In the pantheon of United Nations causes, Africa by many measures occupies a preeminent role. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has described “the African challenge” as “the highest priority on my agenda.”1 Africa is the main theater of UN peacekeeping operations, the poster-continent for UN aid appeals, the object of a long series of high-minded promises and home to a huge roster of lavishly funded UN programs, projects, offices, commissions and initiatives.
Nor does the interest run only one way. At the UN itself, African nations field a considerable presence and substantial voice. The previous two Secretaries-General, Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, both hailed from African nations—respectively, Ghana and Egypt. African countries hold more than one-quarter of the 192 member seats in the UN’s chief governing body, the General Assembly. When they band together, this gives them a regional voting bloc rivaled only by the Organization of the Islamic Conference—in which African nations in any event hold more than one-third of the seats.
True, Africa does not hold any of the five veto-wielding seats on the Security Council. But it has enough member states rotating through the ten non-permanent seats that the U.S., in seeking support for ousting Saddam Hussein in early 2003, ended up pleading for help from the governments of Guinea and Cameroon—then members of the Security Council. During the August 2006 Security Council deliberations over the war launched by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia against Israel, it was Ghana which that month held the chair.
But if all this intertwining of interests and influence sounds like the makings of a fortuitous UN-African partnership, think again—especially if the aim is peace and prosperity on the African continent.
Many of us have been brought up, Halloween UNICEF can in hand, to regard the UN as a benevolent institution; unwieldy and bureaucratic, perhaps, but essentially loveable and devoted to the betterment of humanity. In the July 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, we find the iconic image of this approach: the guru of UN development strategy, economist and UN Special Adviser Jeffrey Sachs, sitting cross-legged under a tree, meeting with African village elders while on tour with a reporter to whom he is explaining that poverty in Africa could be wiped out if only the wealthy countries of the world would open their wallets much wider—say, $200 billion worth or so.
There are plenty of reasons, however, to question just how benevolent a force the UN really is, and how much trust we should place in its campaigns for peace and prosperity. Prime among the problems are the UN’s long-standing penchant for dignifying dictators, as well as its current pursuit under various new labels—such as “Millennium Development Goals” and “national capacity-building”—of the old, ruinous formula of economic central planning.
