LAZARUS MCCARTHY CHAKWERA, President of Malawi, called on Member States to act in urgency to fix the United Nations and other multilateral institutions.  The Security Council must give Africa two permanent seats with veto power.  “We need this fix to strengthen our voice on the issues that matter to us in Africa,” he went on.  No nation can survive a global crisis or develop in the face of shocks without strong multilateral cooperation to sustain it.  “Coming off the back of the state of natural disaster that I declared last year to secure international cooperation in response to the devastation caused by Cyclone Freddy, I have had to declare another state of natural disaster this year to secure international cooperation in response to the El Niño weather conditions,” he said.  Malawi has also suffered from the death of its Vice-President, Saulos Claus Chilima, in a plane crash, the cause of which is yet to be established, he said.

He noted various ways Malawi is focusing on developing the country, including through the building of roads and schools and strengthening education and governance institutions.  These projects are thriving due to cooperation with various countries from the United Kingdom to Saudia Arabia.  “Malawi is a testament to the power of cooperation to move a nation’s development forward into an inclusively wealthy and sustainable future,” he said.  If the future belongs to nations that know how to leverage the power of international cooperation, then the future belongs to Malawi.  But, some efforts to move forward are being significantly slowed down by a global system of multilateral agencies and financial institutions that are too slow, too inefficient, too monolithic and too undemocratic.

The debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratios in developing countries like Malawi are growing at an alarming rate, posing a significant threat to global financial stability, he warned.  “If this is not fixed, those who keep us in a state of perpetual debt when they have the resources to cancel those debts should make no mistake:  the spreading debt crisis in the developing world is a cancer that will make your own economies unsafe,” he added.  There is nothing wrong with healthy competition between nations, but competition must be fair.  The international system must ensure that the way nations compete and what they compete for is not rigged to disenfranchise some countries in accessing natural resources, international markets, financial support and new technology, which are currently skewed against the Global South.

“Even with the era of artificial intelligence (AI) being fully upon us, I worry that the rules for regulating this arena are already being written to empower some nations and give them unfair advantages over others,” he said.  Stronger governance institutions must enforce fair rules for accessing education, markets, technology, financing and natural resources.  If governance is weak here, there will be no one to regulate the collaboration and competition between nations in an equitable manner, and it is this absence of equity that is at the root of unwinnable conflict in Eastern Europe, in Palestine, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and counting, he went on to say.