings and mass disappearances. Due to the blackout, the true scale of violence remains unknown. Kenyan human rights groups, using satellite phones and cross-border couriers, helped transmit footage to international agencies such as AFP. The images reportedly show bodies being removed by police and transported to undisclosed locations. One opposition claim alleges over 700 deaths, but independent verification remains elusive.
In this fog of digital silence, hard power thrives. The Tanzanian regime appears to have calculated that protests would mirror those in Togo and Cameroon, which were loud but contained. In both countries, youth uprisings flared and faded under the weight of state repression. But this time, the scale of discontent seems to have caught the leadership by surprise. A generation raised on access, voice, and visibility is now confronting the full machinery of a state determined to remain unaccountable.
This is the paradox of the internet age. On the one hand, the digital realm provides unprecedented tools for mobilization, solidarity, and dissent. Gen Z doesn’t need state media or party structures to coordinate. But on the other hand, nation-states have evolved new ways to contain this threat: algorithmic surveillance, strategic misinformation, and the blunt instrument of internet blackouts. When the state cuts off the flow of information, it also severs lifelines, thus leaving behind dark zones where anything can happen and little can be proved.
Election insecurity is not new in Tanzania. But for Gen Z and younger Millennials, this betrayal cuts deeper. Many came of age believing that democracy, however imperfect, was expanding, buoyed by the post-Cold War consensus that liberalism would spread like a contagious yawn. But today, that dream is faltering. The legacy of colonial extraction, the rise of authoritarian populism, and the economic devastation wrought by global financial hierarchies have all converged to create a generation that feels abandoned and unrepresented.
What is unfolding in Tanzania is not just a national crisis, but a generational reckoning. A battle between soft power (digital influence, moral legitimacy, cultural capital) and hard power (guns, courts, surveillance, blackouts). It is the moment when a digitally native generation realizes that memes alone cannot protect them, that virality does not equal victory, and that the future will be won or lost not just in feeds, but in the big tent of a hazardous political circus.
Now, as the world waits for Tanzania to lift the blackout and reveal what remains, we sit in a holding pattern. Will the regime entrench itself further, emboldened by silence and geopolitical indifference? Or will this prove to be a turning point, a rupture that births reform, even if through fire?
We do not know yet.
But what is clear is that Generation Z is not asking for the future to be handed to them. They are trying, often desperately, to seize it back before it disappears altogether.
