by Kofi Annan
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At the promulgation of the new Kenyan constitution on August 27, 2010, we joined in a crowd of countless thousands in the grounds of Uhuru Park to applaud the referendum result. It was as if we were going back in time with wisdom to our youth. We were finally stepping onto a path we should have taken long ago at independence. Kenya’s people had peacefully come together to affirm a new road forward: and they were leading the way for the continent.
While in the crowd cheering the new Kenyan constitution, I caught a glimpse of a face I did not expect to see: Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan—a leader recently indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. He had been invited to the event by the Kenyan government? I could not quite believe it, but there he was: an honored guest. His lurking figure at the progressive event was a symbol of the danger Africa lives with today. Huge advances have been made for Africa by Africans. But there can be no complacency. Equally huge challenges remain, and the potential to revert is always there in the background, as Bashir’s presence reminded me.
We Africans still have much to do.
VI
REDEFINING HUMAN SECURITY:
The Global Fight Against Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals
Mr. Secretary-General, when it comes to condoms, the Pope and I are one!” Robert Mugabe fired back this response as he lurched back in his chair and hooked both his first fingers together in a sign of stubborn solidarity. I had just put it to him that much more needed to be done, and urgently, in face of the appalling scourge of HIV/AIDS; and that all African leaders, particularly those with a strong voice on the continent, should encourage the use of condoms. Mugabe at first only shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Mr. Secretary-General, you shouldn’t be talking about condoms.”
“Why not?” I asked. “I have even raised it with the Pope.” This was true. I had raised the issue with the Pope, and I thought that might open this staunch Catholic’s mind. But it was obviously too much for him. He wanted to end a conversation with which he was deeply uncomfortable. His eyebrows furrowed as he raised his voice, issuing his statement of solidarity with the Pope. There was clearly no more he would say on the matter. I was working the diplomatic floor at a meeting of African heads of state, and could not easily show my anger at this response, but I felt a familiar outrage that gripped me every time I encountered this willful obstruction of the campaign against HIV/AIDS.
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By the time of that conversation with Mugabe, HIV/AIDS had ceased to be an inevitable death sentence thanks to advances in medicine and antiretroviral drugs. That is, unless you were poor. For those living in countries that could not afford the exorbitant prices set by the pharmaceutical companies, HIV/AIDS did, indeed, mean a certain and slow death.
The scale of the suffering inflicted by this disease is beyond full human comprehension, not least because the impact does not stop at the personal level. During my first term as secretary-general, from 1997 to 2002, HIV/AIDS was creating a cocktail of disasters in the developing world. By some measures, the impact of AIDS was worse than war. In Africa, in 1999 it was estimated that AIDS had killed ten times more people than armed conflict in the same year. By 2000, the disease had created a staggering 13 million orphans worldwide, with 34.3 million people living with the disease on top of the 18.8 million lives it had already claimed.
Worse still, the disease was not just taking away the lives of the people infected; it threatened the future by eating away at the social and institutional fabric of societies. This is because HIV/AIDS’ greatest toll was among young adults—and women in particular—the most productive members of society, who also had responsibility for rearing the next generation. It was killing off large numbers of young doctors, nurses, teachers, and other professionals who were essential for economic and social development. It was eliminating the breadwinners of households, leaving what was left of their families and communities increasingly desperate and without even the most basic means for self-subsistence.
The situation was by far the worst in Africa. In 2000, 70 percent of adults and 80 percent of children living with the disease were on the continent, and by then nearly three-quarters of AIDS deaths had occurred there. The economic circumstances were already dire in many parts of the continent, but HIV/AIDS was now threatening to grind any social and economic successes that were emerging back into its soil. But it was far from just an African problem. In Eastern Europe and South and East Asia, rapid rises in HIV infections were occurring at that time. In India, HIV was already firmly embedded in the population, and in the state of Tamil Nadu alone, it was estimated that almost a half million were infected.
The figures were terrifying. I spent most of my tenure as secretary-general in an international environment obsessed with the potential peril of weapons of mass destruction. But in HIV/AIDS, which never received anything like the same level of attention, we had a true WMD—and one that was actively unleashing itself in the world. This demonstrated, far more severely than any other pandemic, the security threat posed by diseases internationally, and the further importance of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as an instrument of self-interest for the rich countries of the world.
More than the statistics, it was the memory of the child victims that stayed in my mind. I had visited HIV/AIDS clinics with Nane, and we had spoken with sex workers and victims of the disease from all segments of society when traveling to countries worst affected by the pandemic. Doing so was not always deemed appropriate for a secretary-general—and not just by the likes of Mugabe. But we could not pretend that these people did not exist or attempt to hide them away.
