UN’s 75th birthday a sombre occasion to reflect on its failings

The 193-member UN commemorates its 75th birthday in September. The UN emerged from the ashes of World War 2 in 1945 to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. But, as UN secretary-general António Guterres recently conceded, “Today we have a multilateralism that has no teeth.”

The multilateral system has three pillars: peace, human rights and development. All three are under severe strain from the headwinds of the populist nativism blowing from Washington.

The UN’s work is being bankrupted by its largest donor behaving like a deadbeat dad. The US has irresponsibly withdrawn from the World Health Organisation (WTO) amid a global Covid-19 pandemic.

The Trump administration has also wielded a wrecking ball through the dispute resolution mechanism of the

World Trade Organisation

(WTO).

The world body’s 1945 charter was drafted largely by Christian powers, which insisted that only “peace-loving” nations could be members, and pushed Christian concepts of peace and love as the antidote to war.

UN peacekeeping succeeded in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Cambodia, El Salvador and East Timor, but failed spectacularly in Rwanda, Angola and Bosnia.

The powerful 15-member UN security council has five anachronistic veto-wielding permanent members — the US, China, Russia, Britain and France — which still reflects the alliance of victors 75 years ago. While the council represented 22% of the UN membership in 1945, it accounts for just 8% of members now.

The body’s legitimacy is therefore threadbare, and should include countries such as Brazil, India, Nigeria and SA to regain credibility.

The UN human rights council, created in 2015, remains as ineffectual as its discredited predecessor. Abuses continue from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and China to Saudi Arabia and Kashmir, even as black citizens continue to be maimed and murdered by white police officers across US cities.

The Albanian-Indian Catholic nun and Nobel peace laureate Mother Teresa promoted the rights of the poor, with 4,500 nuns across 133 countries. She can thus be seen as the embodiment of global human rights.

Critics have, however, argued that the canonised nun believed that “the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross”, noting that she failed to provide proper health care in her clinics, as some rich countries such as the US similarly neglect universal health coverage. Mother Teresa was further condemned for opposing the empowerment of women — discrimination that occurs across many countries.

The UN development system has produced “lords of poverty” committed to bureaucratic inertia and allergic to innovation.

More than a billion people still live on less than $1.25 (R21) a day; few rich countries contribute 0.7% of gross national income to development assistance, a target set 50 years ago; environmental degradation continues unabated.

The most recent embodiment of global socioeconomic development is Africa’s prophet of regional integration, Adebayo Adedeji, who headed the UN Economic Commission for Africa from 1975-1991.

He used the ECA to launch the most sustained assault on the structural adjustment programmes implemented from the 1980s by the World Bank and IMF.

These programmes involved large, enforced cuts in health, education and employment.

Like Argentina’s Raúl Prebisch in Latin America two decades earlier, Adedeji urged greater intraregional growth and integration.

The late former president Nelson Mandela commemorated the UN’s 50th anniversary in 1995 by noting that:

● “The youth ... are ... bound to wonder why it should be that poverty still pervades the greater part of the globe;

● that wars continue to rage; and

● that many in positions of power and privilege pursue cold-hearted philosophies that terrifyingly proclaim: I am not your brother’s keeper!”

These words continue to ring true 25 years later, rendering the UN’s 75th birthday a rather sombre affair. Adekaye Adebajo is director of the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for pan-African Thought and Conversation.

Pillars of peace, human rights and development are under severe strain from the UN’s threadbare legitimacy and US populist nativism