Recently, Africa has been very intentional to find voice on the global stage, seeking stronger representation in the G20, and above all permanent representation at the UN security council. (UNSC).
For a long time, on the world stage, Africa has been under represented, having a nary representation or no voice at all at decision making tables on the world stage. But in the economic map between solution countries to problem countries, how realistic can we the African make decisions at the UN most powerful body, and be a bridge between the global south and the North?
The diplomatic debate surrounding reform of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is entering its eighth decade, but the rhythm remains the same: Calls for expansion, appeals to fairness, demands for inclusion, and promises that a bigger Council will somehow produce a more just world. Across capitals from New Delhi to Brasília, from Tokyo to Pretoria the momentum is building once more. Yet the central paradox remains unaddressed expanding the Council may gratify political aspirations, but it will not remedy the structural inequities that make the UN system tilt toward power rather than principle.
For Africa a continent profoundly shaped by the decisions and omissions of the UNSC the stakes are uniquely high. But precisely because Africa understands the costs of global governance gone wrong, it must approach the question of reform with both moral clarity and strategic sobriety. The continent deserves influence, voice, and dignity within the global system. What it does not deserve is a symbolic victory that, while emotionally satisfying, leaves the architecture of inequality intact.
To put it plainly, Representation without redistribution is not reform it is decoration.
Consider The Veto: A 1945 Power club Wearing 2025 Clothes
Dag Hammarskjold once said, “the UN was not created to lead mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell” In other words, the rest of the world can hardly break the monopoly of the P5(permanent members of the Security council) given their nuclear power above the rest of the nations, and multiplication of vetoes will not fully justify equity and accountability amongst members. The Super powers(the US and CHINA) will be the Super powers period and the other world powers completing the P5 original members will be the world powers. We should let that sink in, at least in contemporary UN affairs. Perhaps and until other countries including those in Africa grow to that strength, then the exclusive powerful club will truly experience a new power balance in multilateralism and be ready to add more members on the permanent seats. Permanent representation without true Power is technically not reform.
The primary reason the Council fails is not its size, but its veto the political equivalent of a royal prerogative that allows five states to silence the other 188 members of the UN. China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States the P5, enjoy an authority that is neither democratic, nor legal in a modern sense, nor morally defensible.
We Africa knows the consequences intimately, In Rwanda in 1994, the Council hesitated.
In Libya in 2011, it was divided. In conflicts across Sudan, Somalia, and eastern Congo, its responses have been episodic, inconsistent, or shaped by geopolitical flavor.
The veto ensures that legality becomes negotiable, accountability becomes selective, and human suffering becomes a variable in the arithmetic of great-power rivalry. Adding more permanent members without addressing this structural distortion is akin to repainting a crooked wall. The wall remains crooked. More seats plus the same veto equals more paralysis, not more justice.
Expansion Without Restraint: A Larger Aristocracy
At the heart of the expansionist argument is a moral intuition: The Council should reflect today’s geopolitical realities. Africa agrees. But geopolitical realism alone is insufficient grounds for institutional redesign particularly when such redesign risks creating a larger, more diverse aristocracy of permanent powers.
If India, Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Africa, Tanzania, or Nigeria were granted permanent seats, would the Council become more democratic? Or would it merely crown new hegemons states that would claim, often without continental or regional mandate, to speak on behalf of hundreds of millions of people?
Africa must resist reforms that replicate the logic of the colonial era, a few powerful capitals making decisions for the many.
Adding more permanent members risks reinforcing three distortions, on regional domination, in which powerful states speaking for their neighbors.
Secondly Geopolitical blocs, new permanent members forming hardened alliances, worsening stalemates. And thirdly, Hierarchical formalization, transforming informal regional power imbalances into permanent charter-based privilege.
This is not multilateralism. It is multilateral aristocracy.
Our African Dilemma: Who Speaks for the Continent?
Even within Africa, reform requires candor. The African Union’s Ezulwini Consensus calls for two permanent and five non-permanent African seats, but it does not specify which states would occupy the permanent ones. The silence is strategic and necessary. Africa is a diverse mosaic:
We the Tanzanians carry a significant Pan Africanist weight and a moral authority to represent the rest, as it is this country that formed the camps within its soil and giving travel passports, alias names to South African freedom fighters, including Nelson Mandela the father of democracy against an apartheid South Africa. We are the key founder of SADC, and in 1971, we rallied African countries to support and provide the needed numerical majority to pass resolution number 2758, that formerly recognized the People’s Republic of China as a member of the UN, and circa 1971, the UN had 130 member states and the majority were African. On peace keeping missions over the years Tanzanian troops have been deployed as the UN’s blue berets under various peacekeeping missions. And at home Arusha and other cities have been used as reconciliation centers for fighting diplomatic peaceful solution to fighting parties. Morally and historically, we carry more weight, including the gift of the natural history of the first origins of mankind being found on Tanzanian soil, while Mount Kilimanjaro peak stands highest as the roof of Africa on Tanzanian soil.
