By Dan Agbese
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 (UNGA). 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 15 minutes. The late President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
addressed the assembly a day after U.S. 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 70s, 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 artefacts 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 UNGA, 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 is
a veteran journalist and writer
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