Africa

Brigid Kosgei claims a new women's marathon world record in Chicago, beating the time set by Britain's Paula Radcliffe in 2003.

Paris Saint Germain forward Neymar limps off as Brazil are held to a 1-1 draw by Nigeria in Singapore.

Tunisians are choosing between a flamboyant media mogul, and a law professor nicknamed "the robot".

Sylvia Gathoni on finding her winning streak in the high-stakes arena of e-sports.

For record producers, finding new musicians is a constant quest but for this couple, the hunt took them far.

Gernot Rohr refuses to comment about his future as Nigeria coach following further speculation over unpaid salary.

The attack prompted many people to flee the northern village of Salmossi.

Ivorian forward Gervinho extends his contract with Italian Serie A side Parma, with his new deal keeping him at the club until June 2022.

The post Huge moment for Ethiopia as Abiy Ahmed wins Nobel Peace prize appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

It’s one of the world’s most prestigious honours, and has been awarded to Ethiopia’s prime minister in recognition of his inspired leadership across the Horn of Africa. But the award also comes at a time when his domestic policies and credibility are under increasing strain.

The post Huge moment for Ethiopia as Abiy Ahmed wins Nobel Peace prize appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Eliud Kipchoge becomes the first athlete to run a marathon in under two hours, beating the mark by 20 seconds.

The 7ft 5in Senegalese rookie only started playing basketball six years ago.

A prominent Ghanaian journalist writes about being sexually abused when she was just seven years old.

A 21-year-old was caught with cannabis-laced cakes weighing more than 1kg (2.2lb) in Zambia.

Artist Kehinde Wiley discusses his work. Credit: A. D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Oct 11 2019 (IPS)

Fresh from unveiling a huge statue of a black man on horseback in New York’s Times Square, renowned African American artist Kehinde Wiley flew to France this week to “meet” 18th-century French painter Jacques-Louis David.

Wiley – most known for painting the portrait of US President Barack Obama in 2017 – is now “sharing a room” with David, who lived from 1748 to 1825 and was a painter and supporter of French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte.

In an exhibition titled “Wiley Meets David”, the American artist’s massive and colourful 2005 painting Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps can for the first time be viewed opposite David’s 1800 depiction Bonaparte Crossing the Great St. Bernard Pass (Le Premier Consul franchissant le col du Grand-Saint-Bernard), in a show that runs until Jan. 6, 2020.

“There’s lots of chest beating going on … that’s why when you look closely at my painting, you’ll see sperm cells swimming across the surface,” said Wiley at the Oct. 9 opening of the exhibition. “This is masculinity boiled down to its most essential component. All of this stuff, warfare, is about egos, about nationhood, about the formation of society.”

The two works of powerful-looking men on horseback are presented “in dialogue” at the imposing Château de Malmaison, just outside Paris. This is the former residence of French Empress Joséphine, which she shared with Bonaparte before they divorced in 1809.

Wiley’s painting comprises a reinterpretation of David’s portrait, and it is the first in his series “Rumors of War”, where African American subjects replace the historically mighty in a questioning of warfare and inequality. Here, a model named Williams is on horseback, in the same pose as David’s Napoleon, but wearing contemporary urban gear and a golden cloak. In contrast, David’s depiction was a “symbol of the glory of Bonaparte” when it was produced in 1800, according to the show’s curators.

Wiley stressed that his work was meant to make people of African descent visible in ways that they haven’t been in the history of art. But he added that despite the aura of power in his painting, he was also portraying “fragility”, even amidst certain social advances.

Wiley arrives at the Château de Malmaison with associates. Credit: A. D. McKenzie

“I want to caution us against a facile acceptance,” Wiley said. “These steps that we’re moving forward with, I prize greatly, but I also recognize their fragility. As powerful as that young man looks on that horse, it’s not his power that I’m concerned about, but rather his fragile position within that culture … that relegates artists like myself to even need to make utterances like the ones that I’ve done.”

Before being brought to France, Wiley’s painting had been exhibited for years at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the current show is a joint project between this museum and the Château de Malmaison.

After the exhibition in France, both paintings will be on display in Brooklyn, from Jan. 24 to May 10, 2020. David’s work is therefore returning to the United States, where it had spent time in New Jersey in the 1800s as part of the property of Napoleon’s brother Joseph.

