Can We Trust the P-5’s ‘Unanimous Agreement’ of African Representation at the UN Security Council?

The unanimous agreement of African representation on the UN Security Council is not a structural fix to the systematic marginalization that African nations face on the world stage. Instead, it raises the question of whether it is in the best interest of the continent.

In recent times, the United Nations has, arguably, not done a good job being a representative of the interests of the ‘international community’. As a matter of fact, the UN’s reputation has suffered because of political indecision, inability to mediate international disputes, and seeming bias in operation. There have been massive protests against UN presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali and even Haiti all in 2022, with large swathes of the population rejecting UN policies or seeking the eviction of UN peacekeeping forces and claiming that the UN has not served its stated purpose of mediating conflict or improving security.

In 2023, during the UN General Assembly’s annual debate, the UN president, Dennis Francis, admitted that without structural reform, the effectiveness and legitimacy of the UN Security Council will only be further compromised. He further stated that while conflict continues to spread across the world, the UN remains paralyzed mostly because of the divisions within the P-5 (i.e., the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States) and their competing interests. For context, there have been calls for equitable representation in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) since the 1960s. In 1963, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) recommended that the UNSC be expanded to include ten non-permanent members. In 2021, Ethiopia’s president, Abiy Ahmed, made an appeal that the African Union be represented in the UNSC; and, in 2016, the C-10 (African Union’s Committee of Ten Heads of State) pointed out the worsening marginalization within the UNSC and the need for structural reform. In 2021, the president of the 75th session of the UNGA, Volkan Bozkir, argued that the council’s preventative tools and mechanisms are in desperate need of review. Only recently have those calls been further pronounced especially as the organization failed to land on a unified position concerning the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas war...