VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA
United Nations Organisation [UNO] is about to fail, after keeping the world’s peace for 81 years and making sure there has been no war as global, as all-out, as World War Two which cost 60 million human lives?
Secretary General António Guterres said last week that the UN faces “imminent financial collapse” amid unpaid annual dues and other issues. Only 36 of the UN’s 193 member states have paid their 2026 dues in full; $1.5 billion in dues is outstanding; and the US, which is supposed to contribute 22% of the UN’s budget, has slashed voluntary funding to UN agencies and refused to make mandatory payments to its regular and peacekeeping budgets. Guterres said, “The crisis is deepening, threatening programme delivery and risking financial collapse. And the situation will deteriorate further in the near future.”
Until I saw this statement by the Portuguese diplomat, I had thought that it was only Nigerians that are having budget problems this year due to the new tax laws. During my early primary school days, BBC’s Hausa service, which reached deep into rural parts of Northern Nigeria, frequently mentioned the UN as “Majilisar Dinkin Duniya.” That is, the council for stitching the world. Korea; Vietnam; Middle East; Lebanon; Rhodesia; South Africa; Cyprus; Kashmir; Cambodia; Mozambique; Angola; Western Sahara; news from every world trouble spot was replete with mentions of the UN.
In my young mind, I imagined UN to be a room full of tailors, with their Singer machines, busy stitching clothes. Elders in my hometown often mentioned a man called “Usal” as the world’s most powerful man. I later learnt that this was U Thant of Burma, UN’s third Secretary General [1961-71]. After him, the names Kurt Waldheim of Austria, Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, Kofi Anan of Ghana, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea and Mr. Gueteres became household names here. All of Africa stood aghast in 1981 when USA repeatedly vetoed the OAU’s candidate for secretary general, Salim Ahmed Salim of Tanzania. Only the Peoples’ Republic of China stood by Africa and repeatedly vetoed candidates favoured by the West, until the slot was zoned to Latin America and de Cuellar clinched it.
UN is collapsing? It set me thinking; which other international organsations that have made so much impact in our lives now risk collapse, and can the new Board of Peace, with Donald Trump as its Chairman for Life and possibly Chairman After Life, fill the vacuum? What happens to World Health Organisation [WHO] led by Africa’s fluffy-haired son Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu? As WHO’s director general, this Ethiopian confronted the mightiest health challenge of the last 100 years, the COVID 19 pandemic. Mr. Trump has now pulled USA out of WHO; what if aliens from Mars arrive in Florida with a new virus?
What happens to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation [UNESCO]? You mean, all its mighty achievements in the fields of education, science and culture will be Gone with the Wind? What about United Nations’ Children’s Fund [UNICEF]; who will cater to the needs of the world’s children, without whom human life will come to a screeching halt? What about United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], upon whom millions of child, women, sick and elderly people displaced by war and famine look up to?
Not only the UN and its agencies, but recent changes in the world order threaten to eclipse many other international agencies that have been a feature of our lives. Will there be ECOWAS in the next decade? Already, the exit of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger Republic has robbed it of more than half of its territory, though not its population. With the policy of suspending any member state where democratic rule is overthrown, Guinea Bissau was recently suspended and Benin Republic narrowly escaped the same fate. Who knows which country will be next?
African Union [AU] is much less visible today than it was during our school days, when it was known as Organisation of African Unity, OAU. In those days, nearly everybody in Africa was in the know ahead of the annual OAU Summit. It was colourful and dazzling. Mobutu Sese Seko, Muammar Gaddafi, Anwar Sadat, Jerry Rawlings, Robert Mugabe, Gnassingbe Eyadema, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Daniel arap Moi, Julius Nyerere and Field Marshal Idi Amin were all sights to behold. Not to forget Murtala Mohammed, who dazzled OAU’s late 1975 summit in Addis Ababa with the fieriest speech in its history: “Africa will not bow to the dictates of any so-called super power!”
Organisations that once dominated the news in Africa are now gone, such as East African Community [EAC], which fell apart in 1977 due to quarrels between Jomo Kenyatta, Idi Amin and Julius Nyerere. Is the Southern African Development Community [SADC] still there? Not much is heard of it these days. Where is the Mano River Union of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea Conakry and Cote D’Ivoire? I can understand why the African Frontline States is no longer there, since Apartheid ended in South Africa 31 years ago, but where is the Arab Maghreb Union of Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia?
Before we Africans mourn too much, remember that Arab League is mostly unheard of these days. In my secondary school days, my Egyptian teacher called me “Mahmud Riad,” after the extremely visible Arab League secretary general, from Egypt. Since Arab League has largely faded, so has the Arab Rejectionist Front of Iraq, Syria, Algeria and Libya, which formed the most steadfast front against Israeli occupation of Palestine. Today you have Arab monarchs groveling at the feet of Donald Trump and dashing him a luxury plane.
Who hears these days when Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] is holding its bi-annual meetings in Vienna? In days past, Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani’s body language was enough to shoot up international oil prices. Organisation of American States [OAS], you mean you are there when Donald Trump plucked away the President of Venezuela, seized the country’s vast oil fields and said he will personally run the country? What do you think old man Simon Bolivar will say, you guys having thrown away his hard fought battle to liberate Venezuela and three other countries from the Spanish Empire 200 years ago?
Where is the [British] Commonwealth of Nations, which once made Nigerian kids to march on the streets and say God Save the Queen? Vladimir Putin, where is Commonwealth of Independent States [CIS] that Russia and eleven other former Soviet Republics formed in 1991? Look, where is the Association of South East Asian Nations [ASEAN]? Just because some of its members made major leaps economically, what about the others that are still struggling, such as Laos and Cambodia? You Asian guys even formed what you called South East Asia Treaty Organisation [SEATO], where you teamed up with Western powers allegedly to checkmate the spread of communism. You mean, there is no imperative to checkmate renewed colonisation of some countries and thwarting your progress through high tariffs?
Where is the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation[APEC] that you guys invented when ASEAN and SEATO became invisible, ostensibly to bring China and US together with others in a Pan-Pacific economic handshake? It used to hold high profile summit meetings but I haven’t heard about it for some time now.
Anyway, we Third World folks are not the only ones facing collapsing institutions. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO], touted by Whites as the most powerful military alliance in world history, is coming apart, with its strongest member [USA] threatening to seize the territory [Greenland] of another member [Denmark]. What’s the rationale then for stopping Russia from seizing Ukraine, China from seizing Taiwan, Turkey from seizing Cyprus, Serbia from seizing Kosovo, Ethiopia from seizing Ogaden, Morocco from seizing Western Sahara, UK from seizing Gibraltar or Nigeria from seizing Bakassi?
European Union [EU] is much less visible these days since the Brits bolted out and others are less eager about it following the influx of many East European countries. Even the Whites down under, where is the Australia-New Zealand-US [ANZUS] military alliance, to checkmate China and Russia from reaching down into the Pacific? By criticising the US attempt to grab Greenland, is the Aussie prime minister not saying bye bye to ANZUS?
I am just wondering; what ever happened to the UN Convention on Law of the Sea? Is there any provision in it for some countries to bomb boats in international waters on suspicion of drug smuggling or to stop some countries from exporting their oil? I hear less these days of my favourtite international organisation, World Wildlife Fund for Nature [WWF]. Are elephants, rhinos, lions, polar bears, blue whales, pandas and Siberian tigers no longer threatened with extinction? Or are you now saying good riddance to king cobras, great white sharks, killer orcas, prairie wolves, Nile crocodiles, New Zealand’s tuatara lizards and Galapagos giant tortoises?
UNUNCHR
