Africa’s stake in the future of the UN *

Date | 24 August 2026

Abdul Mohamed, a former UN senior political advisor and head of the Sudan mediation office, is a senior fellow at Amani Africa

The selection of the next Secretary-General of the United Nations comes at a moment when the institution he or she will lead is confronting perhaps the gravest crisis of relevance, authority and confidence since its establishment over eighty years ago. This is not simply another leadership transition within an international organisation. The international order is not merely changing, but the multilateral foundations on which it once rested are being progressively weakened, through geopolitical rivalry, selective adherence to international law, declining political investment and, increasingly, preferences for unilateral and transactional arrangements. The UN finds itself having simultaneously to defend its own relevance, protect the principles of its Charter, and respond to global crises whose scale makes international cooperation more necessary than ever.

For Africa, this is not an ordinary institutional crisis. The weakening – let alone the possible demise – of effective multilateralism constitutes an existential strategic threat to the continent. Africa consequently has reason to be more invested, more vocal and more politically engaged in defending and renewing multilateralism than any other region. Yet that urgency is not sufficiently visible in African diplomacy or in the debate surrounding the selection of the next Secretary-General. This contradiction should concern us.

The retreat for multilateralism should alarm Africa 

Major powers can navigate, and some may even believe they can prosper in a weakened multilateral order. They possess military power, economic leverage, technological capacity, privileged positions in global finance, and bilateral networks through which they can pursue their interests. They can use multilateral institutions when convenient and bypass them when they are not.

Africa does not enjoy the same luxury. For Africa, multilateralism is not an á la carte proposition. Our stake in it is comprehensive. Peace and security, development, climate action, international finance, humanitarian protection, public health, migration, trade, technology governance and the protection of sovereignty all depend, in varying degrees, upon functioning international institutions, agreed rules and collective action. International law matters most to those who cannot rely upon power alone.

This is why the current retreat from multilateralism should alarm Africa.

The crisis did not begin yesterday. For more than a decade, geopolitical rivalry, paralysis in the Security Council, weakening respect for international law, unequal globalisation and growing distrust of international institutions have accumulated. The wars of recent years, including Gaza, have further exposed the selectivity with which international norms are sometimes applied and have damaged confidence in the universality of the system. More recently, policies pursued by the current United States administration have accelerated the retreat from multilateral approaches, reducing support for international institutions and privileging bilateral bargains, narrower coalitions and national power. Whatever the stated rationale, the practical effect is to weaken institutions, make collective rules more negotiable and increase the premium on power.

Consequences for Africa’s multilateral institutions 

Apart from removing the international arrangements that support pan-African multilateral cooperation, the global retreat from multilateralism does not stop at Africa’s shores. Its continental manifestation may be equally consequential. A world increasingly organised through bilateral transactions between unequal states can weaken the African Union (AU) and the regional economic communities, circumvent common African positions, and reward fragmented national bargains over continental approaches. It can encourage external powers to deal selectively with individual states and transform Africa once again into an arena in which others compete, rather than a political space in which Africans collectively exercise agency. In its most dangerous form, this tendency threatens a new balkanization of Africa – not necessarily through the redrawing of borders, but through the fragmentation of African political purpose.

The defence of global multilateralism and the defence of African multilateralism are therefore inseparable. Defending and pushing for a just global multilateralism is in the interest of Africa’s multilateral institutions. For Africa, this retreat of the post-World War II global order requires it not only to take active interest in and extend heightened support for the UN and the forging of a more inclusive and just multilateral cooperation but also to double down on its integration push and the deepening of continental multilateral cooperation.

Africa should be concerned about the selection of the next Secretary-General 

This is also why Africa’s present disposition toward the selection of the next Secretary-General is inadequate at the moment. The selection process is already in full swing. Candidates have presented their visions in public interactive dialogues and a General Assembly town hall. The Security Council has cast two straw polls in July and August indicating the views of members of the Council about each candidate at the particular point at which the polls were cast. Yet Africa has not generated the continental debate that the stakes of the selection of the next UN Secretary-General at this point in time require.

