A decade ago, I spent several days in Majengo, a densely populated slum on the fringes of Nairobi City. The al-Shabaab terror attack on Westgate Mall a year earlier, in September 2013, had dealt a body blow to Nairobi’s middle-class lifestyle and national psyche generally and had raised many questions about what drove young (mostly) men to join terror groups.
The answers we found in Majengo were surprising. For instance, although al-Shabaab was an Islamic group, some of its young recruits were recently converted Christians and even agnostics. In addition, while the group is Somalia-based, many recruits were not Somali but from different communities across Kenya, including Luo, Kikuyu and others.
The question of what drove young people into violent religious extremist groups wasn’t local. ISIS, or the Islamic State, was reordering the political and religious order across the Middle East and reaching as far away as the Sahel for support and new members. Understanding the incentives for recruitment was an important first step in stemming the violence and stymying radical movements.
A popular theory at the time suggested that many of these young male recruits were simply sexually frustrated. Boris Johnson, who was then Mayor of London, captured this sentiment in an interview with the Sun after a visit to Iraq, where he proclaimed that the ISIS “Jihadis are porn-watching wankers”.
Popular as it was and remains, the “sexual frustration” theory was not new. In Europe in the Middle Ages, scholar Georgios Karras noted in 1998, it was believed that male sexual needs could build up and, if unmet, lead men to “commit seduction, rape, adultery and sodomy”. This was, of course, a self-serving and very narrow argument.
Subsequent research found that sexual frustration was mostly a proxy for and perhaps even a byproduct of socioeconomic frustration. These, and the young men we found being recruited in Majengo, were not getting any because they did not have anything.
Subsequent research has found evidence of a complex and intertwined relationship between political unrest and sexual frustration among young men, which leads to extremism, aggression and “militant masculinity”.
Anyone looking at the data from Uganda’s recent electoral process, the census, and other data sources — even unscientific anecdotal analysis of social media sentiment — can see the silhouette of angry young men who feel socially, economically and politically excluded.
We’ve made this argument in these pages before, but it is important enough to revisit. Between 2016 and 2024, an estimated 317,555 Ugandans migrated to the Middle East, mostly as labourers. Of these, official data show, almost eight out of every 10 were women.
This means 218,871 more Ugandan women got jobs than men in the Middle East in that period. The numbers might vary from source to source, but the trend analysis holds, as does the anecdotal evidence from the long export lines at Entebbe International Airport.
The impacts are beginning to emerge in interesting ways. First, as a friend told me recently, it has become much harder to find domestic help around Kampala — usually a young woman who’s dropped out of school, never had the chance to go, or is waiting on a better job.
At face value, this is a good problem. Scarce labour means higher wages for the few women willing to do domestic work. Many young women who previously drifted into the city to work as domestic labour are now expatriates, doing the same work but for better-paying clients in the Middle East. Many are still here physically, but mentally are in the departure lounge waiting for their passports and work permits.
This has created an arithmetic gender imbalance, but with other complexities. The average young Ugandan woman with exposure to external labour markets is likely to have a higher income and a more refined worldview than the boda boda-riding boyfriend she left behind in Lukaya.
One possible result is a surge in domestic and gender-based violence as these young men struggle to come to terms with changed power dynamics within relationships on account of economic inequalities. Another is crime, as the young men find alternative ways to patch up their masculinity, or an increase in militant rhetoric and political aggression as they seek to find ways to deal.
If this weren’t a God-fearing and morally upright country, one would suggest that more relaxed social mores would reduce the political (and other) tensions among angry young men. Instead, we advise that policymakers should think very intentionally about how to ensure that young men are not left behind. We can’t sleep soundly or avoid political unrest if angry and hungry young men are tossing around in their empty beds.