Excellencies, we, each year, find time to meet here for one course- to better our world and to renew our commitments to each other.
The challenges of the yester years can not now be solved by the same solution we identified in our last general assembly. New trends and new dimensions of the same or similar challenge emerge with each passing day. Yet the resilience and the undying hope that we can defeat all, and triumph above all together stands out clear.
Excellencies, it is the realization that by remodeling ourselves, our interests and our mindsets with each changing global trend and each emerging challenge that has seen us come up with new solutions and identify better approach to global problems.
At the core of its interests, each nation has its citizens and civilians at heart and since Humanity has always looked onto each other for progress and this gives rise to the interconnectedness of the international system, the practice of two neighbors, one asking salt from the other replicated in the growth of international aid and donor grants, the same culture of conflict between two individuals that leads individuals arming themselves with clubs and machetes to international arms race and military alliances to counter alliances. From the practice of two or three individuals formulating rules, norms and ethos to guide their daily interactions and their existence in the society, man has developed international law at the global level. Humanity is at the heart of our global interconnectedness but for far too long individuals have played minimal and subordinate role in driving their course at the international system, but in our current system, we have a paradigm shift with individuals playing greater role in bringing states together. The use of technology and the social media through which an American citizen is driven by the plight of the children of Uganda is not just any random act of activism, It’s the realization by individuals that they are now living in one village, the global village and that one can not shut his eyes and plug his ears to the pain and cries of others.
You all realize that it is the individual who is the perpetrator and at the same time the victim of his decisions. Piracy and civil wars, floods, terrorism, economic depression, the ravages of drought and famine directly affect the individual. When a state is food insecure, then it is its civilians that sleep hungry. Whether its child slavery, child soldiers in Uganda and Sudan or the sex exploitation of the kids in Cambodia and Korea. Be it war in Syria or Congo. Floods in the Mississippi or in Kenya, food insecurity in Afghanistan or the horn of Africa, the inaction of member states is not just a failure of these respective governments but rather a common failure of each state of the earth.
The same fear that is borne by the mother in Africa concerning her child’s security, health, environment, education and employment are the same one that others mothers across the world bear, the same concern of dealing with terrorism, piracy and all other challenges to the existence of humanity are being addressed by all international organizations and every state.
How then can we, member states, with shared vision, a common concern for humanity, same challenges then work together to achieve this? It must be a different approach and a new global outlook that must be employed to take us there. Not the traditional and conventional approaches that we have been employing for all these years; we have a collective responsibility in these new era of global interdependence.
Since we have common problems, common dreams and common goals then, why do we consider others as our enemies and others as our friends? Everyone is working towards the same goal of bettering their position on earth but the means of approach is quite different, that’s where the collision in our quest to better humanity lies, that’s where the United Nation steps in as the ‘center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these goals’. But often instead of listening to those not our compatriots we oppose, condemn and criticize them without realizing that we indeed are working towards the same goal but in different perspectives. All we sometimes need is tolerance and dialogue and if the stand of our enemies is indeed the destruction of humanity then we are have a right to destroy them before they destroy the global good and humanity. Diplomatic envoys and global leaders who we can call Global Village Elders have been listened to, our won Former Secretary General MR. Anan is one such global elder whose service we can all rely on to settle our differences than resorting to unwarranted force in dealing with such enemies.
The United Nation has the mandate to protect civilians, embodies the ideal of collective responsibility and today unilateral actions is not accepted, I ask you all to uphold the principle of RESPONSBLE SOVEREINTY and to have a global vision in which each member state respects the rights of individuals and instead of defining their interests in terms of power, define your interest in terms of a common course for humanity and the call to humanity entails that it is individuals who tackle the existing global problems in their own unique way. States need to tap in a more positive way into the individual debates going on, in the village squares, the campus hostels and in the market centers in the same importance as those in prominent board rooms.
I urge you, political leaders and developed countries, to go farther than forging new partnerships that ends at economic, military or political fronts to that ensuring that the benefits of such partnerships will spill over to friendship between individuals. We need to go farther than give aid and threatening to cut donor funds and instead put some face to the statistics that is prompting you to five those funds. Engage at a more friendly and humane level the human beings benefiting form these external aid other than stopping at the aid agencies when it comes to our interactions.Environmental conservation concepts brought down to the household level where each family is asked to plant trees and utilize resources too.
When upholding the rule of law, I ask all of you, to dispense justice to all and not selective justice, we need to go farther than persecuting a few perpetrators at the ICC to leaving the true victims in the same state and worsened conditions of life as resulting from the actions.
When we refuse to learn from the apartheid in South Africa and now having to deal with a similar crisis in Sudan, where the north is ejecting the southerners who have all along known the north to be their home!
The case of Rwandan genocide being a dent on the story of global interdependence and today we face a situation where each year crisis that if added together can be of a similar magnitude as the Rwandan genocide and the horn of Africa crisis being a constant problem where each year we deal with the same scenario of hunger and starvation. We can’t talk of sustainability if our approach every year is short-term and immediate only to the crisis. This kind of repetitative crisis should awaken us to stand together now more than ever.
This not a time for war drills and arms race, not a time to form alliances and counter alliances, the debate of Africa leaning towards the East should and must be subservient to the problems facing us all, the Syrian crisis, the hunger in the horn of Africa, terrorism, floods and a diminishing resource base. The interests of single states should be subordinate to the cause of humanity. Its not a time for shutting our ears to the debates going on between citizens of our different states on the social media, not undermining global concerns and agendas even when it is in conflict with our immediate interests but this is a time for identifying the means of and facilitating platform and forging partnership. A time for being true to each other and not to renegade on the agreements between us, not clasping our hands into a fist to those we consider not to be our compatriots or cutting the hands that are stretched out to us. This is the time for shaping one global destiny. And the way is to empower our citizens to know that they are living in one world and to respect life.
If nations remain indifferent to the crisis of the other, they lack in the same breath the moral authority to address each other and to condemn each other’s indiscretion and failures. We need to forge a new global moral where all is looked at from the angle of Humanity and your roles as political leaders is to give directions, identify new, overlooked approach, creativity and nurture the ingenuity of our race!!
I wrote this as a competition entry following The Brookings Institution and the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) speech writing contests for university students. The Brookings Institution in Washington DC and UNAI launched the global contest, inviting the students around the world to imagine a speech that would be made by the Secretary-General at the opening of the next session of the General Assembly. The contest aimed to encourage interested students and future leaders with the opportunity to demonstrate innovative thinking on responsibilities and rights involved in solving global problems together in a shared culture of intellectual social responsibility.
And I leave you with this excerpt from the song ‘’Is There For HonestPoverty", by Robert Burns
Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that)
That Sense and Worth over all the earth
Shall have the first place and all that!
For all that, and all that,
It is coming yet for all that,
That man to man the world over Shall brothers be for all that.
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