But before 2000, the world was doing next to nothing about the pandemic. As the economist Jeff Sachs established in an article published at that time, when you broke down the donor figures, it turned out the entire world, in a disgraceful imbalance, was donating a total of just $70 million to fight AIDS across the entire continent of Africa. But like any problem, no matter how severe, there was an opportunity to shift the balance of interest, and intervention, in favor of action—action that would have to focus on changing far more than just the manifestations of one disease.
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By 1997, the year I started my first term as secretary-general, I had spent much of my life observing the global development agenda wind its way through a long and grinding journey. It had not come far. Plans for poverty eradication and international development cooperation had spent most of the twentieth century in a stillbirth cycle: laudable imaginings repeatedly crushed by the thrust of power in the international system. For me, it started as a teenage African stepping into adulthood at the advent of decolonization, when all the debates were ensconced in the fervent anticipation that Africans would be finally free to develop themselves. I watched this false dawn, believing, like many of my contemporaries, that we could all play dynamic roles in this exciting future—even as the first coups rolled in and pitiful leadership and institutional decay began to grip the continent.
Later, as a young UN official at the Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa in the late 1960s, my colleagues and I optimistically discussed the continent’s economic prospects. We projected heady visions for Africa’s regional integration through infrastructure development: continent-spanning communication systems, roads, and rail networks—the necessary fabric for Africa’s economies to prosper. Little of this happened. Infrastructure development continued to stall. Travel remained incredibly difficult, so much so that to get from one African country to another, one still often had to go via Europe. While Africa failed to move forward, all the while it was accompanied by a sustained, angry shout from African leaders: the colonial powers were at fault. They had failed to develop Africa, leaving it in this awful mess. But to some of us younger Africans, it was clear that we could not keep blaming colonialism. It was over ten years since decolonization, but while
Africa’s economies sank deeper, the colonial blame game ran on.
In the 1960s and 1970s, we also watched the UN launch its first “development decades.” However, in the rich world it was not with poverty but violence that international attention and political efforts became transfixed. East and West were embroiling themselves in the explosion of civil wars of that time, resulting from the struggles for national power following the retreat of Europe’s empires. Among the great powers, which were fueling these civil wars in the hope of securing victory for their favored faction, there was little care for development.
This is not to say that there were not any serious efforts at development for its own sake during the Cold War. The Dutch, Canadian, and Scandinavian governments, for example, devoted serious resources to development in poor countries throughout this period. But in the case of the richest of nations as a whole, particularly among the superpowers and their closest allies, the vast majority of the financial firepower available for spending abroad was not allocated for this. With the likes of Russian-backed Cuban troops openly landing on the coast of Angola, while U.S.-backed South Africans invaded from Namibia—all in the context of the threat of a global nuclear holocaust—few resources were available to improve the lives of the populations of the developing world who were subjected to these wars. The focus was on the politics and the fighting, as if development were a separate and peripheral issue that could be held at arm’s length.
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The absurdity of this notion was most sharply exposed to me when I came to the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in the early 1990s. The Cold War was over, but development continued to slumber in a separate world to political work. It was clear from the experience of our operations in civil war–torn countries that development was an integral, central part of any successful strategy for addressing conflict. But a real commitment to development at the heart of peacekeeping remained elusive. Military, political, and development matters continued to be treated as distinct areas.
In the Somalia peacekeeping mission, to take one example, the budget available for the military was $1.5 billion. For the humanitarian side of the operation, we set a target of just $150 million, and even this fraction we failed to raise—for a mission with a humanitarian goal. In other interventions, member states would lament the lack of local institutional capacity in places like Bosnia, Haiti, and elsewhere, because it sorely hindered their ability to withdraw and leave the place in any semblance of good order. I increasingly responded to these complaints that this was actually our failure: a failure to commit the resources for encouraging locally owned development—an obstinate reluctance to put development at the heart of our strategies for peace. Member states willed the ends but very rarely the means. The world, as ever, was happy to invest in the instruments of violence, but not the resources for peace.
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The Cold War didn’t just tear the political and social fabric of countries through the proxy wars. It also represented an ideological rift at the heart of the UN. Throughout my UN career before 1989, we would constantly hear the debate between the capitalist, Western view, and the socialist and communist view of economic and social development. As an intergovernmental organization, this made it even more difficult for the UN to enact any kind of single development agenda.
I have to admit that it was very easy to get caught up in those competing paradigms in those days—and we all did at some stage. But I later came to realize that the debate was driven at its heart by an ideological vanity, not a concern for the individuals who suffered the grief and humiliations of extreme poverty. The debate between these visions, between private enterprise–driven capitalism and state socialism, wore on all those years as if in ignorance of the urgency for those who had the most to lose. And what really mattered—the dying, the sick, and the humiliated poor—became lost in the argument.