“The partnership with the Brooklyn Museum will provide an opportunity to shed light on the current practices of North American museums with regard to groups of artists who have been overlooked in history and the history of art, and their links to audience development,” said Emmanuel Delbouis, a co-curator of the exhibition.

For Wiley, 42 years old, it’s high time for a change in the narrative regarding the contributions of people who have traditionally been excluded from mainstream stories. He said it was not a “trend” or a “movement” that so many artists of African descent are now focusing on historical issues affecting people of colour.

“We have been able and capable of contributing to the larger conversation globally, and now these conversations are happening,” he said during the exhibition’s press opening. “I think perhaps the culture is evolving. So, it’s not a trend … it’s simply another human voice being paid attention to.”

He said his painting was a criticism of colonialism and a challenge to its legacy, but that it was also an “embrace” of French art and David’s talent.

Wiley, who rose to fame with the portrait of Obama, has seen his artistic impact grow, both in the United States and internationally. He has held several exhibitions in France, and before the opening of this latest show, the unveiling of his 27-foot-high statue in Times Square, on Sept. 27, garnered global attention.

That work, his first public sculpture, will be on view at the famed square for several weeks before being permanently installed at the entrance to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, Virginia. It is being shown at the same time as the painting in France, sparking dialogue on both sides of the Atlantic about history and who gets to be celebrated in public monuments.

“We’re standing on the leading edge of story-telling, arguably on the leading edge of propaganda,” Wiley said in France. “Art has for centuries been at the service of churches, of state, of powerful men. And now artists have the ability to take that language and do what they will with it.

“So what am I doing? I’m engaging that language in a way that says ‘yes’ to certain things and ‘no’ to others,” he added. “The culture evolves, but we’re stuck here together, and we have to figure out how we’re gonna evolve together.”

This article is published in an arrangement with Southern World Arts News. Follow on Twitter: @mckenzie_ale

The post Obama’s Portraitist Challenges Napoleon’s Painter appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The Ethiopian prime minister has won the Nobel Peace Prize, but how successful has he been?

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Oct 11 2019 (IPS)

Politics is a dodgy game, maybe even more so if you represent political views based on a moral approach. When the charismatic Justin Trudeau, son of a cosmopolitan liberal who served as Canada´s Prime Minister for 16 years, in 2015 was elected Prime Minister it was within a global political climate different from what it is today. Barack Obama was in the White House, Angela Merkel served her third period as German Chancellor, and the UK Government had not yet announced its country’s withdrawal from the EU. Nevertheless, Russia had three months before Trudeau´s election annexed Crimea, while Viktor Orbán´s Hungarian government the month before initiated the construction of a 4 metres high barrier along its nation´s eastern and southern borders to keep immigrants out.

After Donald Trump on January 27, 2017, had announced a ban on entry from seven Muslim-majority countries, Trudeau tweeted that “Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith” and since Trump was elected more than 40,000 asylum seekers have from the USA crossed the border into Canada.1 Just after taking office, Trudeau issued a statement promising to work for gender equality, to fight environmental degradation, rebuild relations with indigenous people and run an open, ethical and clear government, as well as he declared that his first legislative priority would be to lower taxes for middle-income Canadians and raise them for the highest percentage of income earners.

However, Trudeau´s stance as a stout liberal is becoming increasingly difficult within a global context and ahead of the Canadian general election day on October 21 his political opponents are exposing and trying to benefit from several shortcomings of his politics, as well as casting doubts on his personal integrity. A recent addition to this campaign has been when on September 18 Trudeau attracted controversy for a photograph published in Time on which he wore “brownface makeup” at a party at a private school where he was teaching in 2001. Time also published two earlier photos on which Trudeau wore “blackface”. Eventually, Trudeau was accused of being a populist politician obscuring the fact that he grew up as a privileged, white boy in close connection with the corridors of power where he learned to avoid accusations by acting as a firm believer in equality and multiculturalism. At once Trudeau apologized for unconsciously having hurt people:

