The UN at 80: The Twin Demands for Structural Justice from Africa and the Caribbean

𝐀𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬

𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧 𝐔𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐌𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭

As the United Nations marks its 80th anniversary, the organization finds itself confronting a fundamental crisis of legitimacy, viewed most acutely from the Global South. For the African continent and the nations of the Caribbean, the UN system is characterized by a crippling paradox: it is both the historical champion of decolonization and the modern enforcer of a global order designed by colonial powers.

While they acknowledge the UN’s critical roles in diplomacy, peacekeeping, and humanitarian aid, leaders from these regions are unanimous in their assessment that the institution is critically "unfit for purpose." They argue that the promise of sovereign equality, enshrined in the UN Charter, remains undermined by a governance structure and a global financial system frozen in the geopolitical realities of 1945.

For Africa, the issue is political marginalization in global security; for the Caribbean, it is the existential threat posed by an inequitable financial system that actively fuels the climate crisis. The 80-year milestone demands not passive celebration, but radical structural justice to ensure the organization’s survival and relevance in its ninth decade.

The Demand for Political Justice: Africa and Security Council Reform

For Africa, the lack of permanent representation on the UN Security Council (UNSC), the body responsible for mandating and enforcing international peace and security, is the most egregious symbol of historical injustice. The continent’s exclusion from the permanent veto-wielding membership, held by the P5 (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States), is a direct legacy of the era when the UN was formed, a time when the vast majority of African nations were still governed by colonial powers.

Today, this historical wrong translates into contemporary paralysis. African conflicts and security challenges routinely dominate the UNSC agenda, consuming up to 70 percent of its time, yet decisions affecting over one billion people are made without an empowered African voice at the decision-making table. The current structure effectively gives five nations, representing the victors of the Second World War, the power to veto actions designed to protect and stabilize African regions, often leading to delayed intervention, prolonged conflicts, and, frequently, a reliance on regional or foreign military solutions.

This demand for political justice is comprehensively crystallized in the Ezulwini Consensus, a unified, non-negotiable position adopted by the African Union in 2005. This framework explicitly calls for two permanent seats with veto power for Africa, in addition to two more non-permanent seats, thereby correcting the historic imbalance. This effort is spearheaded by the Committee of Ten (C-10). African leaders consistently use the UN General Assembly (UNGA) platform to insist that this is not a plea for favour or an act of petition, but a necessary correction to maintain the Council's relevance and legitimacy in a multipolar world.

President Julius Maada Bio of Sierra Leone, speaking as a representative of a nation that successfully transitioned from civil war with UN partnership, articulated the moral failing of the current system when international crises erupt: “A veto should never be a verdict against humanity,” he stated, underscoring that selective adherence to international law has severely tested the UN's credibility. He challenged the organization to meet the moment of its 80th year with courage: “Small states are not inherently small,” he said. @Our sovereignty is equal, and our responsibilities are the same. The world does not need a louder UN. It requires a braver UN.” The sentiment is clear: until the UNSC reflects the world’s current demographics and geopolitical reality, its resolutions will be viewed with skepticism, limiting their moral and political authority.

Similarly, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of Ghana highlighted the resulting erosion of global faith. While acknowledging the UN as the “best means” for the world to address its challenges, he cautioned that this ability is contingent on deep reform. He noted that the theme of rebuilding trust “is an acknowledgement that things are not what they ought to be in our world,” emphasizing that the "mutual trust among nations that is required to ensure harmony has considerably diminished" due to the sclerotic structure.

President William Ruto of Kenya reinforced this point with a call for the institution to reflect current power dynamics, insisting that the UN must “make it fit for purpose, reform its structures, strengthen its mandate, and ensure its decisions reflect today’s realities rather than the geopolitical map of a bygone era.”

By demanding permanent seats, Africa insists that its immense human resources, its regional security mechanisms (like ECOWAS), and its vested interest in global peace are recognized as essential, not supplementary, to the maintenance of global order.

The Fight for Financial Survival: The Caribbean and the Bridgetown Initiative

If Africa seeks to repair the broken political architecture, the Caribbean is focused on fixing the fundamentally unjust financial architecture that threatens its very existence. For Caribbean states, climate change is the primary, non-stop driver of economic catastrophe. They are on the front lines, bearing the brunt of severe storms, rising sea levels, and catastrophic biodiversity loss, while contributing a negligible fraction of global emissions.

The traditional development model, which classifies many island states as "middle-income" based on flawed GDP-per-capita metrics, pushes these nations into an endless, vicious cycle of debt.

This existential predicament is what drove Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley of Barbados and other regional leaders to formulate the Bridgetown Initiative (BTI). The BTI is not merely a request for increased aid, but a comprehensive, market-driven plan to overhaul global finance and provide vulnerable nations with the resilience funding they desperately need. It seeks to change the fundamental lending and repayment rules that currently trap island states.

The initiative’s core proposals are revolutionary and pragmatic:

1. Climate-Resilience Debt Pauses: Creating standardized, automatic clauses in all loans that trigger an immediate moratorium on debt service payments following a major climate disaster. This mechanism would instantly free up national capital for emergency relief and reconstruction, bypassing the lengthy process of seeking aid or new, crippling loans.

