A global youth revolt is shaking the foundations of political power. In just a few months, millions of young people have taken to the streets across continents – from Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, Kenya, Tanzania, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru and Paraguay – to denounce corruption and collapsing public systems. The spark is familiar: governments accused of looting public wealth while ordinary citizens face unemployment, rising costs, poverty and failing services. These digitally connected protest movements – leaderless, borderless and fast-moving – have toppled governments in Nepal, Peru and Madagascar. The anger is not abstract. It is directed squarely at political and economic elites who have turned public office into private estates. What they are confronting, often without naming it, is state capture – a form of corruption so deeply embedded that it shapes the rules of democracy itself.

Most people think corruption is about a politician taking bribes, or a public official pocketing cash for a favour. That’s the low-hanging fruit: petty or grand corruption, both corrosive but familiar. But there is a deeper, more dangerous form of rot – state capture. Not simply corruption of the system. It is corruption as the system.

Where ordinary corruption bends the rules, state capture rewrites them. It is the moment when oligarchs, corporations, criminal networks – or even foreign governments – turn the machinery of democracy into a mechanism for their own enrichment and power. In its grip, elections become hollow rituals, reforms are cosmetic and citizens find themselves living in states that look like democracies on paper but function like cartels. In Tanzania, for example, state capture is not just a political issue, its a generational crisis threatening the future of democratic participation.