Once again, it is a great
honour and pleasure for me to address this
distinguished Assembly. Let me start by congratulating
Mr. Joseph Deiss on his assumption of the presidency
at the sixty-fifth session of the General Assembly and
assuring him of my delegation’s full support and
cooperation. I would also like to convey my sincere
appreciation to his predecessor, His Excellency Mr. Ali
Abdussalam Treki, for his efficient and effective
conduct of the previous session. My gratitude also goes
to the Secretary-General for his comprehensive account
of the work of the United Nations and his analysis of
the challenges facing our global community.
In my statement I would like to talk both about
the successes that my country has achieved with the
help of the international community and about the
reforms we now need to make in the way we interact
and govern ourselves globally. My Government is
sincerely grateful for the international community’s
engagement with Sierra Leone’s efforts to put the
country on a path to sustained economic growth and
development. Building on this engagement, our
country has significantly improved our international
standing in many areas.
The Global Peace Index now ranks Sierra Leone
as the fifty-third most peaceful country in the world.
The Mo Ibrahim Index records that we are one of the
five crisis-affected countries that have made a
significant leap forward in democratic governance. A
recent International Monetary Fund review shows
improvement in our public finances, with our 4 per
cent annual economic growth rate higher than the
average rate of 2 per cent for sub-Saharan Africa. We
have also made steady progress in our rankings on
doing business, corruption perception and democracy.
In addition, earlier this year I was the proud recipient
on behalf of the people of Sierra Leone of a peace prize
awarded by ACCORD, the African Centre for the
Constructive Resolution of Disputes. And only last
week my country received a Millennium Development
Goal Award for showing outstanding leadership in the
fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
My Government has also continued to emphasize
the protection of the basic rights of the people of Sierra
Leone. We have put in place comprehensive justice
sector reforms in response to both national and global
demands, to ensure that the rights of citizens are
preserved, and that they have access to justice for all.
And the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone
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has assumed a lead role in advising my Government on
building a culture of human rights. It ensures that the
Government ratifies international treaties and protocols
and fulfils its reporting obligations. A case in point is
our recent validation of the common core document
that forms the basis for all reporting on international
treaties.
Sierra Leone is among the few countries
emerging from conflict that have formulated a
comprehensive action plan for Security Council
resolutions 1325 (2000) and 1820 (2008). My
Government is determined to ensure effective
implementation of the action plan, particularly in
addressing gender-based violence as well as enhancing
women’s participation in politics and the public sector.
My Government’s commitment to free media is
equally strong. No journalist has been imprisoned in
my country since I assumed office. We have transformed
the Government-owned broadcasting services into what is
only the second independent public service broadcaster in
Africa, the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon witnessed the launch of
this historic, groundbreaking initiative in June. It is the
beginning of a new era of access to independent, unbiased
and impartial information in our country.
My Government is also delivering results on the
key priorities in my Agenda for Change to improve the
lives of all Sierra Leoneans. We have launched free
health care for pregnant and lactating women, as well
as children under five, for the first time in our history,
improving access to around 300,000 women and more
than a million children. We have also begun the serious
commercialization of agriculture, the mainstay of our
economy, particularly through smallholder farmers, for
whom we are facilitating improved mechanization,
irrigation and the establishment of farming
cooperatives. We have successfully made significant
progress on road construction and the rehabilitation of
electricity supply in key provincial cities and towns, to
generate economic activity across the country. We have
made great strides in attracting large-scale private
sector investors from international companies,
following the Sierra Leone Trade and Investment
Forum in London last year. Furthermore, to maintain
macroeconomic stability and make those achievements
sustainable, my Government also remains firmly
committed to the fight against corruption.
Despite that progress, many challenges remain. I
am proud of what Sierra Leone has achieved so far. But
we need to further enhance our capacity to promote
and protect human rights, establish good governance
and managerial capacity across the whole public sector
and fight corruption and trafficking in narcotic drugs.
For all that, our country will need further technical
assistance and cooperation, private capital investments
and technology transfer.
Most importantly, we are not oblivious to the
imperative of consolidating peace through enhanced
political dialogue, tolerance and ensuring a free and
fair electoral process. With those elements and our
political resolve, we will make further progress
towards peace, security and a stable and open
democracy.
I shall now turn to the theme of the Assembly’s
sixty-fifth session: reaffirming the central role of the
United Nations in global governance. It could not have
been better timed, at a moment when the global
community is grappling with myriad challenges facing
the international system. The end of the cold war,
together with an explosion in information and
communication technologies, gave rise to a new
paradigm of flexible or loose functional coalitions
involving State and non-State actors. A new
configuration of interdependent relationships,
economic, social, political and ethnic in nature, has
emerged from those historic circumstances.
There are fears that globalization nurtures the
dominance of power politics, a growing disparity
between the North and the South, intolerance of
different values, a tendency to resort to force to solve
international conflicts, and neglect of the environment.
At the same time, globalization has led to a multilevel
system of governance that is beginning to address
global issues ranging from economic interdependence,
migration, financial crises and drug trafficking to the
pandemics of tuberculosis, avian flu, HIV/AIDS and
malaria.
It is in recognition of the imperative to promote
multilateralism and build synergies with both State and
non-State actors that I commend the choice of theme.
We support the United Nations more than any other
organization as a centre of global governance. It has
the unique characteristics of a global mandate and
universal membership. Those characteristics make it an
indispensable and neutral catalyst for the achievement
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of international cooperation in solving international
problems of an economic, social, cultural or
humanitarian character. The centrality of the role of the
United Nations in global governance cannot be
overemphasized.
The recently concluded High-level Meeting on
the Millennium Development Goals revealed that
progress has been uneven and that developing
countries, particularly those in Africa, continue to be
most vulnerable to the effects of globalization. The
prevailing global recession resulting from the
economic and financial crisis that struck developed
economies has further compounded that challenge. In
this context, my Government believes that the United
Nations remains the crucial hub for norm-setting and
harmonizing the actions of nations for the maintenance
of international peace and security and for the
attainment of our development goals.
The Assembly, meeting at the turn of the
millennium, decided that reforming the Security
Council and making it more accessible, transparent,
equitably representative and accountable was long
overdue. That brings me to the crucial issue that has
led us in Africa to consistently reiterate that there can
be no meaningful reform of the Council without
allocating permanent seats to the continent.
No one continent should have an exclusive
monopoly over membership of the Security Council.
There is no justification for a discriminatory allocation
of seats, nor can we debate endlessly and ignore the
realities of our rapidly changing global circumstances.
While the fifth round of talks has not truly led to
a compromise-oriented solution, distilling all positions
into a single negotiating document has been a
significant step in the right direction. We in Africa look
forward to and support a process that will allow the
text to evolve during the next session of the General
Assembly in an open, inclusive and balanced manner,
towards a solution that can garner the widest possible
political acceptance by Member States. We urge all
delegations to muster the political will required for
progress.
I wish to conclude my statement by saying that
the moment has come for us to address the historical
injustice inflicted on Africa by allocating the continent
no less than two seats, with all their attributes and
privileges, and two additional seats in both the
non-permanent and permanent categories of the
Council. I do not need to emphasize that at the
inception of the United Nations, most of Africa was not
represented and that as a result Africa remains to this
day the only continent without a permanent seat in the
Council. To ensure greater relevance of the Security
Council within a revamped United Nations system,
Africa demands permanent representation on the
Security Council, with all the requisite attributes.