Darkening your face, regardless of the context and circumstances, is always unacceptable because of the racist history of blackface. I should’ve understood that then, and I never should’ve done it […] I’m not that person anymore. I’m someone that understands the deep hurt caused by actions like that to people who live with discrimination every single day. I regret it deeply and I’m deeply sorry that I did that. It was something I didn’t think was racist at the time, and now I know it was racist.2

Trudeau was probably right. Dressing up and acting like a person from another culture and with another skin colour is probably something many of us have done. I remember how happy I was when I as a kid was chosen to play the African king Caspar in the Church´s Christmas pageant, wearing blackface and a beautiful robe. Furthermore, one of the favorite games among us kids in Sweden were to play Cowboys and Indians. I always wanted to be Sitting Bull and even had a magnificent feather war bonnet that my father had made for me.

Wearing blackface in the US or Canada may occasionally be equally innocent. Racist connotations of blackface are easily discernible, but its history is nevertheless multifaceted. Music and entertainment have always been a means for discriminated people to express frustrations and criticize an oppressing society. In his book Blues People from 1963, Leroy Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, traced the origins of blues and jazz.3 Among other findings he described the cakewalk, originally a dance performed at get-togethers of plantation slaves, ridiculing the pretentious behaviour of slave masters. The polyrhythmic and syncopated music accompanying such dances was influenced by the hambone rhythm common among the West African Ewe people. After a troupe of former slaves performed the dance at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia it became popular all over the U.S. It was named cakewalk since the dancers were awarded with an enormous cake. Several composers, like Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Stephen Foster, made use of cakewalk tunes, but most famous was Scott Joplin´s inclusion of these specific rhythms in his ragtime compositions.

Cakewalk also captivated Europeans. In 1908, the French composer Claude Debussy published his Children´s Corner, a 6-movement suite for solo piano. The sixth piece, Golliwogg´s Cakewalk, is a jaunty, syncopated tune inspired by American ragtime. At the time Golliwogg dolls were fashionable all over the U.S. and Europe. They were stuffed dolls with jet black faces, bright red lips and wild, woolly hair. They wore red trousers, a shirt with a stiff collar, red bow-tie, and a blue jacket with tails, all reminiscent of performers in blackface minstrels.

Over the years, cakewalk had developed into popular shows, so called minstrels, in which both white and African American actors painted their faces jet black and then engaged in equilibristic song and dance numbers. Even the composer of the Canadian national hymn, Calixa Lavallée (1842-1891) spent 10 years of his life on stage in blackface. Famous Afro American blackface performers were Bahamian born Bert Williams and young comedy star Josephine Baker, who later brought her act to France, transformed it by introducing exotic ”African” traits and eventually became not only one of the most famous African American performers ever, but also a hero of the French resistance movement against the Nazi occupiers. The list of white artists performing in blackface is vast; famous among them are for example Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Doris Day. Mickey Rooney, Shirley Temple and Judy Garland, just to mention a few of them. Most famous of all blackface acts is when musical artist Al Jolson sang Mammy in the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer, the first sound film. As a son of a Jewish, Orthodox cantor who could not accept that his son had become a vaudeville artist, both Jolson and the character in the movie wore blackface during their performances as an indication that they had broken away from the ”enclosed traditional Jewish life” and become integrated in ”American culture”.4

The Golliwog character that inspired Debussy was created by the illustrator Florence Kate Upton, who in 1895 began writing children books about a black doll. The doll became the hero of thirteen enormously popular, rhyming books and was presented as a gentle and inventive character. The last of Upton´s books about Golliwog was published in 1909, but dolls manufactured in his likeness had by then become a common addition to thousands of nurseries. In far away Sweden, I was unaware of their existence but like millions of other children around the world I had read several of Enid Blyton´s (1897–1968) books – they have over the years been published in over 600 million copies – though I was never a great fan of them, the kids ate too much and were far too well-behaved. Her books are still popular and have been translated into 90 different languages. She built a literary empire, sometimes producing fifty books a year, among them a series of Golliwog books, like The Three Golliwogs, The Little Black Doll, The Golliwog Grumbles and Here Comes Noddy Again, it is only in the last book that a Golliwog is really naughty – he asks a driver for a lift only to end up stealing his car. Blyton´s books about the Golliwogs have been defended as being innocent children´s literature. Neverthelss, they are racist. The looks and simplistic behaviour of the black characters contribute to conecptions that more or less consciously influence the minds of young readers. The name Golliwog is offensive as well. Wog is a derogatory word referring to a ”non-white person”. The term apparently originated from sailors and used to label a person as a clumsy newcomer, someone who had not yet crossed the equator – pollywog was another name for a tadpole, i.e. someone who is not yet fully developed.

