As I have just been re-
elected, this is my first opportunity to speak to this
forum at the beginning of my second term. It is
therefore with great pleasure that I am here today for
this sixty-first session of the General Assembly.
Please allow me to congratulate Mrs. Haya
Rashed Al-Khalifa on her election as the new President
of the General Assembly. We are fortunate to have as
our President a diplomat with such magnificent
credentials. In addition, this is a milestone for the
United Nations which makes us all proud. My country,
Sao Tome and Principe, is a firm believer in gender
equality. I am proud to say that we have a very high
percentage of girls in our schools. A woman has held
the presidency of our National Assembly, and the
current head of our Supreme Court is a woman. We
have had two female Prime Ministers, and today
women head half of our Government ministries. We are
therefore delighted by her election and wish her every
success.
I thank also the outgoing President, Mr. Jan
Eliasson, for his remarkable work, especially in the
area of advancing reform of the United Nations. Words
are insufficient to pay tribute to outgoing Secretary-
General Kofi Annan. A very special son of Africa, he
has been an extraordinary leader of our Organization.
He has worked unceasingly, showing enormous vision
and great courage. No challenge has been too large or
too dangerous. My country and I owe a special debt of
gratitude to the Secretary-General, whose intervention
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during a 2003 coup attempt helped preserve democracy
in Sao Tome and Principe. My people and I thank him.
We can only hope that his successor will prove as
praiseworthy as he.
We are meeting here today at a time of growing
international tension and of increased terrorist attacks
on innocent civilians on every continent. We see
unending conflicts, even genocide. Never have we
needed the United Nations more than at this time, when
life as we know it on our planet is threatened by
climate change. It is tragic that in the face of all these
challenges, the United Nations is often unable to act,
because internal politics and a lack of resources
constantly hamper its ability to respond as needed.
No country can live in a vacuum in today’s world.
For better or for worse, we are together in deciding the
fate of our planet. We can no longer be only citizens of
our town, our region or our country. We also cannot
blindly think that our religion is the only religion,
when God created so many, all believing in a Supreme
Being but worshiping in different fashions. God also
painted us in a rainbow of colours and did not leave
instructions for one colour to be in charge of all the
others. Nor did He choose a special region or language
to rule over everyone else. We must pull together so
that no one is left behind. There is enough for
everybody, if only we would share. We all could live in
freedom and in peace, with work, health, education and
dignity, if only we would work together.
While we must work together for certain common
goals, we must also respect our cultural differences.
One size does not fit all. The practice of democracy in
Latin America may not be the same as democracy in
Asia. What worked to create economic growth in
Europe may not work in Africa. Each country, each
people, each region, each town must have the freedom
to decide what is best for it, while also respecting the
rights of all and everyone’s responsibility as a world
citizen.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic is still out of control. In
my own tiny, isolated island country, we were long
immune from it. Despite desperate efforts at education
and prevention, our tiny population is being laid waste
by a shocking increase in the number of HIV/AIDS
cases. We have only one hospital and a handful of
doctors. We are helpless in the face of this crisis, as we
cannot afford the antiretrovirals we need for all our
sick people, nor do we have the ability to police our
maritime borders to keep out the main source of
infection. Our women and children are among the
millions of other faceless victims around the world,
and, without help, we could one day face extinction.
Climate change is already sabotaging many of the
efforts being made to achieve sustainable development
goals, augmenting poverty in developing countries,
especially in the least developed countries and the
small island developing States. There is new and strong
evidence that most of the warming observed is
attributable to human activities. As the polar ice caps
melt, my low-lying island country faces a second kind
of extinction, that of disappearing beneath the waves of
the ocean.
I cannot continue without again asking the
Assembly why a country of 23 million people is not
represented at the United Nations, where every country
is supposed to have one vote. I refer here to Taiwan, an
established democracy whose people live in freedom
and in peace. Their dynamic and technologically
advanced economy is a model for creating wealth in
today’s global economy. Taiwan is also an excellent
world citizen, generous in humanitarian and
development aid.
For centuries, the people of Sao Tome and
Principe were debilitated by endemic malaria, and
thousands died. Countless attempts to control the
mosquitoes carrying that disease failed, until Taiwan
brought the necessary know-how and resources to bear.
Today cases of malaria have been reduced by 60 per
cent. Our doctors and nurses say that there have never
been so few cases of malaria in living memory. Thanks
to Taiwan and also to the Global Fund to Fight
HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, we are well on
our way to finally bringing this scourge under control.
