In the next month, all African eyes will be on the race to see who will represent the continent on the United Nations Security Council. Polite diplomacy is quickly giving way to horse-trading.
At a meeting in Swaziland in February, the African Union called for two permanent seats with veto power and two additional rotating seats on a reformed Security Council of 26. After this week’s meeting in London, it appears the Africans will have to drop the veto demand in exchange for the G4 (Brazil, India, Germany and Japan) agreeing to 26 members. A UN High-Level Panel set up by Secretary General Kofi Annan had earlier suggested an increase to 24. Disputes still remain as to which country would fill a permanent African seat. Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa have all declared their candidacies. Kenya, Libya and Senegal have also expressed interest. The AU has struggled to achieve consensus, making it likely that the 191-member UN General Assembly will determine the issue.
Cynics have dismissed Nigeria as too ”anarchic”; Egypt as too ”Arab”; and South Africa as too ”albinocratic”. In its favour, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous state, has an impressive peacekeeping record dating from the UN’s protracted Democratic Republic of Congo crisis in the 1960s to the more recent Liberia and Sierra Leone missions. Nigeria organised a UN anti-apartheid conference in 1977 and chaired its anti-apartheid committee for much of its existence.
It has produced impressive UN technocrats like Ibrahim Gambari (current Undersecretary General for Political Affairs) and Adebayo Adedeji (former executive director of the UN -Economic Commission for Africa). Nigeria is -currently in the throes of a difficult transition from 15 years of military misrule, but continues to suffer from the excesses of a profligate political class and communal strife.
South Africa has several advantages: the constitutional democracy of Africa’s richest country — albeit with massive inequalities — is admired; it has produced four Nobel peace laureates in Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk; and Thabo Mbeki has won much praise for his peacemaking efforts in the DRC, Côte d’Ivoire and Burundi.
South Africa, a respected member of the global South, also has wide-ranging trade interests in Asia, Europe and the Americas; a close partnership with Brazil and India; and recently organised two high-profile UN summits on race and sustainable development. On the negative side, South Africa’s military, academic and economic institutions are still seen as white-dominated, and memories of South Africa’s destructive destabilisation of the region in the 1980s still linger amid continuing doubts about whether many South Africans have truly embraced an African identity.
Egypt has a proud history of international peacekeeping and produced a UN secretary general in Boutros Boutros-Ghali. But Egypt has been accused of having its body in Africa and its heart and head in the Middle East. The apparent Arab League support for Cairo at a meeting in Algiers earlier this year reinforced this perception. Egypt’s legendary leader, Gamel Abdel Nasser, also annoyed black Africans by talking patronisingly of ”diffusing the light of civilisation into the furthest parts of the virgin jungle”.
Egypt’s current leader, Hosni Mubarak, has until recently been seen as aloof from African affairs. Questions also continue to be raised about Egypt’s democratic and human rights record, with the 77-year-old Mubarak widely expected to add to his 24-year rule.
The UN Security Council must be reformed in September, when world leaders meet in New York. Every effort at reforming the Council in the past 40 years has, however, failed. The UN’s chattering classes have long dismissed the UN’s ”Open-Ended Working Group on Council Reform” as ”the Never-Ending Working Group”.
African diplomats are unlikely to reach consensus and if only one African member is chosen in the General Assembly’s secret ballot, Nigeria and Egypt may well lose out to South Africa’s more extensive diplomatic and trading network and ”rainbow” mystique.
Adekeye Adebajo is executive -director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town. He was a member of the Resource Group advising the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change