Ghana presents its compliments to the President and congratulates him on his election to preside over the General Assembly at its seventy-eighth session.
Ghana also uses this — the greatest of all platforms — to express the deep condolences and sympathies of its Government and its people to the Governments and the peoples of Morocco and Libya over the recent tragic events that have engulfed their countries.
I do not need to employ any hyperbole or find fancy words to state the reality of the situation that humankind currently faces. Our world is not a happy place today. Wherever we look and to whichever area of our lives we turn our attention, there is unhappiness, distrust and a loss of confidence in the structures that have guided the governance of the world since the end of the Second World War. nearly eight decades ago.
The theme chosen for the seventy-eighth session is “Rebuilding trust and reigniting global solidarity: accelerating action on the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals towards peace.
prosperity, progress and sustainability for all”. The choice of that theme implies that there is a general acknowledgement that things are not what they should be in our world. The mutual trust among nations, which is required to ensure harmony, has considerably diminished. The cohesion that we need to build the peace and prosperity of our societies is disintegrating and nearing Cold War lows. We do not seem to have any common values on which we can all agree, or common goals to which we all aspire. The fault lines are not just between the poor and the rich, the South and the North, or the developed and the developing countries. Even within well-established and rich countries, the tensions over trade, climate, political boundaries and geopolitical spheres of influence are palpable. Long- held definitions are being challenged, sacred truths and beliefs are being questioned or discarded outright and. in some instances, the deliberate peddling of blatant untruths has become acceptable.
The United Nations Organization, under whose auspices we. the nations of the world, are gathered for the annual review of the world, was established in the belief that our common humanity would be the overriding consideration in dealing with the problems that would invariably arise when we deal with one another. There is no doubt that the Organization has achieved a great deal in its 78 years of existence, of which we can all be justifiably proud. But it is also true that the reluctance of the nations that were the major Powers at the time of its founding to agree to any reform to reflect current realities has led to the undermining of the credibility of the United Nations and some of its organs, in particular the Security Council. Ghana is currently serving out the second year of its two-year term as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. That is the fourth time that we have had the privilege of serving on the Council in the 66 years since we joined the United Nations, as the first post-colonial African nation to do so.
It has been a sad and disappointing experience for us. We have witnessed at first hand, over and over again, that the great Powers of the United Nations might be preaching democracy, fairness and justice around the world, but they are happy to practice the opposite here at the United Nations, prioritizing parochial interests over those of humankind. In 2017. the first time I addressed the General Assembly as President of my country (see A/72/PV.11). I spoke at length on the need for reform of the United Nations and of the Security Council in particular. I said then that the urgent need to reform the Organization had been talked about and scheduled for a long time, but that somehow we had never found the courage and the will to execute it. I said then that Ghana supports United Nations reform, especially of the Security Council, as set out in the African Common Position on Security Council Reform based on the Ezulwini Consensus.
I said then that the time was long overdue to correct the long-standing injustice that the current structure and composition of the Security Council represent for the nations of Africa. After serving on the Council at this difficult time in the world, our views on the need for reform have been even more strongly reaffirmed. We cannot continue to preach democracy, equality and good governance around the globe, and we cannot insist on peace and justice in the world, when our global Organization is seen by the majority of its Members and the people of the world as being hampered by an unjust and unfair structure.
The Assembly has quite properly chosen the rebuilding of trust as critical for restoring stability and prosperity to our world. We cannot rebuild such trust when the Organization that should bring us together is seen by many as helping to perpetuate an unfair world order, which is reinforced by an inequitable, dysfunctional global financial architecture.
For the past year and a half, a full-scale war has been waged in the centre of Europe. The United Nations appears unwilling or unable to influence the events taking place in Ukraine. Ghana has sat on the Security Council throughout that period and can testify that the global solidarity we seek to reignite under the umbrella of the United Nations will happen only if. and when, it suits those who wield the mighty power of the veto. And. at the moment, there is nothing to show that those countries have any interest or inclination to make that happen. Ghana still believes that the Organization provides the best vehicle for the world to manage its hydra-headed problems, but it can function effectively and meet our expectations only when we reform the pillars upon which it rests. Anything short of that will continue to undermine its credibility.