In Blues People, Leroi Jones characterized blackface performances as yet another proof of unawareness of how black people relate to oppressors. According to him, white people are brought up within a culture that thoughtlessly infantilizes and discriminates against persons of another skin colour. Most white Americans lack awareness of the origins of their own culture, which in reality is a mixture of contributions from a vast number of people with different skin colours. Especially American music, fashion and literature contain important traits of African culture and much of what now is used to denigrate African Americans were originally used by them to criticize the whites:

If the cakewalk is a Negro dance caricaturing certain white customs, what is that dance, when, say, a white theater company attempts to satirize it as a Negro dance? I find the idea of white minstrels in blackface satirizing a dance satirizing a dance satirizing themselves, as a remarkable kind of irony.5

Racism is absurd and all of us, irrespective of the colour of our skin, ought to realize that if we do not admit that certain behaviour can be considered as denigrating by others we remain at an infantile state of mind. When kids play being Cowboys and Indians, or when grown-ups impersonate people from other cultures, this is mostly done in an innocent manner. However, it is a quite different case when, as for example D.W. Griffith did in his classic and still admired movie Birth of a Nation, blackfaced actors are ridiculing and demonizing black Americans.

Trudeau did the right thing when he apologized for his use of blackface. However, his political opponents’ way of interpreting thoughtless, bygone playacting as a racist statement may be considered as a politically motivated maneuver intended to damage someone who actually has been trying to improve race relations.

1 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47940989
2 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/justin-trudeau-blackface-brownface-photos-video
3 Jones, Leroi (1999) Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Harper Perennial.
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIaj7FNHnjQ
5 Jones (1999), p. 86.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

The post Justin Trudeau´s Blackface appeared first on Inter Press Service.

In Kashmir there are thousands of young women who were sold in their teens by their parents to older men, and now living lives governed by restrictions which many equate to imprisonment. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Umar Manzoor Shah
SRINAGAR, Oct 11 2019 (IPS)

Haseena Akhtar was only 13 when an agent told her parents that they could earn a good amount of money by letting her marry a Kashmiri man. The man was, however, three times older than Akhtar, the agent said.

Akhtar’s parents, who lived in the poverty-stricken region of West Bengal (an eastern Indian state), had two other daughters and according to tradition they would have had to bear cost of their marriages. So they let their 13-year-old daughter go with the agent.

Akhtar, who is now 20, ended up here in Kashmir — a landlocked northern region of India caught in the grip of violence and conflict over the past 30 years.

The agent took her to an old part of the city in Srinagar, the region’s capital, and she was married to a middle aged, disabled, Kashmiri man.

“That was not a marriage in any terms. That was a pure selloff. I was sold to a man who couldn’t find a bride for himself in Kashmir because his right leg was amputated after he was injured in a bomb blast some years before,” Akhtar told IPS.

Too many daughters and no boy

A year after the marriage, she gave birth to a girl.

Three more daughters later, and the strong desire by both her husband and her in-laws for a son and grandson was not fulfilled.

By the age of 18 Akhtar was mother to four daughters and relations with her husband and her in-laws had deteriorated.

“I was nothing less than a sex slave for my husband who wanted me to give birth to a boy. When that didn’t happen, I was first ridiculed, then beaten and then dragged out of the home along with my daughters,” Akhtar said.

One of the neighbours provided her with shelter and intervened to talk to her husband and his family. A volunteer organisation also came to her aid and helped her get work as a cleaner in a private firm, earning $100 a month.

When efforts to remedy things with her in-laws failed, Akhtar’s husband  paid her $550 and divorced her.

With a meagre income and four daughters to support, the road ahead for Akhtar looks filled with hurdles.

“I don’t know what I will do and where I will go. I sometimes wonder why being poor makes you vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation,” she said.