In addition to humanitarian and development aid,
Taiwan also maintains productive commercial ties with
many United Nations Member countries and is a
member of the World Trade Organization, the Asian
Development Bank and the Asia Pacific Economic
Group. The principle of universality is consecrated in
the United Nations Charter. Permanent members of the
Security Council should not continue to ignore the case
of Taiwan.
Another issue that continues to require the urgent
attention of all of us is the embargo on Cuba. This is a
relic of the cold war that should be lifted immediately.
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While mentioning the Security Council, I must
say that my country supports the calls that have
reverberated through these halls for more than a
decade. We must reform the Security Council. Its
membership and institutional structures reflect
outdated geopolitical realities and political thinking
that was shaped by the world of 1945. Giving only five
permanent members the veto power and special
privileges puts the Security Council out of touch with
the world. Africa, for example, does not have a single
permanent member. This is not acceptable.
I will close by talking about poverty, or rather
what we are all seeking, which is the end of poverty.
The Millennium Development Goals are a noble
project. Sao Tome and Principe is grateful to Secretary-
General Kofi Annan and the Goals’ Director Jeffrey
Sachs for their tireless efforts to pull poor countries out
of what Professor Sachs so rightly calls the poverty
trap.
But how did so many countries get into the
poverty trap? We are unlikely to get out, or stay out,
unless we know how we got there in the first place. I
think it is time we all faced some of the unspoken
truths about poverty. Why are we poor? Economists
traditionally told us that economic wealth comes from
a combination of man-made resources, such as roads,
factories, machines, telephone systems; human
resources, hard work and education; and technological
resources, technical know-how and technological
machinery. But if this were true, then poor countries
could simply build some schools, pave roads and buy
some computers, and we would quickly catch up with
rich countries.
But there is something wrong here. While
Taiwan, South Korea and China have all been doubling
their incomes every decade, many poor countries
making these changes are not growing faster than rich
countries. In fact, they are growing more slowly, or
even getting poorer. So there is a new theory that says
the more you have, the faster you grow. This could
explain why rich countries stay rich, and poor countries
fall farther behind — except that it does not explain
how Chile, India, Singapore, Mauritius and Botswana
are catching up. These dynamic countries — not Japan,
not Switzerland, not the United States — are the
fastest-growing economies on the planet. Fifty years
ago they were trapped in poverty. That is no longer the
case.
Why have so many other countries been left
behind? The newest theories tell us that the answer is
simple. With or without natural resources, with or
without human resources, with or without technology,
badly governed countries are poor countries. Bad
government causes poverty. When States do not protect
property and people; when national revenues benefit
self-interested political insiders who oppose any
actions that would lead to more equal distribution of
income and resources; when Government officials
waste funds; when people are hired on the basis of
being from the right family or region or political
grouping; when nobody monitors Government
spending; when corruption is noted but never punished;
and when illegal activities are not restrained by law,
the press or democratic opposition, then miserable
results follow.
We have all heard of the “natural resource curse”,
which shows that large amounts of oil or diamonds, for
example, tend to make democracy and good
government less likely. But recent studies have also
found that there is also an “aid curse”. Without
meaning to do so, multilateral and bilateral donors can
actually make Governments worse. And just as badly
governed countries tend to be poor, so badly governed
aid projects, without transparency or accountability,
also tend to fail.
Humanitarian aid has proven far more successful
than long-term development aid, because it is given in
highly targeted bursts. It is also usually given as
medicine, food, clothing or tents and taken directly to
the location of the tragedy, with doctors and nurses on
the ground rather than consultants.
Of course, there have been some beautiful
successes in aid programmes, mostly in health care,
with victories over smallpox, drug-resistant
tuberculosis and river blindness. Adult literacy has
risen, as had life expectancy until the AIDS pandemic
wiped out that improvement.
Aid gives hope to millions of people around the
world. We simply need to mend it, not end it. My own
country has certainly suffered from its own share of
bad governance — for the most part unwittingly,
because of our own inexperience. But we are learning
quickly in our short history, and we now have one of
the most stable and robust democracies in all of Africa.
We have the prospect of oil in our waters and in
waters shared with our neighbour, Nigeria. We have
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already taken steps to ensure that any potential
petroleum resources are not wasted but are protected
for the benefit of all our citizens with an oil revenue
management law that was passed unanimously in our
parliament in 2004.
We cannot let the past bury the future. We can lift
billions out of poverty. When I was first elected
President of my country five years ago, I lit a candle of
hope for the long-suffering people of Sao Tome and
Principe. We are not there yet, but the light is getting
brighter.
If development were easy, everyone would
already be developed! We cannot sit in supine
indifference. Let us renew our efforts and work
together with respect, dignity and dedication for the
benefit of all the peoples of the world and for the fate
of our beautiful planet.