A Seat at the Table, or Two (Is it Time for Africa?)

by Christopher Paller Gerale

How is Africa forcing the United Nations to reckon with its own foundational inequalities?

The Office of the President, State House, Sierra Leone

The UN need not be reformed; it must be destroyed. For only from the collapse of the old can something fairer, freer, and genuinely multilateral be born. ~ Christopher Paller Gerale

In the September heat at UN Headquarters in New York, His Excellency Julius Maada Bio stood at the podium with a weight that had been carried for generations. Not just as President of Sierra Leone, or as chair of the African Union’s Committee of Ten (C-10), but as the embodied voice of fifty-plus nations and over a billion people who believe something long overdue must be fixed.

“We speak today for a continent that has long been underrepresented in the decision-making process that shapes our world,” Bio said, outlining the African Union’s demand plainly: two permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), two additional non-permanent ones, and if the veto power remains then it must be extended to new permanent members “as a matter of justice.”

The UNSC was born in a world still reeling from colonialism, a world ordered by the victors of the second World War. Africa’s nations, when they eventually joined this body of states, found themselves outside the highest tier of global decision-makers. By virtue of geography and power, none of the original five permanent members (P5) are African nations. That discrepancy — structural, glaring — has festered. In 2005, African leaders adopted what is known as the Ezulwini Consensus, asserting that the continent should be granted two permanent seats with full veto privileges, plus five non-permanent seats. Celebrating the 20 years of the consensus, the AU decreed that it should decide which nations fill those permanent seats, based on “representative nature” and “capacity”.

Greatly, Africa is about remaking the sense of what justice looks like in global governance. However, unfortunately, Africa must face the hard gravity of realism: those who hold power rarely share it, even in the name of fairness. Realist thinkers like John J. Mearsheimer would remind us, justice rarely reorders power. In an international system driven by self-interest and competition, multilateral reform is seldom granted on moral grounds alone. Institutions like the United Nations, Mearsheimer argues, are reflections of the global balance of power, not engines of change within it.

In truth, the world may have outgrown the United Nations. What began as a promise of collective security has calcified into a hierarchy of privilege, where vetoes outweigh voices and procedure disguises paralysis. If reform remains forever deferred, then perhaps what the twenty-first century requires is not another round of negotiations, but a new beginning altogether, a new architecture of global governance that reflects the moral and material realities of our time. The UN need not be reformed; it must be destroyed. For only from the collapse of the old can something fairer, freer, and genuinely multilateral be born.