It’s so common, its socially acceptable

Akhtar’s story is not unique here.

In Kashmir there are thousands of young women like her, sold in their teens by their parents to older men, who are now living lives governed by restrictions which many equate to imprisonment. 

Infested with violence and Islamist militancy, Kashmir is becoming a safe haven for human traffickers. 

A three-decade insurgency that aims to free the region from Indian rule and the Indian efforts to quell it have claimed at least 100,000 lives, including those of civilians, militants and members of the security forces.

The border tensions and insurgency have killed an average of 1,500 people each year over the last 30 years, according to official records. Here, many former militants, torture victims and people who remain psychologically affected by the conflict didn’t marry at the traditionally marriageable ages of between 25 to 35 years. 

Now much older, these rejected grooms are turning to agents who provide them with young, non-local women whom they can marry — all for the price of just a few thousand dollars.

Aabid Simnanni, a renowned scholar and a social worker who heads an organisations that focuses on human trafficking in Kashmir, told IPS that a majority of the marriages between Kashmiri men and teenage, non-local women end badly due to the generational and cultural gaps. 

“You see the men to whom these young brides are married to are middle aged — 40 to 45 years old. How could you expect such a huge generation gap to disappear? Also, there are cultural, linguistic and many other barriers between the two sides. These things matter a lot in a successful marriage,” Simnanni said.

He said that for the past five years his organisation has been helping women get legal and financial help but that it would be a Herculean task to stop the practice. 

Police won’t investigate because the women are legally married

A senior official in the anti-trafficking cell of the Kashmir police told IPS that it has become almost impossible to catch traffickers as there is no one willing to testify to the crime.

“The victim is usually married to the man by [law] and it is difficult to ascertain the victim’s age as the documents are already forged by the agents. We act only when we receive the complaint against anyone,” said the official who did not wish to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media about the issue. 

He says that there are no records available about the number of brides trafficked to Kashmir as the practice has societal acceptance in Kashmir. 

“The marriage is happens in a broad day light. Though it is an open secret that these girls are sold by their parents for a pretty sum, the relationship they get into is absolutely legitimate and legal in accordance the law,” the official said.

My marriage, my prison

Four years ago, Ulfat Bano, a 14-year-old from India’s Northern state of Bihar was taken to Kashmir by her distant cousin who herself was married to a Kashmiri man. 

Bano’s family was given around one thousand dollars and an assurance that she would marry into a good family. 

Here she was given to a  50- year-old torture victim.

“I was shocked when I saw him first. He was older than my father and I was forcibly married to him. I had no choice,” Bano told IPS.

According to her, her husband was tortured in the early 1990s when militancy against the Indian rule erupted in Kashmir.

His left eye was damaged and for years he could not find a local woman to marry him. His family contacted Bano’s cousin, who was married to one of their relatives, and asked her to find a bride for their son.

Now the mother of a three-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, Bano longs for home every day. 

In the four years since her marriage, she has not been allowed to return to Bihar to see her family.

“Kashmir is nothing less than a prison for me. What good is this life for when you cannot meet your parents and share few moments of joy with them? My husband fears that if he allows me to meet my parents, I won’t return home.

“He is probably right.”

—————————————–The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Related Articles

• West Africa’s Fine Line Between Cultural Norms and Child Trafficking
• As Fathers Die, Kashmir’s Children Become Breadwinners
• Myanmar and China’s Bride Trafficking Problem

The post For Some in Kashmir Marriage Equates to Sexual Slavery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Riana Group.

The post For Some in Kashmir Marriage Equates to Sexual Slavery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Dr. Abiy Ahmed must now work tirelessly for peace

By PRESS RELEASE
OSLO, Oct 11 2019 (IPS-Partners)

“We congratulate Dr. Abiy Ahmed on the Nobel Peace Prize and his courageous efforts in bringing ambitious reforms to Ethiopia and offering the hand of peace to neighbouring Eritrea. The Norwegian Refugee Council is among the very few international groups operating in Eritrea and Ethiopia and assisting people in need in both countries. We have witnessed the dramatic improvement in relations between the two countries during Dr. Abiy Ahmed´s government after conflict and tension over the years produced displacement and suffering.

