Africa and the US ‘non-proposal’ on UN Security Council reform

Published: September 23,2024

By Tim Murithi 

Professor Tim Murithi is Research Associate with the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa at the University of Cape Town.

The US proposal that Africa gets two seats on the UN Security Council without veto powers would relegate the continent’s 1.4 billion people to permanent second-class citizens on a Security Council that allocates 60% of its agenda to issues relating to Africa.

The reform of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has emerged as one of the most contentious and polarising issues under negotiation in the lead-up to the UN’s Summit of the Future on 22/23 September.

The intergovernmental negotiations framework which has compiled the outcome document effusively billed as the UN Pact of the Future essentially kicked the can down the road as far as undertaking any concrete decisions on UNSC reform.

Twenty years ago, the Africa Union (AU) adopted the “Common Position on the Reform of the United Nations Security Council”, known as the Ezulwini Consensus, through which AU member states demanded two permanent seats on the UNSC “with all prerogatives and privileges of current members”, including the right to invoke the veto.  

For the two intervening decades, all of the Permanent Five (P5) members of the UNSC – the US, UK, France, China and Russia – paid lip service to the idea of UNSC reform, and Africa’s inclusion as a permanent member, but in effect rejected any genuine attempts to place the issue on the agenda. 

This status quo maintenance strategy of the P5 appears to have been disrupted by the announcement from US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who announced that the US was prepared to consider two seats for Africa as permanent members of the UNSC, with a significant snag being that those seats would exclude veto powers.

In effect, the US non-proposal would relegate the African continent’s 1.4 billion people to the category of permanent second-class citizens without any significant decision-making power on a UNSC that allocates 60% of its agenda to issues relating to Africa.

In effect, Africa would once again be confined to the status of spectators in UNSC decisions that affect the lives of its people, repeating the historical exclusion of African countries that transpired in June 1945 when the UN was formally established in San Francisco.  

The fact that the US proposal excludes the veto is a strategy that Washington’s foreign policy mandarins have carefully calibrated and calculated as an opening gambit which is purposefully designed to precipitate rejection from African countries and provoke widespread opprobrium from China, Russia and the Global South.  

The net effect of an all-out rejection of the US “non-proposal” would be the desired response from those who would like to maintain the status quo. In the aftermath of widespread rejection, Washington’s foreign policy establishment can throw its hands up in the air in moral lament, and castigate the Global South for rejecting a perfectly reasonable proposal of permanent membership of the UNSC without any permanent rights.  

The world is already at an inflection point, and convoluted attempts by Washington’s foreign policy mandarins to maintain and defend the status by any means necessary is ultimately a flawed strategy in the medium to long term.  

In effect, the insistence on maintaining the status quo which has its supporters not only in Washington but also London, Paris and Brussels, will only push countries from the Global South away from the decaying and dysfunctional multilateral institutions, such as the UNSC, and to seek alliances in emerging geopolitical groupings, such as BRICS and the Non-Aligned Movement, which will ultimately lead to the formation of parallel and competing multilateral institutions. 

The UK and France, both with populations of 67 million contrasted with 1.4 billion Africans, are the decayed part of the UNSC furniture. The “permanent” presence of the British and French on the UNSC echoes the dying throes of a dysfunctional system in terminal decline, and their presence on the council resembles the gold-plated statues of dead and discredited colonial conquerors of a bygone imperial era.

This is also the reason that London and Paris generally tend to avoid using their veto powers unilaterally, because they know they have no credibility to sit as veto-wielding members of the UNSC.  

The US “offer” to the African continent is analogous to a back-handed slap with a leather glove, an act that European nobility would practise on antagonists that they considered not even worthy of any physical contact. Washington has set the status quo cat loose among the pigeons of change, and may be surprised to find that these birds will not fly! 

The pursuit of a global order that advances the idea of equality among humanity is viewed with scepticism by the agents of US-Western hegemony. The thinking that informed the disingenuous non-proposal to reform the UNSC will only contribute to a more polarised and dangerous world.

Beyond merely moving the deck chairs around the planetary Titanic as it sinks, Washington’s mandarins need to consider a mind shift, go back to the drawing board and frame the discussion through a different prism.  

The UN Summit of the Future is billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine global governance for the 21st century. 

The US “non-proposal” on UNSC reform to Africa is symptomatic of a failure by Washington’s mandarins to identify with their fellow human beings, and will stand out as a pivotal missed opportunity to recognise and acknowledge that the world has changed significantly. Efforts to continue to pursue the reassertion and enforcement of yet another American century could tilt the planet and humanity into an even deeper crisis.

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