Ghana's Mahama Calls Africa's Exclusion From The Security Council 'Fundamentally Unacceptable In The 21st Century'

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 7 Of 15

File Photo Via: @JDMahama on X

Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama told the UN General Assembly that Africa's lack of a permanent seat on the Security Council is "fundamentally unacceptable in the 21st century", and warned of "a dangerous drift toward unilateralism, lawlessness, and the erosion of multilateral norms".

Addressing the General Debate on Thursday, September 24, Mahama argued that past injustices remain built into today's power structures. "Africa is home to 1.5 billion people, over 18 per cent of humanity, and constitutes the largest regional voting bloc in this General Assembly. Yet, Africa remains without a single permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council," he said.

"We cannot credibly champion the sovereign equality of nations while preserving a global governance structure designed for the post-war geopolitical realities," he continued. "Security Council reform is not a favour to Africa; it is an imperative for the legitimacy, credibility, and survival of the United Nations." In line with the common African position, he called for permanent African representation carrying the same rights, responsibilities and veto powers as existing members.

He extended the case to the global economy. "The same systemic inequality permeates the international financial architecture. Developing nations borrow at interest rates up to eight times higher than industrialised nations," he said. African and Caribbean countries hit by climate disasters, he said, were forced into crippling debt to rebuild from floods and droughts they did not cause. "Governments are forced into a tragic choice: to service predatory debt or serve their people. We demand reform."

Much of the speech dealt with reparatory justice, after the General Assembly adopted a resolution in March, which Ghana had pressed for, declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans the gravest crime against humanity. "Real repair demands structural transformation," Mahama said. "It requires dismantling the persistent engines of exploitation, unfair global trade, predatory resource extraction, discriminatory credit ratings, unsustainable debt burdens of the Global South, and the continued export of raw materials from Africa while real value addition and job creation occur elsewhere." He welcomed moves by the Netherlands, Germany and France to join the dialogue.

Turning to the present, he warned of the drift toward unilateralism and lawlessness, adding: "No human civilisation deserves to be annihilated, certainly not a member state of the United Nations." The remark came two days after US President Donald Trump told the Assembly he was weighing a deal with Iran against "annihilating" it.

Mahama's speech showed how the multipolar debate is often framed from Africa. It was less about which great powers should lead than about a continent, long the subject of decisions taken elsewhere, claiming a share in making them. Africa, he said, was seeking equal partnership, not charity.

The national statements delivered at this year's UN General Assembly left little doubt about how far the ground has shifted. Opening the debate, Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders that "we are clearly moving towards a multipolar world" and that the movement is irreversible, though he warned it could take the shape of fragmentation and transactionalism rather than a networked order rooted in international law. The backdrop was hard to miss: a US-Israeli war with Iran nearly seven months old, the US capture of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US President who used the same podium to say he was weighing a deal with Tehran against "annihilating" it. Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the World Trade Organization was on life support and condemned the use of tariffs as "a weapon of coercion and blackmail", while India's S. Jaishankar declared that the post-1945 order is giving way to new realities. Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Spain's Pedro Sánchez, from very different vantage points, both called for an end to the veto held by the Security Council's five permanent members. Russia's Sergey Lavrov went further, telling the Assembly that "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok" and that a fairer, multipolar order was emerging. What remains unsettled is not whether power is spreading, but whether the institutions built in 1945 can adjust fast enough to hold it together.