2. MDB Reform and New Concessional Financing: Transforming Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) to dramatically scale up concessional financing and increase their lending capacity by trillions of dollars. The BTI insists that lending must be based on a country's vulnerability criteria (exposure to climate shocks) rather than its income criteria (GDP per capita), which currently excludes high-risk nations from necessary low-interest financing.

3. Mobilizing Private Sector Capital: Establishing a new global funding mechanism to deploy hundreds of billions of dollars for climate mitigation and adaptation, potentially financed by reallocating the vast subsidies currently given to the fossil fuel industry, thereby redirecting climate-destructive capital toward climate resilience.

The urgency of this initiative is echoed by the leaders. Prime Minister Philip Davis of The Bahamas provided a sobering statistic that defines the crisis for the region: "Over 40% of my country's national debt is as a direct result of the impacts of climate change." He stressed that this perpetual cycle of destruction and reconstruction, fueled by debt, makes it impossible to "fulfil the reasonable aspirations of our people for national development."

The Caribbean has also strategically shifted its pursuit of climate justice through legal accountability. Ryan Pinder, Attorney General of The Bahamas, explained the limits of traditional multilateral diplomacy: “We have tried diplomacy for many years as a region… As we can see, that has gotten very little traction and the results are minimal.”

This frustration has led the Caribbean to champion efforts, like securing an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice, to establish the legal obligations of major polluters. As Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines observed, such legal victories confirm that climate treaties now carry "substantive legal obligations," strengthening the negotiating hand of island states and paving the way for legally mandated financial solutions. The BTI is the financial complement to this legal strategy, offering a viable pathway out of debt slavery imposed by the ecological recklessness of others.

The Moral Imperative: Decolonization and Reparatory Justice

For both African and Caribbean nations, addressing the UN at 80 requires confronting the unfinished business of its founding, namely, the completion of decolonization and accountability for the historic crime of transatlantic chattel slavery. These are not merely historical grievances but active determinants of current economic vulnerability.

Despite the UN's commitment to self-determination outlined in Chapter XI of the Charter, the Caribbean region still harbors vestiges of colonial rule. Several territories remain listed under the UN's Special Committee on Decolonization (the C-24), including islands controlled by the United Kingdom, France, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

For Caribbean leaders and several civil society organizations like the One St. Martin Association (OneSXM), the persistence of these non-self-governing territories represents a profound contradiction to the values the UN purports to uphold. It highlights the continued hypocrisy of celebrating global freedom while erstwhile colonial powers maintain political and economic control through dependency structures, in other words, a continuous colonial domination, thus limiting the region’s collective bargaining power on issues like climate change, debt relief and Reparatory Justice.

Furthermore, the call for Reparations and Reparatory Justice has solidified into a unified regional demand championed by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), with its Ten Point Plan as the basis for further negotiations. Leaders argue that the systemic underdevelopment, lack of resilient infrastructure, critical health issues and structural vulnerability of their economies are not accidental but are direct, measurable consequences of the exploitation intrinsic in the evil system of chattel Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and subsequent colonial rule. The demand for Reparations is therefore framed not as a request for aid, but as a legal, financial and moral obligation for European states to address the generational damage caused by their crimes against humanity.

This demand for reparatory justice directly intersects with the climate crisis. The financial vulnerability that necessitates the Bridgetown Initiative is viewed as a modern manifestation of historical debt imposed by Slavery, an "ecological debt" owed by the wealthy North to the impoverished South.

By advocating for a comprehensive, ten-point plan, CARICOM seeks specific actions, including a formal full apology and acknowledgment of the debt, repatriation programs, Indigenous People’s development programs, psychological rehabilitation, technology transfers, and the cancellation of existing debt that links back to colonial exploitation.

For the Global South, the UN cannot fully achieve its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and lasting peace without a robust mechanism for addressing these foundational historical economic and moral wrongs that underpin global inequality.

Conclusion: A Decisive Moment for Multilateralism

The African call for political justice in the Security Council, the Caribbean’s insistence on financial justice via the Bridgetown Initiative, and the collective moral demand for Reparations and complete decolonization, are three intrinsically linked facets of the same fundamental argument: that the UN system must finally move beyond charity and transactional aid to embrace structural equity.

The 80th anniversary of the United Nations is the moment to decide whether the institution will serve as a dynamic engine for justice or remain a fossilized monument to an obsolete world order.

The cost of inertia is no longer merely theoretical; it is measured in the lives lost to climate-fueled disasters in the Caribbean and in the protracted conflicts and missed development opportunities across Africa.

These demands force the Global North to confront the fact that global security, economic stability, and the UN's relevance are indivisible from the survival and prosperity of the most vulnerable. For the UN to secure a legitimate and effective future, it must answer the call of its most loyal yet most marginalized members, transforming itself from a relic of the post-war era into a truly modern, brave, and just institution for the twenty-first century.

Built from the ashes of World War II , the United Nations seems to have frozen in time. Nothing symbolized this more than the malfunctioning of the elevator and the teleprompter during the visit of US President Donald Trump. The elevator stopping seemed to reflect the inertia of the world organization and the teleprompter refusing to work seemed to be a metaphor for the need to stop talking and start acting. If it is to fulfill its mandate of pursuing world peace and avoid another global conflagration, it better pay serious attention to those two unintended metaphors.

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