As the recipient of the Nobel prize, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed must now make resolving ethnic tensions within Ethiopia a priority and work tirelessly to bring peace to his people.

As Africa´s youngest leader, Dr. Ahmed made peace with Eritrea after almost 20 years of hostilities. He released political prisoners and journalists, unbanned opposition groups and appointed women to his cabinet, all within a year of being in office.

Today´s announcement is not only a win for Dr. Ahmed but for Ethiopia.

When I visited Ethiopia in June, I was astounded by the country´s economic and social achievements, including its ability to welcome refugees from war-torn countries like South Sudan and Somalia without complaint. Ethiopia currently hosts over 900,000 refugees and passed a historic new law that allows refugees access to services such as work permits and banking.

However, I was equally struck by meeting many of the millions of displaced Ethiopians as a result of ethnic violence. Around 2.3 million citizens are displaced inside the country, 1.7 million of them after fleeing conflict. Dr. Ahmed must continue to be brave and work to resolve ethnic tensions through peaceful means and bring to an end the misery and suffering of millions of displaced people.”

For interviews or more information, please contact:

NRC’s media hotline: info@nrc.no, +47 90562329

The post Statement by NRC Secretary General Jan Egeland following the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2019: appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr. Abiy Ahmed must now work tirelessly for peace

The post Statement by NRC Secretary General Jan Egeland following the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2019: appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Arsenal striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is named September's Premier League player of the month.

By Kul Chandra Gautam
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Oct 11 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations is faced with a financial crisis once again. Leaders of as many as 64 countries who paraded and pontificated at the UN General Assembly and its multiple Summit meetings in September 2019 were deadbeats, who had not paid their dues in full to the UN for this year.

Many have been in arrears for multiple years. Those include not just poor and war-torn countries in crisis but many wealthy countries such as the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Oman, and Nigeria whose ambassador presides over the UN General Assembly this year.

This is not a new phenomenon. UN has been in serious financial crisis before. And once every decade or so the crisis becomes alarming as it seems to be at present.

We are told that the UN Secretariat could face a default on staff salaries and payments for goods and services by the end of November 2019 unless more Member States pay their budget dues in full.

To address the crisis, the Secretary-General has taken various steps including reduction in official travel; postponing spending on goods and services; discontinuing events outside official meeting hours, and possibly considering postponement or even cancellation of meetings and conferences mandated by the General Assembly. Previous Secretaries-General also had to resort to such measures.

Faced with similar circumstances, many bold proposals were made to resolve the crises in the past. But the fate of such proposals always ended up in resorting to short-term, stop-gap, compromise solutions.

Kul Chandra Gautam

As his predecessors have done in the past, Secretary-General António Guterres wrote a letter to all Member States on the 7th of October 2019 to apprise them of the imminent financial crisis and appealed for their help to resolve it.

What is new in the S-G’s most recent letter to Member States is an explicit acknowledgment that “this is a recurrent problem that severely hampers the Secretariat’s ability to fulfil its obligations to the people we serve”.

He went on to say that he “looks to Member States to resolve the structural issues that underlie this annual crisis without further delay”.

It is my considered view that the time has come for the Secretary-General himself to exercise bolder leadership and make some specific proposals, and not just to “look to Member States to resolve the structural issues that underlie the crisis”.

Precisely because there are structural issues and strong vested interests, Member States by themselves are unlikely to come up with solutions that require bold, innovative and even non-conventional approaches.

Only a neutral, visionary and respected leader or a group of leaders can come up with such proposals. The onus and the opportunity for coming up with such proposals now lies squarely with Secretary-General António Guterres.

Everybody says UN needs reforms. But the kind of reforms that are proposed by Member States are often timid and inadequate, and in the case of those proposed by some, e.g. the Trump administration, they are actually harmful and contrary to the multilateral ethos of the United Nations. Such proposals are unlikely to command broad-based support.

It is time for the Secretary-General himself to take the initiative and commission a high-level panel to propose a more predictable and sustainable funding of the UN.

The 75th anniversary of the UN in 2020 is a perfect occasion for the S-G to present a bold proposal for a more sustainable funding mechanism for the UN in keeping with the ambitious Sustainable Development Agenda for 2030 that the UN has championed so boldly.

