President Museveni: “Africa deserves a UN permanent seat, don’t accept anything less”
2 min readPresident Museveni on Thursday asked African countries not to accept anything less at the UN Security Council reforms until the continent is granted at least two permanent seats.
Speaking to a group of foreign ministers from across the continent, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni stressed that Africa, like the rest of the world’s developing areas, is not asking for favors when it demands adequate representation.
Reforms, he claimed, will “obviously” make the global body more inclusive.
“The UN Security Council should have been and must be reformed. This is not [a] favour by anybody but a right of all peoples that inhabit the planet earth,” he said.
The Ministers meeting in Kampala are from ten African countries known as the C-10, or Committee of ten, as designated by the African Union.
Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Congo-Brazzaville, Libya, and Namibia are among them.
Africa and other regions have been pushing for changes to the UN Security Council, the UN’s most powerful organ, for nearly two decades.
The continent claims that the Council, which was established with five permanent members and ten non-permanent members, is disconnected from reality.
The five countries that are now permanent members of the UN Security Council had strong economies, had emerged triumphant after WWII, or had a large population when the UN was founded in 1945.
The permanent members are the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France.
“Was the assumption that we would never be free? If that was the assumption, then the assumers were wrong,” President Museveni told the ministers.
“It is, therefore, a circus to waste time, year after year, debating the obvious. We demand our right to have permanent seats, not the seasonal ones allotted to us by the present unfair system, on the UN Security Council.”
Most of the demands for reforms have previously met a dead end, owing to the fact that any changes to the Council’s structure require the Council’s consent, which includes a vote by all five permanent members.
Also read,
President Museveni’s government ban women from occupying front seats in trucks
Follow us
