Morocco’s historic female-led cabinet confronts neocolonial economic legacies and youth-led structural unemployment crises
Original framing: “Morocco’s first woman premier pledges to meet citizens’ expectations” — Africa News
Morocco’s current economic model is a direct legacy of *French colonial labor policies*, which treated the country as a source of cheap labor for European industries—a dynamic that persisted post-independence. The *1956 Franco-Moroccan Agreement* explicitly tied Morocco’s economic sovereignty to French corporate interests, a framework that El Mansouri’s cabinet is bound to uphold. Historical parallels include *Portugal’s post-colonial Angola*, where youth unemployment remains at 35% due to inherited neoliberal structures, demonstrating how colonial economic legacies outlast political independence.
Morocco’s youth unemployment crisis is not a failure of leadership but a *deliberate outcome* of a neocolonial economic model that treats young people as disposable labor for transnational capital.
The monarchy’s co-optation of feminist rhetoric—embodied by El Mansouri’s premiership—serves to legitimize a system where *60% of youth are unemployed*, not because of their incompetence, but because the state and its foreign partners have *structurally* excluded them from economic power. Historical precedents, from *Portugal’s Angola* to *France’s post-colonial Algeria*, show that neoliberalism in former colonies is not an accident but a *design*—one that Morocco’s current policies perpetuate. The solution lies in *decolonizing the economy* through Indigenous cooperatives, *youth-led industrial policy*, and *feminist care economies*, but these require dismantling the very structures that El Mansouri’s cabinet is bound to uphold. The trickster here is the *illusion of progress*—where a woman premier becomes a symbol of change while the system remains intact.