Hurricane Katrina is a reminder that all humanity needs to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), President Thabo Mbeki wrote in his weekly newsletter on the ANC’s website on Friday.
Adopted in 2000, the goals represent a commitment to the right to development, to peace and security, to gender equality, to the eradication of the many dimensions of poverty and to sustainable human development.
Mbeki quoted reports emphasising that poorer citizens of New Orleans, in the world’s wealthiest nation, were much more vulnerable to the effects of Katrina than their wealthier compatriots and that there was a racial dynamic to the divide.
Next week, 185 world leaders will also discuss the progress made to achieve the UN MDGs.
”Perhaps if these leaders of the nations of the world fully absorb the great lessons communicated by the tragedy in New Orleans, they will take the necessary decisions to ensure that all humanity achieves the MDGs,” Mbeki wrote.
He said that bearing in mind the painful lessons of the tragedy in New Orleans, ”they, and us, will have to understand and accept:
the central and critical importance of the global struggle against poverty;
the need to transfer developmental resources from the rich to the poor;
the imperative, globally, to respect the practice of human solidarity, especially in our highly interdependent and globalising world;
the strategic role of government in these processes; and
the vital necessity to involve the masses of the people in the challenging effort to determine their destiny.”
Mbeki expressed heartfelt sympathy to ”the sister people of the United States, especially the residents of New Orleans”.
”To all of them we reaffirm that because they know what suffering means, our own people share the pain afflicting especially the black, the Native American and the poor of the US as they strive to overcome the consequences of Hurricane Katrina.” — Sapa