Africa has the world’s youngest population, but it’s ruled by a legion of old men. While the average African is nineteen years old, the continent’s average politician is sixty-two.

For the past two decades, leaders in the Global North have fretted about demographic aging and its impact on the welfare state. Africa does not have that problem — its population is estimated to double over the next thirty years, with 42 percent of the global youth population estimated to be African by 2030.

And yet Africa’s youth —  or at least the nonelderly —  have mostly failed to take over the continent’s halls of power. The oldest leader in Africa is Paul Biya, the ninety-year-old president of Cameroon, who has ruled since 1982. He is followed by the likes of eighty-two-year-old Alassane Ouattara, the president of Ivory Coast, who has ruled the country since 2010; eighty-one-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema, president for life of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea since 1979; eighty-year-old Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa, who came to power at the ripe age of seventy-four via the military coup that removed ninety-three-year-old president Robert Mugabe after decades of rule; and seventy-eight-year-old Ugandan head of state Yoweri Museveni, who lost the 1980 election only to launch a war to assume the presidency in 1986.