Does Africa Need A Seat At The UN Security Council, Or A Change In How Power Is Exercised?

The 81st UN General Assembly met under the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: A United Nations that delivers for all.” I followed the General Debate closely. For different reasons, leader after leader called for reform of the United Nations. Small countries want the Security Council restructured, above all to broaden its representation. Some also want an end to the veto wielded by its five permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

As I listened, I kept wondering whether Africa will ever have a permanent place at the table where war and peace are decided, and on what grounds it should continue to press for one.

Brasília and Washington open the debate

By a tradition dating back to 1955, Brazil opened the General Debate on September 22, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defended multilateralism at a time when the major powers increasingly prefer unilateralism. He renewed Brazil’s long-standing call to enlarge the Security Council with new permanent members.

President Donald Trump followed, as the host country’s leader traditionally does. Defending the war against Iran, he told the Assembly that “while others have talked, I have acted,” and said he had to decide between a deal with Tehran and annihilating it. He called the International Criminal Court “an evil group of people” and urged its member states to leave it. Africa hardly featured; the deals with Africa were struck on the sidelines.

Mia Amor Mottley: an African speaking for all Africans

Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley of Barbados, a source of pride to Africans on the continent and in the diaspora, continues to make strides far beyond Barbados. In a world in which African voices are becoming endangered, I admire her boldness on many issues. Of course, that same boldness rules her out of the pool of women being considered to succeed António Guterres.

In her address to the Assembly on September 24, 2026, she called for the Caribbean to remain a zone of peace. On Haiti, she backed the full, long-promised deployment of the 5,500-strong Gang Suppression Force and the renewal of its mandate, and she did not mince words: “Enough is enough.” She spoke up for Cuba and for dialogue grounded in sovereign equality.

She linked slavery to today’s global order. She argued that the mindset that built and sustained slavery is the same one that preserves inequities in the UN’s own power structures and in the international financial architecture. She also insisted that the Caribbean does not ask for reparations without accepting responsibility for its own self-repair. No African leader said it better. In that hall, Mottley was an African speaking for all Africans.

She also put the reform question more sharply than anyone. While supporting permanent membership of the Security Council for Africa, and probably for the Caribbean, she rightly pointed out that the issue is not only who sits at the table, but how power at that table is exercised. Africa should keep that sentence in its pocket.

Accra, Nairobi and Abuja: the same hymn sheet

President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana spoke in the tradition of Nkrumah. He noted that Africa, with 1.5 billion people, is home to over 18 percent of humanity and forms the largest regional voting bloc in the General Assembly. On that basis, he demanded permanent African representation on the Security Council with full veto powers.

He highlighted the March 2026 resolution, tabled by Ghana and backed by 123 nations, declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity; the same resolution Mia Mottley celebrated. He argued that true repair means dismantling unfair trade regimes, discriminatory credit ratings, unsustainable debt and the export of raw materials without value addition. He insisted that Africa’s critical minerals be processed on the continent. Twice, he condemned corruption in Africa.

President William Ruto of Kenya pointed out that every nation has one vote in the Assembly, yet on war and peace five nations hold a permanent power that the other 188 do not. Africa, with 54 member states and more than a quarter of the Assembly, has no permanent voice and is too often the subject of Council decisions: “permanently discussed, yet permanently excluded.” He answered the claim that reform is impossible by recalling that in 1963 the Assembly amended the Charter to enlarge the Council from eleven to fifteen members.

He noted that developing countries borrow at rates two to four times higher than developed nations, and that biased credit ratings have cost Africa about $75 billion. To his credit, he conceded that reform abroad cannot substitute for accountability at home, including confronting corruption without equivocation.

Nigeria spoke through Vice President Kashim Shettima, who delivered President Bola Tinubu’s statement. He demanded at least two permanent seats for Africa, with the veto for as long as it exists, and five non-permanent seats, in line with the Ezulwini Consensus and the Sirte Declaration. His best line was that “the world of 2026 cannot remain captive to the distribution of power in 1945.” He said Nigeria is ready for greater responsibility, citing its sacrifices in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali and The Gambia, and its mediation and security work through ECOWAS, the AU and in the Gulf of Guinea.

Having served in several of those theatres, I can confirm that Nigeria’s peacekeeping record is real. But, as the lawyers say, past consideration is no consideration. Nigeria’s sacrifices in Liberia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere are honourable, but they now belong to the archives. A permanent seat is not a reward for what a country did in the 1990s; it is a bet on what it can deliver today. And a Nigeria that cannot secure its own highways will struggle to persuade the world that it can carry the weight of a permanent seat with a veto.

Our conflicts are not our credentials

Here I part company with an argument I heard too often that week. It runs like this: because the Council spends so much of its time on Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, the Sahel and eastern Congo, Africa deserves a permanent seat to shape those decisions. Ruto’s phrase “permanently discussed” captures a real frustration. But I do not accept that a continent’s conflicts are its qualifications.

– Babafemi A. Badejo is a former Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Somalia and a former Professor of Political Science and International Relations. He is the author of the best-selling Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics and of Somalia Just Before Al-Shabaab: Why Peace Was Elusive. He is a recipient of the Mandela Lifetime Achievement Award of the Annual Africa Conference at the University of Texas at Austin, the Medal of the Order of Timor-Leste, and Djibouti’s 27 Juin 1977 Order.