President Yoweri Museveni has said the UN system needs reform to reflect the new needs and realities in the world today and that Uganda will use this time to make a small contribution towards the reform of the UN and its organs in terms of pushing for the African agenda on the issue.
“I thank the UN General Assembly for electing H.E. Sam Kutesa, our Foreign Minister, as the President of the UN General Assembly for the year 2014/15. As you all know, those reforms, as will be agreed by all of us, will strengthen the UN, not otherwise,” he said at the opening of the general debate of the 69th UN Summit currently underway in New York.
Mr. Museveni, who was third to speak at Wednesday’s General Assembly, after Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and President Barrack Obama of the US, joking, said Obama had copied his comments about pseudo ideology.
During his speech, Obama thanked Muslim leaders worldwide for working to counter the extreme form of Islam that the Islamic State (IS) group advocates. “Here I’d like to speak directly to young people across the Muslim world,” he said. “You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder. Those who call you away from this path are betraying this tradition, not defending it,” Obama said shortly before President Museveni took to the podium.
“When President Obama was moving out, I met him and said he had copied some of my comments,” he said referring to what he described as the one bottleneck that has bedeviled Africa, the espousing of the pseudo-ideology of sectarianism of religion or tribe as well as chauvinism vis-a-vis the women.
“It is this pseudo-ideology that has fueled most of the conflicts in Africa. We are also witnessing the same pseudo-ideology causing havoc in the Middle East and North Africa. When uninformed outsiders link-up with these pseudo-ideologists, the permutation is most tragic. The sectarian ideology is pseudo and bankrupt because it is at variance with the people’s real interests of symbiosis, exchange of goods and services as well as integration for mutual benefit. Only parasites revel in such schemes. This pseudo-ideology should be banished and treated with the contempt it deserves,” he said.
The general debate gives all U.N. member states approximately 15 minutes to outline their priorities to the other 192 world leaders gathered in the U.N. Assembly Hall and President Museveni delved into the African continent’s history of traumas inflicted on the continent: slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonialism, plunder, human haemorrhage and even genocide in some cases.
“These traumas resulted in haemorrhage of the population and the depopulation of the African continent to the extent that by 1900, the population of the whole of Africa was only 133 million people while that of China, which is only one quarter of the land area of Africa, was 489,000 million people; in other-words, four times greater than the population of Africa at that time,” he said.
The President said it is these distortions and the original endogenous weaknesses of Africa that the present generation of Africa leaders has been addressing.
“In many African countries, positive results are beginning to manifest themselves. The middle class in Africa is now of the magnitude of 313 million people which has boosted the purchasing power of Africa to US$2.5 trillion. This purchasing power is growing at the rate of 3.2% per annum,” he said.
The President said this growth and expansion of African GDP and purchasing power is in spite of inadequate roads, inadequate railways, inadequate electricity, etc.
“When these strategic bottlenecks are addressed, the sky will be the limit as far as Africa’s potentialities are concerned,” he said.
On the side of socio-economic transformation, the President said Uganda is busy building hard surface roads, electricity systems, the railways, ICT networks, a universal education system and a pan-Ugandan health system.
“Together with our neighbours, we have integrated our markets in the EAC and COMESA. We also partner in common security solutions. Therefore, Africa as well as the individual African countries are becoming more credible partners with any serious actors beyond our shores. Uganda needs and welcomes investments, trade access, tourists and, in some cases, security partnerships that are approved by the African Union from our partners in the world, many of whom are members of the United Nations,” he said.
The President, along with other world leaders, was later hosted to a luncheon in honour of Heads of State and Government. He later attended the Security Council Summit on the threat of terrorism to international peace and security, chaired by President Obama and the high level meeting on Somalia implementing Vision 2016 inclusive politics in action.
ENDS