It all started on December 17, 2010. A young Tunisian college graduate, Mohamed Bouazizi, who couldn’t find a job and was making do selling vegetables on the roadside in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid, doused himself with petrol and set himself on fire in protest after a police officers prevented him from selling vegetables on the streets and confiscated his cart. He was rushed to hospital.

Bouazizi’s suicide set off protests over lack of jobs in the town, which is in one of the poorest regions of the country.

Then, on January 4 this year, Bouazizi died in hospital. Hundreds of students took to the streets that morning in solidarity with the youths of Sidi Bouzid.

Then the protests swept the country. Ten days later, Tunisia’s dictator, President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, stood down amid a state of emergency declared following street protests in the capital Tunis and other cities.

By dinnertime on the same January 14, Ben Ali was jobless. He had fled into exile to Saudi Arabia.

A few days after Ben Ali took off into exile, protest noises could be heard in Egypt.

A young man sprinkled himself with fuel in central Cairo, and lit a match. The fire was put out and he was rushed to hospital in critical condition.

In Mauritania, another young man set himself on fire a la Bouazizi as a means of protesting against the government. And in Algeria, four youths also self-immolated.

It seemed the revolution was spreading down to the south of Africa. It didn’t.

Instead, it turned north again and settled in Egypt, where within a week the country’s strongman, President Hosni Mubarak, was desperately resisting pressures for him to go, promising that he will not run for office again in September and seeking to bribe protestors off the streets with half-hearted concessions.

Instead of moving south, the tremors from the “Revolt on the Nile,” as the TV channel Al Jazeera called it, were instead felt far away from Africa in the Middle East.

In Jordan, a nervous King Abdullah rushed to sack his government and appoint a new one, which he tasked to improve economic conditions.

A little closer, but still out of Africa, in Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in power as long as Egypt’s Mubarak, sought to appease thousands of protestors, who were expressing solidarity with the Egyptians, by announcing that he would not run in 2013, and urged the government to take measures against unemployment and ordered that social security coverage be extended.

So should we hope that the revolution will spread to sub-Saharan Africa? The answer is “Yes’ and “No.”

The protests are mainly against high youth unemployment, tough economic conditions, corruption, and general repression.

Tunisia and Egypt both have those ills in plenty. They have nearly the same level of youth unemployment – 41 per cent.

However, these conditions also exist, at worse levels, in Black Africa.

A general agreement is emerging that the Internet, especially social media like Twitter and Facebook, were the tools that allowed the young people of Tunisia and Egypt — where free political activity is curtailed — to organise the protests. Egypt and Tunisia are among Africa’s top 10 Internet users.

According to data from June last year, Egypt had 10,060,000 regular Internet users. Tunisia was seventh with 3,600,000.

This would suggest that once you have a corrupt government, youth unemployment hovering at or beyond 40 per cent, high Internet use, and some level of repression, then you have the ingredients for an Egypt-Tunisia-type rebellion.

On that account, revolts in the rest of Africa are long overdue.

Take Nigeria. By June last year, it had the largest number of Internet users in Africa – 43,982,200. It is corrupt, and its level of youth unemployment make Egypt look like paradise. It is estimated to be 60 to 70 per cent.

Kenya — where last week the Communications Commission released figures showing Internet usage has skyrocketed to about 8,689,304, the fourth highest in Africa — has youth unemployment reported at 65 per cent.

Uganda, with the eighth highest number of Internet users in Africa, a notch below Tunisia, has one of the world’s highest levels of youth unemployment for a country that is not at war. It is a mind-boggling 80 per cent!

This is a random pick. Clearly, then, the conditions exist in sub-Saharan Africa for mass revolts.

However, while the conditions exist, there are critical differences between North and sub-Saharan Africa.

To begin with, countries like Egypt and Tunisia are fairly homogenous.

They have one “tribe,” if you like. They are overwhelmingly Arab. Then, on average, 90 per cent of the people are Muslims.

In most of the rest of Africa, except for a few of the countries — most of them small, like Rwanda, Burundi, Botswana, and Somalia — the differences are massive.

On average, most of the countries in the rest of Africa have between 20 and 60 ethnic groups, and are almost evenly divided among Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Traditionalists.

In Egypt and Tunisia, Twitter and Facebook, which are instruments of homogenisation, could build a community quickly because they had few cultural differences to overcome.

Secondly, in Africa these movements are extremely susceptible to hijack because of its internal diversity.

In Uganda, for example, in recent years all student (and indeed lecturers’) protests have fizzled out because the government has been able to divide them along ethnic-political lines.

The long-term effect of this is that student elections at Makerere University, just as at Nairobi University these days, are fought along regional lines.

The tribe/party of the president will support a candidate, and the rest will gang up against him.

Or the Catholics will vote against the Protestant candidate. This process mirrors itself in most of Africa’s elections.

In the Arab countries, it is very difficult to play that ethno-political card, because in most cases it is not possible.

But tribalism and religious chauvinism don’t function in a vacuum.

In fact, they are a product of a deeper problem, which has to do with the way most post-colonial states in Africa have developed.

After the rush of expectations following Independence, there was a sharp increase in education for “natives” that brought a wave of educated people to the job market.

The African chiefs failed to expand their economies fast enough to meet the demand for opportunities.

Also, a population explosion created many new mouths that needed to be fed. The result? A crisis of supply.

There simply weren’t enough fat jobs or opportunities to pass around.

The leaders had to make tough choices about distribution. Most of them chose the path that would yield the most loyalty; they distributed the goodies to their tribes.

Thus while the struggles for Independence were generally led by nationalist movements, after Independence they faded, and many Africans sought the support of their tribes because it was the vehicle that best ensured distribution of public goods to them.

Because not everyone in your tribe will come to the street, to enable you to make the nearly two million that rocked Tahrir Square, in Africa we are more likely to rebel in structures where we can use technologies that help us overcome the limits imposed by the small numbers of our tribes.

Indeed, where small well-knit groups can be an advantage. That formation is bush war.

If all the Tigrinya in Ethiopia had taken to the streets to protest the Mengistu military dictatorship, Meles Zenawi would not be prime minister, or even alive.

But a small disciplined band took to the arid hills, and scored a decisive military victory in 1991.

So, while the conditions for a Tunisian or Egyptian uprising exist in surplus amounts in the rest of Africa, they will not be played out in the streets.

They are more likely to be expressed as armed rebellion, or retail ethnic cleansing as we saw in Kenya following the dispute over the December 2007 election.

Several observers have said the Tunisian/Egyptian protests will have a demonstration effect, like in the 1990s when many African dictators were toppled one after the other after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down.

That is highly debatable. The global situation is very different today from what it was then. After the Soviet Union disappeared, Third World strongmen were exposed.

They did not have another superpower to back them, if the USA decided that they should go.