Allow me to join all speakers before me in congratulating the President of the General Assembly at its seventy-seventh session on his election and in wishing him well in his role. I also thank the President of the General Assembly at its seventy-sixth session for his excellent leadership. Finally, I thank Secretary-General Guterres and the Deputy Secretary-General for their ongoing leadership of our multilateral Organization.
We meet at a time when the United Nations family is facing its greatest tests. The States Members of the United Nations have to work with the Organization to develop effective responses to the current challenges. As the theme of the General Assembly indicates, those challenges are diverse, immense, yet interconnected, and no country can respond alone. Some have referred to this moment as a key turning point in history. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war strongly influence those attitudes today. However, for South Africa, the real inflection point will be a world attending fully to the needs of the marginalized and the forgotten. Our greatest global challenges are poverty, inequality joblessness and a feeling of being entirely ignored and excluded. Acting on the 2021 Our Common Agenda (A/75/982) vision of the Secretary-General should become the major objective of this time — because addressing poverty and underdevelopment will, in our view, be the beginnings of the real inflection point in human history.
The Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its human rights protocols all commit us to protecting all people without distinction of any kind. We must acknowledge that we face theses crises today because we have not always upheld those foundational principles consistently and fairly. We believe that international law matters when this one is affected, but does not matter when this other one is affected. That does not help to uphold international law.
We have learned a great deal from the COVID-19 pandemic. It has provided us with a road map on what
we should do as the global community and what we should not do in order to address global challenges. We need to use the lessons learned from the pandemic effectively. There were some noble initiatives, such as the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), co-chaired by President Ramaphosa of South Africa, the African Union champion for the COVID-19 response, as well as the Prime Minister of Norway. The ACT-A initiative laid the basis for a fairer distribution of vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. We would like today to thank all of the countries that have acted on their financial commitment to the ACT-A initiative.
Global solidarity is also required if we are to meet other pressing challenges, such as energy and food insecurity, climate change and the devastation caused by conflicts, including the existential threat of nuclear weapons.
Up to now, instead of working collectively to address those challenges, we have grown further apart as geopolitical tensions and mistrust permeate our relations. We should, however, move forward in solidarity, united in efforts to address our common global challenges to ensure sustainable peace and development.
One of the tasks we must successfully implement in order to ensure developing countries are not left behind when treatments are available is to create and support research and innovation capacity in Africa and other parts of the world for vaccine production, to invest in strengthened public-health systems and to produce thousands more qualified professional health workers. All of that requires sustainable investment in higher education research institutions and in global research cooperation.
The mobilization of resources and capabilities to strengthen the pandemic response and the preparedness of all nations must be substantially increased. It would be a tragic indictment on all of us as leaders if future pandemics found the poorest as unprepared as many were for COVID-19.
We need to strengthen the global health architecture in order to ensure that we are better able to meet the challenges of new pandemics and other infectious diseases of concern. South Africa is proud to be part of the solution to those problems through the recent establishment of the first mRNA global-technology transfer hubs, which will contribute to the security of supply of life-saving medication for African countries and other developing countries.
South Africa, like many other developing countries, faces huge development challenges, including in our energy sector. We need to collectively address global energy shortages, including by deploying innovative solutions that are cheaper, cleaner and more accessible. Working with international partners, South Africa is developing its Just Energy Transition Plan in order to significantly reduce harmful emissions in our country. We are working on an expanded green economy intervention that is gaining significant momentum in our country.
I would like to commend the Secretary-General for focusing attention during this session of the General Assembly on transforming education. Education remains one of the most important drivers to end poverty and inequality, and we will work towards increasing access to education that is affordable as a country and as a continent. South Africa has no-fee schools at primary and secondary levels to allow the most vulnerable learners to access compulsory education. We also have a State bursary scheme for poor students who qualify for tertiary education. Over the years those measures have served to increase the enrolment of learners previously unable to access education. In the field of research and innovation, we believe we need more partnerships such as the Square Kilometre Array science infrastructure project hosted in South Africa and Australia, an international partnership that is one of the largest joint scientific endeavours in history. Partnerships of that nature must be encouraged in order to leverage scientific breakthroughs for development purposes.
We also believe that the multilateral trading system must be strengthened so that we can create an environment that is genuinely conducive to fair trade and provides opportunities for developing economies. If actionable steps such as those are not taken, developing countries will remain subject to an unbalanced global financial and trading system. Let us use this moment of renewal to reiterate our commitment to multilateralism as the only means for building a better world. The United Nations itself must of course be transformed so that it fulfils its role in a way that is cognizant of current global dynamics. It is unacceptable that 77 years after the establishment of the United Nations, five nations wield disproportionate decision-making power in the system as a whole. Its transformation must include more representative, transparent and accountable organs of
global governance. In order for our Organization to be effective, the General Assembly must be revitalized and the Security Council reformed. Nor will we have a credible Organization if it cannot hold persistent transgressors of the Charter accountable.
