Bright Ofori writes: Who should hold Africa’s at least two permanent seats on a reformed UN Security council?
As world leaders gather in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly, the conversation on Security Council reform has once again returned to the centre of global diplomacy. The current Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, has repeatedly reminded member states that the architecture built in 1945 no longer reflects the world of today, and nowhere is that gap more glaring than in the continued absence of permanent African representation on the Council, which we all agree. It is a democratic deficit that the international community can no longer explain away, and one that Africa itself must now insist on correcting. My advocacy is simple in principle but deliberate in design. Africa, a continent of fifty-four countries, should be granted a minimum of two permanent seats on a reformed Security Council. The first should belong to the African Union, representing the continent as a single political voice. The second should rotate every two years among Africa's recognised regional economic blocs, such as ECOWAS, SADC, the East African Community and others, so that no single geographic zone of the continent is left permanently on the margins of power. I describe this as a minimum deliberately. Two seats are the floor of what fairness demands for a continent of this size and consequence, not the ceiling of what Africa should ultimately expect from a genuinely reformed Council.