The continent should by now be asking, collectively and publicly: what kind of United Nations does Africa require in the coming decade? What must be preserved, what must be reformed, and what must be reinvented? What qualities should the next Secretary-General possess to navigate a period in which the institution may have to fight for both its relevance and its political space? And what commitments should Africa expect from candidates on peace and security, development, international financial reform, climate justice, Security Council reform and partnership with African institutions?

These are not questions to be left to New York diplomacy alone. They concern Africa’s strategic future. While the Security Council holds the key for the selection of the next Secretary-General, Africa exercises influence and responsibility by establishing the political and leadership test against which any candidate should be assessed. The question is not simply who can administer the United Nations. It is who can help navigate the organisation through this turbulent transition while contributing to the reinvention of multilateralism for a world that still desperately needs it.

The next Secretary-General must be a competent and independent leader 

The next Secretary-General cannot be merely a custodian of institutional survival. He or she must be a political leader of unusual competence, independence and judgment: firmly anchored in the Charter; capable of engaging and earning the support of the great powers without becoming captive to them; credible to the Global South; attentive to smaller states; and sufficiently imaginative to understand that defending multilateralism does not mean defending every feature of the status quo. The existing order requires reform precisely because its inequities and failures have contributed to its loss of legitimacy.

Africa cannot be asked to defend indefinitely an international system that marginalises Africa. Renewing multilateralism must therefore include democratising it. Multilateralism will survive only if states and citizens can see its value, not least of all in the core purpose of the UN. That means restoring prevention, mediation and political settlement to the centre of international peace and security; defending international law consistently rather than selectively; and advancing meaningful Security Council reform. For today’s world, this additionally means supporting reform of the international financial architecture; mobilising collective action on climate change; and developing workable regimes for global public goods, including public health, food security, digital governance, artificial intelligence and the global commons.

The UN must pursue equal partnerships with African institutions 

For Africa, one additional priority is indispensable: a qualitatively stronger relationship between the UN, the African Union and the Regional Economic Communities. The future of multilateralism will not be constructed solely in New York. It will increasingly depend upon legitimate and capable regional institutions with political knowledge, proximity and operational capacity. In networked multilateralism, the UN should not treat African institutions merely as implementing partners after decisions have been made elsewhere but at the very least as co-creators. Partnership must increasingly mean shared political analysis, early consultation, complementarity, predictable support and respect for African agency and cooperative decision-making. Strengthening African multilateralism is part of strengthening global multilateralism.

Africa must, however, also look inward. We cannot demand multilateralism internationally while weakening it continentally. The AU requires deeper political investment, predictable financing and a willingness by Member States to treat collective positions as strategic assets rather than optional declarations. The credibility of Africa’s defence of the United Nations begins with our willingness to defend and strengthen our own multilateral institutions.

Africa must decide its vision of the future of the UN and the next Secretary-General

The selection of the next Secretary-General should therefore serve as a wake-up call. Africa needs a common strategic conversation and, where possible, a common position – not necessarily about a particular individual, but about the mandate history is imposing upon whoever assumes the office. The AU should help convene and give political expression to that conversation. African governments and diplomatic missions should engage candidates systematically against an agreed set of priorities. African intellectuals, policy institutions and civil society should debate the future of multilateralism as an African strategic question rather than as a distant institutional concern. Silence is itself a position, and at this historical moment it is the wrong one, more so for Africa.

For a continent whose quest for sovereignty, development, integration and international agency has been inseparable from collective institutions, the survival and renewal of multilateralism is not somebody else’s agenda. It is an African strategic interest of the first order. Africa should therefore speak earlier, louder and more coherently than it presently does – not because the United Nations as it exists is adequate, but because a world without effective multilateral institutions would be considerably more unequal, more transactional and more dangerous for those without great-power capabilities.

The selection of the next Secretary-General gives Africa an opportunity. Africa should seize this moment – not merely to help select the next Secretary-General of the UN, but to insist upon its place as a co-author of whatever multilateral order comes next.

* An earlier version of this article was published by the International Centre for Dialogue Initiatives and can be read here https://dialogueinitiatives.org/africas-stake-in-the-future-of-the-un/