Ghislain Irakoze

Dear brother @TherealKwizera allow to respond not as a young Rwandan but as someone who was once young and who has worked with youth youths for the last 24 years and as someone who returned to this country at the age of 17 in 1995. By then my father was 43 years old! Older Rwandans have, to varying degrees, accepted limits on certain civil liberties and political freedoms in exchange for economic security, stability, social order, and public goods. It is an largely unspoken arrangement: the state delivers tangible national progress, while citizens accept constraints that might otherwise be contested. But that social contract is facing a generational test. Millennials and Gen Z are not necessarily rejecting Rwanda’s stability or development model. They are questioning the terms of the exchange. They increasingly want to know what else they are entitled to as citizens beyond security and economic progress: greater personal autonomy, room for self-expression, freedom of speech, and a greater say in decisions that shape their lives. The recent dress-code controversy is a useful starting point because it exposes this tension in a very ordinary way. What may appear to older generations as a question of discipline, decency, or social order can be interpreted by younger Rwandans as a question of personal autonomy and who gets to determine the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. The deeper issue is that the original trade-off may be losing some of its persuasive power. Older generations experienced Rwanda’s transformation from a country marked by extreme poverty and instability into one that is safer, more orderly, and significantly more prosperous. For many who lived through that transition, the argument that certain sacrifices were necessary to secure national survival and development carries considerable weight. Stability is not an abstract concept when you remember what instability looks like. Younger Rwandans inherited a different Rwanda. For many Millennials and Gen Z, rapid development, public order, digital connectivity, and economic ambition are not extraordinary achievements they personally witnessed being built from the ground up. They are the baseline from which they evaluate the state. That changes the question. The younger generation is therefore less likely to ask, “What must we sacrifice to preserve what we have?” and increasingly likely to ask, “Now that we have achieved this, what else should citizenship mean?” That shift matters. Economic development can create new expectations rather than simply satisfy old ones. As societies become more educated, urbanised, connected and exposed to different ideas, citizens often begin demanding forms of participation and autonomy that were less urgent when survival and stability dominated the national agenda. This does not necessarily mean that young Rwandans want instability, political upheaval, or the abandonment of the model that produced Rwanda’s gains. In fact, many may want precisely the opposite: they want to preserve the stability they inherited while expanding the space within which they can live, speak, dress, create, disagree and participate. That is where the generational divide becomes interesting. Older Rwandans may see restrictions through the lens of what Rwanda had to overcome. Younger Rwandans increasingly see them through the lens of what Rwanda has already achieved. The question, then, is not simply whether the social contract will survive. It is whether it can evolve. A state can no longer rely indefinitely on yesterday’s achievements to justify tomorrow’s restrictions. Each generation renegotiates its relationship with power according to the conditions it inherits. So, are we witnessing a clash between generations? Maybe but this is less a battle over who is right than a struggle over what the next version of the Rwandan social contract will look like. And if there is one certainty, it is this: the youth have time on their side.