UN secretary general António Guterres on Saturday accused world powers of ignoring inequality in global institutions, but said the coronavirus pandemic has created a “generational opportunity” to build a more equal, sustainable world.
Delivering the annual lecture for the Nelson Mandela Foundation via internet, Mr Guterres pushed for a so-called New Global Deal to ensure power, wealth and opportunity are shared more broadly and fairly at international level.
"The nations that came out on top more than seven decades ago have refused to contemplate the reforms needed to change power relations in international institutions," Mr Guterres said. "The composition and voting rights in the United Nations Security Council and the boards of the Bretton Woods system are a case in point.
“Inequality starts at the top: in global institutions. Addressing inequality must start by reforming them,” he added.
The Bretton Woods system includes the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
He said the pandemic has revealed, like an X-ray, “fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built”.
“It is exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere: the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all; the fiction that unpaid care work is not work; the delusion that we live in a post-racist world; the myth that we are all in the same boat,” said Mr Guterres during the virtual lecture.
“Because while we are all floating on the same sea, it’s clear that some are in superyachts while others are clinging to the floating debris,” added Mr Guterres, a former Socialist prime minister of Portugal.
Millions infected
The new coronavirus has infected more than 14 million people and caused nearly 600,000 known deaths worldwide, according to a Reuters tally. The UN has appealed for $10.3 billion to help poor states amid the pandemic, but has received only $1.7 billion.
Mr Guterres said rich countries have “failed to deliver the support needed to help the developing world through these dangerous times” and that the pandemic has “brought home the tragic disconnect between self-interest and the common interest, and the huge gaps in governance structures and ethical frameworks”.
He said a changing world needs new social protection policies with safety nets, including universal health coverage and the possibility of a universal basic income.
Mr Guterres concluded: “Now is the time for global leaders to decide: will we succumb to chaos, division and inequality? Or will we right the wrongs of the past and move forward together, for the good of all?”
Responding to the lecture, President Michael D Higgins said in a statement on Saturday: "In what is without doubt the most forthright statement by a secretary general in recent years, Dr Guterres has spoken of how Covid-19 has laid bare not only what we neglected but [what we] sought to hide in terms of avoidable global poverty, hunger and environmental degradation.
“The choice is clear – to seize a new moment for global solidarity or seek to hide in the thickets of a systemic failure that is failing the vast majority of the world’s people and that has brought our planet to a point of ecological disaster.
“Now is the time for all world leaders to come out and respond to the secretary general of the United Nations’s call.” – Reuters