Sierra Leone leverages its presidency for Africa’s seat at the Security Council
Date | 14 August 2024
Solomon Ayele Dersso, PhD
Founding Director, Amani Africa
Affirming that the ‘time for half-measures and incremental progress is over…(Africa’s) demands for justice and equity must be met,’ Sierra Leone made the most masterful and timely case for securing support for Africa’s common position on the reform of the UNSC.
Led by none other than President Julius Maada Bio, Sierra Leone communicated Africa’s position forcefully during the signature event of its presidency of the UN Security Council held on 12 August 2023. Dubbed by the UN as a historic debate, this was ‘the first ever debate’ as President Bio told the press during the joint stakeout after the session. Coming a month before the UN’s Summit of the Future, the timing of the debate would not have been more perfect.
Characterising the theme of the high-level debate – the maintenance of international peace and security through the reform of the Security Council – ‘a matter of grave importance’, Bio told the Council that ‘[n]early 80 years after its creation, the Council has been stuck in time.’ In her very vivid depiction of a UNSC that is stuck in time, Sithembile Mbete of the University of Pretoria in her briefing delivered during the debate, observed ‘while Africa was on the menu, it still does not have a permanent seat at the table.’ UN Secretary-General agrees that ‘the composition of the council… has not kept pace.’
It was a stroke of genius of those who conceptualised the debate that it put a spotlight on and made the central focus of the attention of the world’s preeminent peace and security body at the highest levels the historic injustice of Africa’s non-representation in the permanent category and under-representation in the non-permanent category. It became evident from Bio’s address and the briefings from both the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, and Mbete that this injustice was a direct outcome and continuing legacy of the wrongs of slavery and colonialism.
The placement of this injustice in this historical context makes it unequivocally clear that Africa’s exclusion was wrong at the time of the constitution of the UN and its perpetuation after eight decades is more wrong. Thus, noting that ‘most of today’s African countries were still under colonial rule and had no voice in international affairs’ in 1945, Guterres called Africa’s non-representation in the permanent category and underrepresentation in the elected category ‘a glaring omission that has remained unresolved until now.’
Bio was spot on in highlighting how Africa’s exclusion is a glaring omission and even more when he noted that it ‘is not merely an anomaly of statistics, it is a profound historic injustice that must be addressed.’ In elucidating this, Mbete located this injustice ‘in the four centuries of European slave trade starting in 1450 and devastating Africa’s population, culture, and economies, as well as the 1884 Berlin Conference that imposed colonial States.’
This echoes the emphasis that Guterres put in his New Agenda for Peace that ‘[i]f the purposes of the Charter are to be achieved, redressing the pervasive historical imbalances that characterise the international system – from the legacies of colonialism and slavery to the deeply unjust global financial architecture and anachronistic peace and security structures of today – must be a priority.’ As argued in Amani Africa’s special research report, for the African continent, reform of the UNSC ‘is particularly important not only for reasons of justice but also because it has been on the receiving end of the injunctions of the Council without having any effective say.’
As aptly captured in Bio’s address, the pathway for achieving this redressing of the historical injustice is through the Common African Position (CAP) encapsulated in the Ezulwini consensus. This calls for the allocation of two seats in the permanent veto-holding category and two additional seats in the non-permanent category, with the AU deciding the African countries to take the permanent seats.
There is consensus, as captured in the elements paper of the Co-Chairs of the UN General Assembly’s Inter-Governmental Negotiation on UNSC reform, on the need for addressing the historic injustice Africa is enduring. On how to achieve this, Sierra Leone, as the Chair of the African Union’s Committee of Ten on the Reform of the UNSC, affirmed with compelling clarity that Africa’s case is ‘treated as a special case and priority’ and that this is reflected in the Pact for the Future expected to be adopted during the Summit of the Future next month.
It is widely accepted as the speeches during the debate demonstrated that correcting the historic injustice of Africa’s exclusion is the right thing to do. Equally important, it is also a good thing. One thus agrees with Bio that the CAP is ‘premised on the fact that by rectifying the historic injustice, the international community will not only promote greater fairness, equity and equality in global governance but also act on the imperative to ensure the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Council itself.’
The Summit of the Future, as articulated in Amani Africa’s latest special research report, is the opportunity to be seized for reforming the UNSC with the special case of addressing Africa’s historic injustice. In the words of President Bio ‘[it] is absurd for the UN to enter into its eighth decade of existence with the scar of injustice against Africa’. Guterres agreed that ‘it is unacceptable that the world’s pre-eminent peace and security body lacks a permanent voice for a continent of well over a billion people…making up 28 per cent of the membership of the UN.’
Sierra Leone demonstrated why its role of Chairing the Committee of Ten is so deserved and how Africa did the right thing in endorsing its candidacy and supporting its election to the UNSC. Africa could not have asked for a better representation of its case at this material time in point at the highest level in the world’s most powerful body of the UN. It is now incumbent on the Africa Group in New York to throw its full weight forcefully to ensure that the proposition of correcting Africa’s historical injustice ‘as a special case and priority’ in UNSC reform is reflected in the Pact for the Future.
The content of this article does not represent the views of Amani Africa and reflect only the personal views of the authors who contribute to ‘Ideas Indaba’