Madagascar Jailed the General Who Ran the Crackdown. The System He Served Is Still Standing.

A court in Antananarivo has sentenced Richard Ravalomanana, the retired general who ran Madagascar's Senate under ousted president Andry Rajoelina, to ten years of hard labour for complicity in murder. Prosecutors said he directed the gendarmerie's violent response to the Gen Z protests of September and October 2025 — the water-and-power-cuts uprising that grew into a movement against the whole regime and ended with soldiers refusing to fire on crowds, Rajoelina fleeing the country, and Col. Michael Randrianirina installed in his place. At least 22 people were killed and over 100 injured in the crackdown, according to UN figures. Ravalomanana wore a cowboy hat and his medals through it and is now appealing from a cell.

Good. Nobody who orders live rounds and tear gas onto university students and precarious workers protesting because the water doesn't run and the lights don't stay on deserves sympathy for the verdict landing on him rather than someone else. But the shape of this trial should not be mistaken for justice arriving. A single officer takes the fall for a chain of command that a former national police chief testified, under oath, at Ravalomanana's own trial, never actually ran through him — he says orders went elsewhere, and nobody has been charged for wherever that "elsewhere" actually was. That's not incidental. It's how transitional-justice theater usually works: convict the man whose face the crowd already hated, leave the institution that trained him, armed him, and will re-arm the next one completely untouched.

The gendarmerie that fired on protesters in Antananarivo didn't invent its playbook for this uprising. It's the same security apparatus that has policed poverty and dissent in Madagascar for decades, under presidents of every stripe, backed by security cooperation arrangements that outlast every domestic government. Rajoelina himself first came to power in a 2009 coup backed by parts of the same military. The 2025 uprising was not a rupture in that history — it was the water and power cuts finally making the arithmetic of who eats and who doesn't impossible to ignore, and the Gen Z generation, organized online, doing what older opposition parties had failed to force: making the streets ungovernable until the president left. That the new administration is now trying a handful of loyalists is one measure of how far pressure from below can push a state to eat its own — it is not evidence that the state itself has changed what it is for.

Watch what doesn't happen next. Ravalomanana faces a separate corruption case, which tells you the old patronage network is still being picked apart transactionally rather than dismantled structurally. No timeline exists for compensating the families of the 22 dead. No public accounting has been demanded of the water and power arrangements that were the actual grievance that put people in the street in the first place. A general goes to a labour camp; the political economy that made his gendarmerie useful to somebody stays exactly where it was.

This is the pattern worth naming, wherever it recurs: a mass uprising forces out a figurehead, a court convicts a visible enforcer, and coverage moves on as if accountability has been achieved. It hasn't. The Gen Z movement in Madagascar organized against material conditions — power cuts, water cuts, corruption skimming both — not against one man in a cowboy hat. Anyone still on the street there, or anyone watching from elsewhere and drawing lessons for their own fight, should treat this verdict as a floor, not a ceiling: real, worth having, and nowhere near enough.

Sources

BBC News: Madagascar ex-Senate chief sentenced to hard labour over deadly Gen Z protest crackdown

Wikipedia: 2025 Malagasy protests

Amnesty International: Madagascar — Authorities must launch investigations into deadly force used against Gen Z protesters

ICTJ: Madagascar's President Is Ousted in a Military Coup After Weeks of Youth-Led Protests