I do not refer to the events in Ukraine and seek to pretend to ignore the tragic events in my own neighbourhood of West Africa and the Sahel. Instability in the Sahel and widespread terrorist activities have put West African countries under severe political pressure and economic strain. Several countries in the region
have lost vast stretches of territory to the rampaging terrorists. Coups d’etat have re-emerged as what some mistakenly hoped would be the solution to the threats that confront their nations. We in the West African region are trying as best as we can. under the very trying conditions we face, to deal with the situation. We are convinced that the conflicts that continue to plague our continent, and our region in particular, would be more satisfactorily resolved if the international community were to support, and not undermine, the efforts of our regional and continental organizations to deal with them. Africans fought and died in the Second World War in defence of Europe and its allies and reset the world towards the path of peace and prosperity that their nations and citizens have enjoyed for decades now. It is surely time for the world to reciprocate in our time of need.
We in Ghana are holding firm to our belief in democracy as the best route to building the prosperous nation that is our aim. It is true that the economic dividends that many of our citizens justifiably expected from the democratic process have not come as fast as had been anticipated, but we are determined to hold fast to the course because we believe that ultimately it will succeed in delivering freedom and prosperity for the mass of our people. We are also obliged to countenance, for the first time in recent human history, not just the questioning of democracy and a deliberate campaign of disinformation against democracy but also the propagation of authoritarian rule as a faster route to economic advancement. The belief of young people in democracy as the governance model that is best suited to building peace and prosperity in our society is under systematic attack. The economic impact of the coronavirus disease pandemic and the impact of the war in Ukraine have only added to the pressure and the anxiety of our young people.
We can certainly also do without having to spend the huge amounts of money we currently spend on security, at our northern borders in particular. At this time, unhappily, we feel no sense of the international solidarity that we believe we should receive. It is surely in the interests of the whole world that West Africa should be peaceful and prosperous. We want our young people to be part of a peaceful and prosperous West Africa, rather than part of the thousands who arrive at an unwelcoming Europe after perilous journeys across the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea.
We do not seek to shirk any responsibility for the problems we face that are of our own making, and it bears repeating that we are not craving for sympathy and do not want to be a scar on anybody’s conscience. But we cannot — and the world should not — pretend that the current economic and social conditions of Africa have nothing to do with the historical injustices that have fashioned the structures of the world. It is time to acknowledge openly that much of Europe and the United States was built from the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood and horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the centuries of colonial exploitation. Maybe we should also admit that it cannot be easy to build confident and prosperous societies from nations that for centuries had their natural resources looted and their peoples traded as commodities.
For centuries, the world has been unwilling and unable to confront the realities of the consequences of the slave trade, but that is changing gradually, and it is time to bring the subject of reparations firmly to the fore. Granted that current generations are not the ones that engaged in the slave trade; however, that grand inhuman enterprise was State-sponsored and deliberate, and its benefits are clearly interwoven with the current economic architecture of the nations that designed and executed it. Reparations must be paid for the slave trade. No amount of money will ever make up for the horrors, but it would make the point that evil was perpetrated, that millions of productive Africans were snatched from the embrace of their continent and put to work in the Americas and the Caribbean without compensation for their labour. If there is any hesitation in some minds about the paying of reparations, it is worth considering the fact that, when slavery was abolished, the slave owners were compensated for the loss of the slaves, because the enslaved human beings were labelled as property, deemed to be commodities. Surely, that is a matter that the world must confront and can no longer ignore. The African Union has authorized Ghana to hold a global conference on the issue in Accra in November.
It is probably also the time to return to that vexed subject of illicit financial flows out of the continent of Africa. I refer to the report of the panel chaired by the highly respected former South African President. Thabo Mbeki, on the illicit flow of funds from Africa, which states that Africa is losing more than $88 billion annually through illicit financial outflows. Yes. those monies too must be returned to the continent. It is
difficult to understand why the recipient countries are comfortable about retaining such funds and are happy to call those countries from which the monies are taken as corrupt. I believe that a joint task force of the African Union Commission and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development secretariat, under the auspices of the United Nations, should be charged with finding ways of stopping the damaging outflows.
Before the pandemic, as in many other parts of the world, we were making progress with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). and we had good reason to believe we would achieve the 2030 target. Today the picture we have of our performance is not very bright. Most of the 21 targets designated for achievement by 2020 have not been met. and we are not on track to achieve many other targets by 2030. According to The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023. just 12 per cent of the SDG targets are on track to be achieved. Progress on 50 per cent of the targets is weak. The most disappointing part is that we have stalled or retrogressed with respect more than 30 per cent of the targets. We need to accelerate action on the entire project.
It is within our capacity to turn things around. A good start would be to make the needed changes to the structures of our Organization; then, we can rebuild trust and reignite global solidarity.