Will new chief Guterres withdraw UN from its NGO quagmire?
The incoming leader of the world’s only superpower has the United Nations firmly in his sights.
“Things will be different at [the] UN”, Donald Trump fired off in a recent tweet. He followed up by mocking the efficacy of the 193-member global body, calling it a “club for people to get together, talk and have a good time”.
The double strike comes just as when Portugal’s former prime minister Antonio Guterres assumes office as the UN’s ninth secretary-general. It also served as warning of how one powerful nation can affect the functioning of the global body through its funding.
The speculation is that Trump’s administration will defund the UN in whole or partially, using its position as the highest contributor at 22 per cent of the total UN budget. Of the 193 member nations, the top 20 countries contribute a whopping 83.78 per cent of the annual budget. The funding imbalance is stark when you consider that the annual financial contribution of 135 nations was just 0.1 per cent of the UN’s total budget of US$5.6 billion last year.
The UN as NGO
That data reveals how badly the UN is placed today and also outlines a core challenge the new secretary-general must tackle: how to free his organisation from US hegemony and build consensus to give every country at the table an equal voice through a more equal funding mechanism.
The core mission of the UN is to ensure world peace.
Unfortunately, people across the globe are facing serious issues of terrorism and human rights violations.
Critics charge the UN with behaving more like a non-governmental organisation (NGO) today than a global peace-broker. Instead of focusing its attention on terrorism and rights violations, the UN’s scattered humanitarian and development work in different countries is weakening its position as a global body.
There are specialised and agencies, including NGOs, which are better placed to deliver development solutions for local problems. Why should the UN be intervening where local players are competent enough to handle these issues?
While the UN’s development work budget is in the billions, its Counter-Terrorism Centre has an annual budget of only $20 million. Statistics show that terrorism cost the world $106 billion at its peak in 2005 –a brutal reminder of how important is the UN’s basic mandate to promote world peace.
The global body can do more on terrorism. To cite one recent example: The world knows that Masood Azhar – the chief of jihadist outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed – is a global terrorist who operates from Pakistan to spread the group’s terror activities in South Asia, particularly in India. But at the behest of China, the UN refuses to brand Azhar a terrorist. When India requested he be added to the Security Council’s blacklist of groups linked to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, Beijing vetoed the proposal.
This was viewed as a move to keep Pakistan happy for China’s geostrategic reasons – at the cost of peace in the region.
Guterres now faces the daunting task of refocusing the UN towards this and other matters if it is to retain credibility as a global peace broker – its core mandate, after all.
Organisational reform is also needed. Today, there are about 1,200 UN country offices around the world, with 100 nations each hosting more than 10 such offices. These country offices typically have large annual budgets, with a high proportion of resources going to operational expenses, leaving a small budget for programmes.
Furthermore, many organisations within UN bodies have overlapping mandates. There are sectors – water, energy and health – in which more than 20 UN agencies are engaged and compete among themselves to tap limited resources.
Ten years ago, the UN formed a panel co-chaired by the then-prime ministers of Mozambique and Norway and British Chancellor Gordon Brown to suggest reforms.
The report was highly critical of the way “officials had to almost beg for money from national governments, making it difficult for the organisation to do any meaningful intervention”.
The report also pointed to a large number of support staff doing ill-defined jobs and said that staff costs accounted for two-thirds or more of many UN agencies’ outgoing expenses.
These are the areas Guterres needs to focus on to find ways to improve the organisational set-up. His mission must be to strengthen the UN as a peace broker, going beyond its role as a global NGO.
Sachi Satapathy has worked on international development projects with the World Bank, United Nations Population Fund and other organisations.
