Garfield Ekon

Staff Writer

September 5, 2024 – A call has been made by United Nations (UN) Secretary General, Antonio Guterres Security Council (UNSC) to reform its outdated structure and assign Africa a permanent seat at the table, stressing that the continent is underrepresented.

Making the call during an addressing to the Council on Monday August 13, he told the high-level debate that the composition of the UNSC has failed to keep pace with a changing world.

“We cannot accept that the world’s preeminent peace and security body lacks a permanent voice for a continent of well over a billion people, nor can we accept that Africa’s views are undervalued on questions of peace and security, both on the continent and around the world,” he said.

The 15-member UNSC consists of five permanent members with veto power – China, France, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom – while the remaining 10 nonpermanent seats are allocated regionally.

The 10 seats include three seats for African states; two each for Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe and other states; and one for Eastern Europe.

In May, the UNSC called for the role of African countries to be strengthened in addressing global security and development challenges.

UN General Assembly President Dennis Francis said at the debate that the UN must reflect the world as it is. “The fact that Africa continues to be manifestly underrepresented on the Security Council is simply wrong, offending as it does both the principles of equity and inclusion,” he said.

“It runs counter to the principle of sovereign equality of states and calls for the urgency to reform this institution to reflect the world as it is now, rather than what it was nearly 80 years ago,” he stated.

The President further said the African Union will choose the African permanent members, and that Africa wants the veto abolished. However, if UN member states wish to retain the veto, it must be extended to all new permanent members as a matter of justice,” he said.

The Security Council has primary responsibility, under the United Nations Charter, for the maintenance of international peace and security. It is for the Security Council to determine when and where a UN peace operation should be deployed.

In the more than seven decades since its creation, the United Nations has focused on new challenges, such as youth, gender equality, Climate Change, big data for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , and AIDS, in order to find solutions and encourage action.

Garfield Ekon

Staff Writer

Haiti, September 4, 2024 – Thousands of women and girls displaced by Haiti’s gang violence are under threat from a surge in sexual assaults, the United Nations (UN) warned Tuesday (August 27), denouncing deplorable living conditions in makeshift camps.

“The risk of sexual violence for women and girls in displacement sites in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince is rapidly rising, owing in part, to the alarmingly poor living conditions they are facing,” the global body’s sexual and reproductive health agency UNFPA said in a statement.

The women and girls often “face spiraling sexual violence but have nowhere to turn,” it added.  Among the 185,000 people forced to flee their homes in the city, many are living in makeshift camps visited by UN officials.

In the 14 displacement sites surveyed by UNFPA, more than half of the latrines and many showers are not separated by gender, several shower doors have no locks and many sites have no nighttime lighting.

“As a result, many women and girls are at risk of sexual violence every time they use a shower or toilet,” the UNFPA said.  “With what I’ve been through, I’d rather have died,” said one mother of seven who was living in a Port-au-Prince shelter and was sexually assaulted while sleeping in a public square, according to the agency.

“When they saw that I didn’t have a man with me, they attacked me while I was 4 months pregnant,” she added.  “I’m always afraid for my daughter, who’s 11.” Such assaults are on the rise nationwide.

Between March and May this year, the number of cases of sexual and gender-based violence reported by UNFPA and partners jumped by more than 40 per cent — with only a small fraction of total cases reported.

Such cases of violence surged from 250 in January and February to over 1,500 in March and topping 2,000 in April and May, according to UN figures.

In total from January to May 2024, some 3,949 cases of gender-based violence, mostly rapes, were reported.  Some 61 per cent of victims were displaced persons.

Against this backdrop of insecurity and abuse, the UNFPA has launched an appeal for $28 million in funding “to strengthen and expand access to life-saving reproductive health and gender-based violence services and support in Haiti in 2024.”

But the situation deteriorated sharply in February when gangs launched coordinated attacks in Port-au-Prince, forcing the departure of controversial prime minister Ariel Henry.

Garfield Ekon

Staff Writer

Africa, September 4, 2024 – The first batch of Mpox vaccines have finally arrived on the African continent this week; weeks after they had been made available in other parts of the world and in quantities far below what is needed in order to tackle the dangerous new variant of the virus.

Vaccines have already been made available in more than 70 countries outside Africa and the failure to provide the continent with anti-Mpox shots until now displays worrying problems in the way international agencies deal with global health emergencies, medical officials and scientists warned last week.

The 10,000 shots are donated by the United States (US), and follows the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring, earlier this month, urging that the process needed to give African countries easy access to large quantities of vaccines via international agencies – despite the fact that the disease has afflicted people there for decades.

On Tuesday September 3, the UN confirmed that the UAE had dispatched several aircraft carrying Mpox vaccines to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, and Cameroon.

Mpox is a potentially deadly infection that causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions, and spreads through close physical contact. It was declared a global health emergency by the WHO on 14 August after the new variant, known as clade Ib, began to spread from the Democratic Republic of the Congo into neighbouring African countries.

The long wait for WHO approval for international agencies to buy and distribute the vaccines has forced individual African governments and the continent’s public health agency – the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) – to instead request donations of shots from rich countries.

Helen Rees, a member of the Africa CDC’s Mpox emergency committee, and Executive Director of the Wits RHI Research Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa, said it was “really outrageous” that, after Africa struggled to access vaccines in the Covid pandemic, the continent had once again been left behind.

The Africa CDC has said that 10 million doses may be needed across the continent to cope with the outbreak. The WHO asked vaccine manufacturers only this month to submit the information needed for the Mpox shots to receive an emergency licence – the WHO’s accelerated approval for medical products. It urged countries to donate shots until the process was completed in September.

Also, the WHO said it did not have the data it required to do a full review for approval of the vaccine, and an emergency licence process can be carried out only after a public health emergency of international concern has been declared.