Africa: What Does Africa Really Want?

The continent’s case for “global restructuring” is muddled.

Although African countries would seem to be of one mind in regard to the perceived “historical injustice” believed to have been meted out to the continent by the dominant powers in the international system, there is little agreement on how to go about seeking redress. Consequently, for all the vitriol aimed at the contemporary world order for its purported “anachronism,” African countries seem undecided on whether to make a case for abolishing the system in toto or expanding it to accommodate the historically excluded.

Nothing encapsulates this equivocation better than the continent’s attitude toward the United Nations Security Council, the UN’s principal decision-making organ. While it tends to be depicted as the symbol of the institution’s insufferable inegalitarianism on the one hand, on the other hand, permanent membership “with the same rights and responsibilities,” as Nigerian Vice President Kashim Shettima insisted, for example, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly last month, remains the holy grail.

Nor is this indecisiveness necessarily new. The Ezulwini Consensus [PDF], the African Union’s (AU) 2005 “common African position on the proposed reform of the United Nations” captures the continent’s muddle. For instance, while it expresses an opposition “in principle to the veto,” the AU nonetheless maintains “that so long as it exists, and as a matter of common justice, it should be made available to all permanent members of the Security Council.” Hence the demand for “full representation of Africa” in the Security Council with “not less than two permanent seats with all the prerogatives and privileges of permanent membership, including the right of veto.”

The inchoateness of the African position notwithstanding, representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have at various times expressed broad support for “structural reform,” including “adding seats for underrepresented regions such as Africa.” Whether this unprecedented show of solidarity is sincere or mere posturing dictated by political exigency is beside the point. What is clear is that, for the first time in recent memory, there seems to be a genuine appetite for implementing the kind of reform (or is it transformation?) long advocated by member countries who grumble that they were either not represented at the table when the UN came into being, or were “not in a particularly strong position” “when the first reform took place.”

All of which makes it a particularly propitious moment to press the affected regions to smooth the evident wrinkles in the fabric of their argumentation. African countries, for one, need to come to a coherent stance on the future of the United Nations Security Council. If, as they have bemoaned over the years, the Security Council’s assumed lack of democracy is the quintessence of everything that is wrong with the UN, the logical position is to demand its abolition. To ask for the incorporation of new members who will then proceed to operate with the same charter that was up until recently denounced as undemocratic and obnoxious smacks of opportunism and moral inconsistency.

Besides, there is little guarantee that abolishing the Security Council (a distant prospect at this time) will not create more problems than it solves. Most likely, it will be discovered that, if there is anything worse than a UN in which some have veto power, it is one in which none do. More realistically, African countries may need to abandon the quest for a rose-colored equalitarianism whereby country A is automatically allotted what country B gets and what country B gets only, and embrace instead the reality of a geopolitical landscape characterized by permanent interests and evolving alliances. In sum, the mantra for the AU, which, suffice to say, is itself riddled with hierarchies of various sorts, should be nimbleness and adaptability, rather than equality. As seems to have dawned on a growing number of African countries in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the current global configuration, its undeniable constraints notwithstanding, hardly forecloses opportunity for diplomatic maneuvering by the so-called “weaker powers.” It is one thing to demand legitimate changes in the global configuration, and another thing to imagine that nothing can be done unless and until those calls were heeded.

Which throws up an interesting question: beyond the undoubted prestige, what obvious tangible benefits does permanent membership of the Security Council really confer? One can conceive the various things that a notional African permanent member can do with the status, but the real question is what it will do for that same country. Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa have been touted as possible candidates. What, concretely speaking, will permanent membership of the Security Council help these countries accomplish? For instance, aren’t, say, Nigeria’s time and scant resources better spent coming to terms with its nagging developmental challenges than a quixotic pursuit of United Nations Security Council permanent membership?

To be sure, one is not suggesting that a country be fully clothed in perfection before it can seek admission to this or any other elite transnational group; still, setting aside the justice of the existence or composition of the Security Council, it is extraordinary that a group of countries, to summon the great Dr. Johnson, will be so hurried by its own ardor to distant views as to neglect the truths that lie open before it.

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Among those proximate truths, none wrenches the gut more than the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Sudan, where, since April last year, a bitter power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has left more than one hundred fifty thousand people dead, seven hundred fifty thousand on the verge of starvation, and an estimated 25.6 million people, over half of the population, in need of humanitarian aid. Given the rightful expectation that countries seeking to be big players on the international stage should first take care of business in their backyard, the absence of coordinated African action on the Sudanese conflict is inexcusable.

On the whole, it would appear that over time, African countries have allowed their sense of being “wronged,” understandable as that may be, to override the obligation for clarity on appropriate means of redress.

A rethink is needed.