But even after the end of the Cold War, the UN’s development agenda remained in the powerful shade of this debate. In the new world of economic globalization, capitalism was proving the unquestionable locomotive of enormous worldwide change, yet the development agenda was still hindered by this ideological divide. A lingering and deep distrust of business and private capital endured at the UN, even as they became the prevailing reality behind major, tangible advances in development in much of the world.
But an equally limited view formed on the other side: that globalization was a rising tide that would “lift all boats.” This led to the deeply mistaken belief among the governments of donor countries that there was no need to provide significant sums of aid, as private investment would fulfill this function. Particularly troubling was the trajectory of change in many places: one hundred countries were worse off in 1997 than they were fifteen years earlier. Globalization was not “lifting all boats”—not by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, the opposite was happening for many. Even worse was the lack of outside help for tackling these colossal problems. In 1996, the proportion of development assistance against gross domestic product provided by donor countries had dropped to an all-time low, and was still shrinking.
By the end of the 1990s, you could only be struck by the legacy of all those years. Over 60 percent of the world’s population subsisted on $2 or less per day; over 1 billion people were living on less than $1 per day; illiteracy was at nearly 1 billion; 800 million were chronically hungry—one in seven people on earth—including 200 million children; and 1.3 billion lacked even the most basic health, sanitation, and education services.
Despite these terrible figures on global poverty, there was no sign of urgency among member states to commit even a slight fraction of the resources and effort necessary to face this global tragedy. A profound change was needed. But the fundamental question that had stalked international development for decades remained: how?
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On taking office, I realized that we had to be more creative. It was clear that, as things stood, we could not expect to get the resources necessary from the member states. As had been the case for decades, just attempting to persuade heads of government and senior ministers directly of the importance of development, and the terrible state of poverty, had long proved inadequate for stirring their collective concern. It was obvious we needed a new armory of instruments to take this forward. But before acquiring them, I knew we needed leadership of a different kind to renew the UN’s mission for development—and to do it in an innovative, energetic way, engaging with all the forces in the private and public sectors able to join the struggle.
From my very first month in the job, I began reaching out to other players on the international scene. The first of these lay in international civil society: charities and other nongovernmental organizations. In developing countries, the UN was finding much of its work to be intimately connected with the varied contributions of NGOs. Many of them had been around for years, of course, but in the 1990s, they began to connect up with one another to an unprecedented degree. Cooperation was often catalyzed by major UN conferences, such as the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development and the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women. These brought together thousands of NGOs, giving them a new level of energy and organization.
I have always said that the UN needs to be a United Nations not just of governments but of peoples, as it is from people, not governments, that all power is ultimately derived. The expansion of robust international civil society during the preceding years represented an opportunity to pursue this aspiration. I was unembarrassed to admit that, in many areas, NGOs were ahead of the UN in what they could deliver. They were the “bomb-throwers,” the icebreakers, of social and economic development work, usually with far more on-the-ground experience in their countries of operation.
It was due to the great potential stored in this energy, drive, and dedication, particularly as a sector that was now strengthening its connections internationally, that I very publicly sought to reach out and e
ngage with international civil society and institutionalize this common cause. In the first months of my tenure as secretary-general, I directed all UN entities to establish and formalize close working relationships with civil society, and to create forums for genuine consultation and cooperation.
Our growing string of alliances with this freshly emerged grouping of actors would prove vital to the transformations in the development agenda that were to come. And not just because of these actors’ activities in developing countries. Underpinning our common cause was a rational and deeply moral purpose, but the will of most member states was absent. Political leaders within countries are, in many ways, beholden to compromises of multiple constituencies and the many audiences for whom they must perform to sustain their authority. This was why it was often hard or impossible to convince leaders of an otherwise rational course of international action that was in their country’s interest. But in international civil society, which represented a network of organizations supported by communities of morally concerned supporters, including many voters within donor countries, there lay the potential to affect those countries’ domestic policies.
In expanding our global partnerships for development to international civil society, there was the possibility to tap into and encourage a circle of influence that might move the debate forward worldwide. Indeed, this would prove vital, even to the point where Hollywood actors and rock stars became involved, throwing in their popularity to help make the development agenda a mainstream feature of political debates in the rich world.
In addition to global civil society, the other crucial group of players on the world stage was to be found in business. The state of the world’s economy meant that any ideological aversion to allying with capitalism had to be forgotten. Private investment in developing countries had increased from $5 billion in the early 1970s to more than $240 billion by 1997, underpinning major economic and social change in those countries. However, 80 percent of private investment in the developing world went to just 12 countries, with only 5 percent going to Africa and nearly 50 developing countries failing to attract any financial capital at all. Economic globalization was proving extremely powerful, but also powerfully marginalizing. My belief was that, with the right set of partnerships, underpinned by the cultivation of a shared commitment, we could start turning the vast resources and dynamism of business more decisively toward the common good of global development and poverty eradication.
