During an official visit to the Netherlands in May 2023, Kenyan President William Ruto, addressing a dialogue on the then-upcoming Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi, repeated the adage made famous by US senator Elizabeth Warren in 2014: “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you are probably on the menu.”
Ruto was questioning Africa’s ability to access the resources necessary to finance a just transition to low-carbon, sustainable societies within the current framework of an international financial order in whose governance system the continent continues to be severely underrepresented.
In an unseasonably hot New York gearing up for the UN General Assembly and Climate Week meetings of international business, government, and civil society leaders, Ruto’s comments remind us of the gross distortions in the international decision-making architecture, where, for generations, African nations have been denied fair and equal representation.
Our continent’s marginalisation in the Bretton Woods Institutions and the UN Security Council has forced African governments to bear witness to the selective application of international laws and standards, often at our expense. If steps are not taken to redress this glaring imbalance we risk causing irreparable damage to the credibility and authority of international institutions in the eyes of our citizens. And, by extension, engineering a future in which our leaders rightly question the bona fides of a “rules-based international order” whose enforcement is curiously selective and governed by outdated post-war power structures and alliances.
As reported by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, African countries make up 28% of the entire membership of the UN General Assembly. We provide more than 40% of the troops used in UN peacekeeping missions. Yet still, no African nation currently occupies a permanent seat on the 15-strong UN Security Council. This is despite the promises of the 2005 World Summit, where UN members committed to reform the council to make it more “representative, efficient and transparent”.
No African nation occupies a permanent seat on the 15-strong Security Council. This is despite the promises of the 2005 World Summit
Such underrepresentation is not limited to the Security Council. Despite the continent being home to 18% of the global population, Africa holds only 6.5% of voting shares in the outdated quota system of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To put this in context, members of the G7 countries hold more than 40% of voting shares, a figure drastically at odds with their percentage of the institution’s membership, which is less than 4%.
Decisions forged in these institutions directly shape our economies, our security, and our future. To restore the UN’s eminent conflict management body to proper legitimacy, Africa must be granted a seat at the table.
In recent years, the so-called Global North’s promises of partnership have yielded inadequate tangible support to African nations in need. Over the last six years, Africa has experienced 17 military coups — and armed conflicts in 18 countries during 2021 alone. Concurrently, UN peacekeeping operations have shown a steady decline since 2016. While aid to support the war in Ukraine has grown, it has been slashed for Africa. As reported in The Economist, “financial transfers to developing nations plummeted from a peak of $225bn (R3.9-trillion) in 2014 to just $51bn in 2022”. In the same year, remittances by Africans in the diaspora to their families back home topped $100bn — almost twice the cumulative total of international development assistance to the continent, and constituting 3.4% of Africa’s total GDP.
Of course, resentment should not be directed towards the willingness to devote resources to help defeat Russian president Vladimir Putin or unlawful autocrats in other parts of the world. But it should follow that African countries, when in conflict and extreme poverty, be given the same assistance. The selective lack of attention paid to the citizens of Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and Burundi undermines the global commitment to international laws protecting freedom and democracy.
With relations with Europe and the United States coming under increasing strain, talk of multipolarity and forging of alliances with a range of other partners, particularly China and Russia, is gaining traction. Polling undertaken by Gallup shows that, in 2023, China’s approval rating in Africa was the highest it has been in a decade. In the same year, Russia’s approval rating spiked by 8 points to 42% - the same level it held before invading Ukraine in February 2022.
As the world becomes more fragmented by challenges that transcend borders — from military conflicts to climate change and global pandemics — it cannot continue to sideline a continent of 1.4-billion people. International institutions like the UN, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank and the IMF will risk losing legitimacy unless they expand to be more reflective of broader international interests. It is time Africa took up a seat at the table so as to fundamentally reimagine global institutions to align with 21st-century realities.
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