What might be some elements of the proposal that the S-G can present? I made a humble proposal in 2017 when the Trump administration first proposed its sweeping cuts to the UN budget and aid for international development: http://kulgautam.org/2017/03/20/responding-to-us-budget-cuts-for-united-nations/.

This proposal was further dissected in an Inter Press Service article in December 2018 by several scholars and diplomats with deep knowledge and affinity with the UN : http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/12/time-end-cheque-book-diplomacy-un/

Here are two key elements that stand out for the S-G’s consideration: 1) resurrect, revise and reformulate the 1985 proposal by the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme who recommended capping the share of any member state to 10 percent of the organization’s assessed contributions, and 2) seriously explore some innovative financing arrangements such as the Tobin tax on currency or financial transactions, a carbon tax, taxes on the arms trade, and raising resources from the deep seas and other global commons, which are considered the common heritage of humankind.

It is worth remembering that the cap proposed by Palme was intended to reduce the UN’s excessive dependence on funding by the US and a fistful of big donors. The spirit of the Palme proposal was to protect the UN from being unduly influenced by and vulnerable to the whims of such donors.

Any shortfall caused by capping the US contribution to the UN can and ought to be made up by other members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the large number of middle-income emerging economies, without putting undue burden on the world’s low-income countries and LDCs.

It is worth recalling that in the larger scheme of international finance, in a world economy of $88 trillion and global military budgets of $1.8 trillion per year, the UN’s regular annual budget is only $3.3 billion, and the totality of the UN system’s budget for humanitarian assistance, development cooperation, peace-keeping operations, technical assistance and other essential normative functions, amounts to less than $50 billion per year.

This is a modest amount to respond to the huge challenges that the UN is asked and expected to help tackle.

To put it in perspective, the total UN system-wide spending annually is less than the defense budget of India or France, and less than one month’s US spending on defense.
With similar investment, bilateral aid and national budgets of much bigger proportions could hardly achieve results comparable to what the UN and international financial institutions achieve.

On the idea of exploring alternative innovative funding, it is useful to recall that financing for development landscape is changing rapidly. Many UN activities already benefit from private sector financing and philanthropic foundations. Many NGOs rely increasingly in cloud-sourcing and crowd-funding as well as different modalities of public-private partnerships.

Harnessing such possibilities and expanding its sphere of partnerships must also be part of the UN’s own sustainable funding agenda as recognized in SDG-17.

We know that the US and many other states are likely to oppose such schemes as most states want to safeguard their monopoly over taxing powers and will not be keen to give such authority to the UN or anyone else.

Many governments would also be fearful of UN mobilizing funding from non-conventional sources that they cannot control.

However, I see no reason why the UN should not judiciously explore such funding options – not to replace core funding by Member States, but to complement it.

After all, the UN is supposed to be an organization of “We the Peoples”, not just “We the Governments”. Historically, it is often the people’s movements that have helped the UN to set ambitious and futuristic agenda, such as on human rights, social justice, and climate change, often defying the resistance of some powerful as well as many power-hungry governments.

To his credit, Guterres has dared to push the agenda of addressing the climate crisis, universal health coverage – including sexual and reproductive health and rights – and several other measures despite known objections by some powerful Member States, including the US.

While actual progress has been limited, and the S-G does not have the power or the resources to force changes, the bully pulpit of the world’s top and most visible diplomat needs to be harnessed for the greater good of humanity.

Dag Hammarskjold and Kofi Annan dared to take bold leadership despite great odds, and history has judged them well.

I would urge António Guterres to come up with some bold proposals for sustainable funding of the UN on the occasion of its 75th anniversary in 2020. This could be one of his lasting legacies as the Secretary-General of the SDG-era.

https://amazon.com/author/kulgautam

The post Wanted: Bold Leadership by António Guterres: On Sustainable Funding of United Nations appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Kul Chandra Gautam, a former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, is the author of: Global Citizen from Gulmi: My Journey from the Hills of Nepal to the Halls of the United Nations.

The post Wanted: Bold Leadership by António Guterres: On Sustainable Funding of United Nations appeared first on Inter Press Service.