The world talked to itself this week from September 18-22 in the most famous talk shop in the world – the annual UN General Assembly. This important annual global political ritual is rooted in the belief of the founding fathers of the UN 78 years ago that jaw-jaw triumphs war-war. The man with his finger on the trigger will be minded not to pull back so long as the world leaders talk to one another. Still, the world war-wars within and among nations.
World leaders, big and small, rich and poor, have duly performed the 2023 ritual. Each world leader let the world into his informed prescription on how to save the world or what nations must do to build better and more mutually beneficial international relationships for peace to reign. The third world leaders have either gone home or some of them are lingering in New York and some other American cities doing what they do best – shop for investors to shore up their ailing national economies. The famous assembly hall is now empty. But take my advice: do not expect dramatic attitudinal changes among the 193 member nations of the UN post UNGA 78. Physicians still have problems with healing themselves.
I would imagine that UNGA is not what it used to be. Absent of the dramatists who commanded world attention in the famous hall in the past, the assembly is now a genteel gathering of polite men who hate to speak with inflamed passion against the oppressive injustices and the unfairness that have ensured that the third remains the third world.
UNGA must be missing such men as the late Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. He once took the podium in the general assembly and at a dramatic point in his speech, he was most probably infuriated by the silence that attended his excoriation of Western decadence. He took off his shoe and pounded the podium. A sleepy world instantly woke up to the pounding sound of Soviet fury.
The late President Fidel Castro of Cuba was credited with making the longest speech in the assembly – some two or three hours. No one dared to stop him. The world was either awake or asleep, but he maintained his right to speak to the world and preach the virtues of communism and condemn Western decadence. Some good came of it. The assembly changed its rules and pegged the address to fifteen minutes.
The late President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela addressed the assembly a day after US President George Bush did. He poked his finger in the eye of the leader of the free world when he took the podium and snorted at Bush and said, “The devil was here yesterday and spoke as if he owned the world.”
In the seventies, a Fujian president caused no small stir when he arrived at the general assembly decked out in a grass skirt. It was his national dress. They have no dress rules in UNGA. Each president is allowed to promote his country’s culture. So far, no president has turned up in a birthday suit.
The UN was formed primarily to ensure that the world will never again witness the horrors of WW II and the scale of its devastation. Top on its five-point objectives is “to maintain international peace and security.” The world has come a long way since the founding of the UN after the guns fell silent in the theatres of the Second World War in which more than 30 million people were killed. From the modest figure of 51 member nations, the UN now boasts of 193 member nations. Fifty-four of this number are African nations.
Much has changed in the past 78 years of the UN but much more has remained the same. Power and wealth are still the same defining artifacts of state power. Power still matters; wealth still matters and the right of the strong and wealthy nations to impose their will on the weak and poor nations is duly recognised as the unchangeable world order. The arms race is still on, but it now goes on in research laboratories and weapons manufacturing facilities. Sophisticated weapons emerge from these facilities and increase the capacity of the powerful for world dominance. The world is under greater threats of annihilation than ever before. And this, as the UN looks on.
The UN faces old challenges, and it faces more complicated new challenges. The old challenges are what motivated the founding fathers to found the world body, to wit, to prevent not only a third world war but to make the world a more peaceful place. These old challenges are as complicated as ever. The UN has perhaps staved off a third world war but many parts of the world, especially the developing world, are wracked and wrecked by internal crises that have imposed anarchy on some nations as an acceptable form of government. The ready availability of weapons has empowered non-state actors to impose their will on many nations. Insurgency is a present danger, and one that was not taken into account at the birth of the UN 78 years ago.
The new challenges are those of hunger and diseases. Covid-19 presented the world with new challenges it could not easily deal with. By the time the disease had run its course, millions of people in developed and developing countries had succumbed to it. The world at large demonstrated its impotence against nature’s bad habit of making the grave an imposed choice.
This is the most sophisticated century in human history. Given the advancements in agricultural science and productivity, should much of the world be hungry? Feeding the nation is part of the primary responsibility of the UN because the FAO is an agency of the world body.
It would be unfair to doubt that UN takes its first obligation imposed on it by its charter seriously. It makes its presence known, if not felt, in all the flash points of the world with peace keeping forces to prevent the possible escalation of an internal crisis into an international crisis that could lead to a third world war. It would be naïve to under-estimate the relevance of the UN to world peace and security. Perhaps it could have been much worse for the world without the UN as a restraining factor in the freedom of individual nations to swing their arms.
But the UN has been complicit in the way the West has exercised its powers to effect regime changes in third world countries. It is a major criticism of its role in world affairs. Sanctions are strong weapons used by the Security Council to bring down regimes that have fall not of favour with the West, but they do not hurt the leaders, they hurt the people whose interest arguably advises the regime change.
Among its four objectives is this one: “To develop friendly relations among nations on principles of equal rights and self-determination.”
It has not achieved this objective. It is still a world of inequalities in which the powerful scuttle the right of the weak to self-determination. The world still belongs to the rich and the powerful. The strong still oppresses the weak and the rich still oppresses the poor. There is a first world and there is a third world but there is no second world.
More than half of the more than seven billion inhabitants of the earth are at the bottom of the industrial and economic scale where poverty and the accompanying deprivation make life brutal and nasty. The powerful and the powerless still run along parallel lines just as the wealthy and the poor are in different universes on the same earth. Perhaps, the UN can do little about these challenges, but they are cruel reminders that a world built and maintained on glaring inequalities does not promote self-determination among all nations.
Preventing a third world war is good but saving the starving from hunger, reducing poverty and narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots and respecting the right of nations to have leaders of their choice not subject to the approval of the West and a world order that treats the weak and poor justly and fairly are equally critical to world peace.
In his address to UNG, his first as Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu made the point that “Many proclamations have been made, yet troubles remain close at hand.” The harsh truth is that the UN member-nations have not lived up to the truth of their commitment to a just and fair world. It takes something away from UNGA as a platform for extracting promises of world leaders for greater mutually beneficial attitudinal changes towards building that just and fair world order.
Agbese can be reached Email: [email protected]
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