But still, Nigeria brings demographic weight, South Africa brings institutional capacity. Egypt carries historical influence and technical influence, Kenya is more democratic and with Ethiopia project regional leadership, Algeria commands strategic geography.
But none of these nations not a single one commands unanimous continental legitimacy as a sole representative. Consequently, selecting one or two states risks fracturing the continent’s diplomatic unity to the colonial legacies between Francophone history, Anglophone history still dominating most of the African states. Worse still, Africa may inherit the very problem it seeks to solve: privilege concentrated in the hands of the few.
This is why Africa must insist that reform serve the many, not elevate the few.
The Real UNSC Crisis Is Ethical, Not Numerical.
In my humble opinion the obsession with expansion misunderstands the nature of the Council’s dysfunction. The UNSC is not ineffective because too few states sit at the table. It is ineffective because too many states ignore the very Charter they claim to defend.
In recent years:
- A permanent member invoked Article 51 to justify invading a neighbor.
- Others routinely bypass the Council when convenient.
- Emerging powers advocate for permanent membership while selectively adhering to the rules they wish to inherit.
The UNSC suffers not from scarcity of participation but from scarcity of accountability. As a scholar of international law might put it: lex sine moribus law without virtue cannot stand.
This is where Africa must reimagine the reform debate entirely.
Africa’s Strategic Option: Reform the Incentives, Not the Seating Chart.
The continent’s interests are better served by transforming the behavior of power, not its distribution. We can have a seat permanently at the UNSC, but without moral and civilized culture at home, institutional capacity, intellectual merits, it is like having a honey badger sitting with elephants on the same table, u have tough skin but not same weight and strength.
A realistic, impactful reform agenda achievable without amending the UN Charter would include:
Mandatory General Assembly review of every veto. Whenever a veto is cast, the General Assembly should be convened automatically under the Uniting for Peace resolution.
This elevates the moral cost of obstruction and restores the voice of the many.
Public justification and transparency
Every vetoing state should be required to offer a public, detailed explanation—a Socratic interrogation of its motives. Expose contradictions to daylight, and impunity becomes harder to sustain.
Adoption of the Franco-Mexican proposal:
Permanent members must voluntarily refrain from using the veto in cases of genocide, mass atrocities, and grave humanitarian crises.
Power must bow to conscience.
Prestige-based penalties
States that block humanitarian action could lose leadership of UN committees or peacekeeping roles.
Prestige matters deny it, and behavior changes.
These reforms are modest, legal, and feasible. They shift the global conversation from Who deserves power? to How should power behave? That distinction is Africa’s strategic advantage.
Why This Matters for Africa’s Future
The UN remains the only arena where a small African state say, Lesotho or Benin can challenge a nuclear power with equal legal dignity. That dignity must not be sacrificed on the altar of symbolic reform. If Africa secures a permanent seat but the veto remains untouched, the continent risks inheriting a tool that has undermined global peace for decades. Africa’s moral authority comes not from joining the ranks of the powerful but from insisting that all power—old or new—be bound by restraint.
True reform lies not in expanding privilege but in democratizing restraint.
Reform That Reduces Inequality, Not Rearranges It
A reformed Security Council must strive toward par conditio omnium equal standing for all. Expansion without transformation does the opposite: It will entrench old hierarchies while creating new ones. Africa’s goal should be a system where, small states are protected from great-power abuse, accountability is embedded in practice, vetoes are exceptional and costly, and legitimacy derives from behavior, not birthright.
The future of multilateralism hinges on making power answerable. If the UNSC becomes larger but remains unrestrained, it will simply be a broader platform for geopolitical competition.
Africa Should Demand Reform, Not Rank seating only.
The purpose of global governance is not to coronate new powers but to discipline existing ones. Africa must therefore resist the alluring but insufficient promise of a permanent seat unless it is accompanied by deeper structural reforms.
A larger Council is not necessarily a fairer one. We Africans should intentionally strive to lift our millions out of poverty, we should intentionally have intellectuals with skills and enlightenment in true merits. On the world stage, being a professor and diplomatic representative from Africa is not enough, but do you have what it takes to negotiate with the rest of the intellectuals from the global community, particularly the Powerful north? Can you deliver? Can we go beyond seeing matters from the colonial legacy box and challenge the color line.
In truth, A more diverse elite is still an elite. Even if we have a black skinned representative permanently from sub-Saharan Africa, when elites increase, elite continue to live in the known adage, “POWER begets POWER”. A new permanent member is not a new multilateralism.
The question is not whether Africa wins a chair but whether the table itself becomes more just. The continent’s diplomatic destiny lies not in joining the club of the powerful but in reshaping the norms that govern power itself. By championing reforms that elevate accountability over privilege, Africa can do more than gain representation it can help restore the very moral foundations of global order.
Novatus Igosha is an advocate of the High Court of Tanzania and International Affairs columnist. He also works for national television TBC1 as a consultant political and CGTN “Talk Africa Programme” as an International Affairs expert. Mobile: 0747130688 email: norvum728@gmail.com