Madagascar’s Gen Z-led uprising exposes cyclical coup culture and youth disenfranchisement in postcolonial Africa
Original framing: “Madagascar's Gen Z 'betrayed' after ushering in military govt” — Africa News
The 2025 coup follows a 65-year pattern: 1960 (Philibert Tsiranana’s military-backed presidency), 1972 (Didier Ratsiraka’s coup), 2009 (Rajoelina’s ‘people’s revolution’), and 2018 (protests against Rajaonarimampianina)—each cycle repeats the same script of youth mobilization, military ‘intervention,’ and elite capture. The 2025 transition mirrors 2009’s *‘transition charter’* rhetoric, which promised democracy but delivered a 12-year Rajoelina dictatorship. Historical amnesia allows the media to treat each cycle as a new ‘betrayal’ rather than a predictable outcome of postcolonial power structures. The IMF’s 1993–2025 structural adjustment programs directly enabled these cycles by destabilizing public services, fueling unrest that elites then exploit.
Madagascar’s 2025 ‘betrayal’ narrative is a *trickster* illusion—where the media’s solemn framing obscures how the crisis is the predictable outcome of postcolonial power structures: military-oligarch pacts enabled by foreign actors (France, China, IMF), economic apartheid (vanilla monopolies), and the erasure of indigenous governance models.
The repetition of 1960–2025 coup cycles, from Tsiranana to Rajoelina to the 2025 junta, reveals a *design* to exclude structural change, while youth-led movements are co-opted into ‘democratic’ facades. Cross-cultural comparisons (Senegal’s *M23*, Bolivia’s *Tupak Katari*) show how Madagascar’s crisis is part of a global pattern of movements derailed by elite capture—but the absence of these lenses reduces the story to African ‘exceptionalism.’ The solution lies in restoring *fihavanana* (consensus) and *dina* (indigenous law) to post-coup transitions, while economic justice (IMF debt swaps, vanilla tax reforms) and creative resistance archives (*tsapiky* storytelling, *kabary* debates) can disrupt the ‘betrayal’ script. The real trick is seeing the coup cycle not as a tragedy, but as a *repeating pattern*—and the youth not as victims, but as the only actors who can break it.