Different case studies showcased the greatest challenges of those liberation fighters who finally found themselves in government – in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Uganda, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, and Africa’s youngest state, South Sudan. Equally important for all of those liberation movements was to initially enable and qualify former fighters without any governance experience and to cooperate with and integrate the old bureaucracy of colonial, oligarchic or autocratic previous governments. By necessity, stability was the first priority.

Today it is evident that the justification of stability has become a pretext for self-perpetuating power in several cases – such as in Zimbabwe which is ruled by Robert Mugabe for 32 years. Here, the question is how to replace the „rapidly wasting asset of liberation“: the high reputation and political capital from merits in the liberation war is fading with the years, especially when combined with economic stagnation, lack of political rights, and growing youth unemployment. Particularly the younger generation sometimes cannot identify with the liberation movement any more.

For the future, liberation movements stand on crossroads: either they embrace a political opening – with the enabling of checks and balances, a multi-party system, the encouragement of civil society and young politicians – or they have to face increasing lack of understanding for their power politics.