South Africa Tells UN That Economic Coercion And Africa's Exclusion Are Eroding Trust In Multilateralism
UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 6 Of 15
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| File Photo Via: @RonaldLamola on X |
Ronald Lamola, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, delivered the national statement on Thursday, September 24, which is Heritage Day in South Africa. He opened by recalling that 60 years ago the Assembly condemned apartheid as a crime against humanity, calling apartheid's fall "a glorious story that attests to what multilateralism can deliver".
That history framed what followed. South Africa, he said, had built "a democracy strong enough to withstand and resist attempts at external supervision and tutelage". He did not say from where such attempts came.
On coercion he was direct. "We are also deeply concerned by the wielding of economic weapons to coerce countries into abandoning their chosen development trajectories," he said. He called for an end to the blockade of Cuba, for Cuba's removal from the US list of State sponsors of terrorism, which he called unfounded, and for the "urgent removal of sanctions against Zimbabwe". "Unilateral coercive measures have negative spillover effects that seriously undermine third countries," he said, and called for international courts to be protected "from sanctions and intimidation".
South Africa, which now chairs the Southern African Development Community, wants deeper regional trade so that its economies are "better prepared to absorb the shocks of unilateralism", he said.
The core of the speech was a critique of how global power is distributed. "African citizens are growing weary of their continent being consigned to the periphery of global governance," Lamola said. Africa is home to nearly a fifth of the world's population and more than a quarter of UN member states, he noted, yet 70 per cent of Security Council resolutions over the past decade have concerned conflicts on the continent. "Permanent seats for Africa in the Security Council, with all the prerogatives of permanent membership, are long overdue," he said, reaffirming the Ezulwini Consensus.
He carried the argument into finance. African governments, he said, faced a choice between meeting citizens' needs and satisfying creditors, and had spent roughly as much on debt service in the past year as was needed to close the continent's infrastructure financing gap. Climate responses, he said, were constrained by "a climate finance architecture stacked against developing nations". South Africa backed a Borrowers' Club to counterbalance creditors and, with Brazil, Norway and Spain, called for an International Panel on Inequality.
He described Israel's conduct in Gaza as genocide and reaffirmed support for a two-State solution and for self-determination in Western Sahara.
South Africa did not use the word multipolar. Its argument was about fairness within the existing system rather than its replacement: restoring trust in multilateralism, Lamola said, "will not happen without meaningful reform of global governance, principally the UN Security Council".
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.