We believe we must act immediately to protect the environment and the world we live in, for ourselves and future generations. While Africa is the region least responsible for the climate crisis, it finds itself at the epicentre of its worst impacts. We should therefore emerge from the twenty-seventh Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 27), in Egypt, with an agreement that contains enhanced and balanced actions on adaptation, mitigation and financing. It must of course take into account our common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. In addition, we must agree at COP 27 on a mechanism for loss and change. In South Africa, our Cabinet has approved wide-ranging policies to ensure that we can meet our newly determined climate-change targets. We have established a climate finance task team to lead and coordinate negotiations with international partner groups in order to give effect to the Just Energy Transition Partnership, which seeks to address South Africa’s investment needs in infrastructure with the aim of facilitating our phase-down of coal so as to ensure that no one is left behind.
I do not need to reiterate that building a better world requires peace and stability. South Africa continues to believe that conflict resolution should not come through fuelling conflicts but through investing in efforts aimed at political dialogue. We should aspire to peace as a global public good. There have been no winners of the wars of the past seven decades. Instead, they have engendered strife, distrust among nations, divisions — as we are seeing this week — a perpetual misallocation of resources to weapons, and increased poverty and underdevelopment. Those are all features and effects of war.
While we work to address contemporary clashes, we should not ignore long-standing conflicts such as that of the people of Palestine, which has been on the United Nations agenda throughout the seven decades of the Organization’s existence. We cannot ignore the words of Daniel Levy, the former Israeli negotiator at the Oslo talks, who addressed the Security Council recently (see S/PV.9116) and referred to the increasingly weighty body of scholarly, legal and public opinion that considers Israel to be perpetrating apartheid in the territories under its control. Israel must be held accountable for its destructive actions, which have significantly impaired the possibility of a two-State solution. Similarly, we cannot ignore the decades-long struggle for self-determination of the people of Western Sahara. We must treat all conflicts across the globe with equal indignation, no matter the colour or creed of the people affected. South Africa also calls for an end to the embargo on Cuba, which continues to impede the right to development of its people. In the same vein, we call for an end to unilateral coercive measures against Zimbabwe, which have compounded the problems experienced by its people and have a detrimental effect on the broader Southern African region.
Our quest to build a better world will remain unfulfilled as long as people are still discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, sex, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture or language. We have a responsibility to make sure that every girl child receives an education and that every woman has an opportunity to work, study or start a business and has choice and control over her life and body. We must also ensure that more women speak at the General Assembly. We need to end the violence perpetrated against the most vulnerable, most often women and children. We have witnessed that women in conflict situations are particularly vulnerable, including women journalists. The murder of Shireen Abu Akleh and others is a stark reminder of the danger that women in conflict situations face. We must do all we can to protect them and make every effort to hold those who harm them accountable.
We must also strengthen the capacity of the African continent’s young people and draw on their voices. In that regard, we need to harness the demographic dividend by maximizing our investment in quality education as a means for addressing intergenerational poverty and ensuring inclusive economies.
Africa is home to more than 1.3 billion people. It is fast emerging from centuries of colonialism, occupation and exploitation, as well as willful neglect and underdevelopment. We now have an African Continental Free Trade Area agreement, and the countries of Africa are laying a firm foundation for a new era of trade, commerce and productivity. Our countries are establishing the conditions for the seamless flow of goods and services between African markets, as well as the growth of industry and the construction of the
roads, bridges, railway lines, ports and power stations that will support growth. As we continue our efforts to end war, conflict and insurgency in several parts of our continent and prevent unconstitutional seizures of power, we will continue to seek greater alignment between our agenda and that of the United Nations and our own body, the African Union.
To overcome all those acutely global challenges, we must agree to a common path out of an increasingly polarized world. A rules-based international system, predicated on international law and strict adherence to the provisions of the United Nations Charter, is essential. Such a system should safeguard the interests of all, not only powerful countries.
We acknowledge the efforts of the Secretary- General through his vision in Our Common Agenda (A/75/982), which we strongly support. We believe that he has provided us with options to put aside our differences, build trust and forge a world where future generations will prosper and thrive. That, and not a mandate of division and conflict, should be the mandate that we adopt.