The most revealing thing about the United Nations in 2026 may be the distance between the world for which it was created and the world it is now expected to govern.
The Security Council was designed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the distribution of military and political power looked very different from what it does today. Much of Africa was still under colonial rule. Many of the countries that now occupy the General Assembly as sovereign states did not yet exist as independent nations. The institutions of global governance reflected the priorities and power of that moment.
Eight decades later, the world has changed almost beyond recognition, but the central architecture of the Security Council has barely moved with it. China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States remain the five permanent members, each with the power to veto substantive resolutions. Africa, a continent of more than fifty countries and more than a billion people, still has no permanent seat.
That is the contradiction Nigeria has taken to the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York.
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Representing President Bola Tinubu, Vice President Kashim Shettima renewed Nigeria’s demand for the reform of the Security Council, including at least two permanent African seats with the full privileges and responsibilities of permanent membership, including the veto for as long as the veto remains part of the Council, alongside five non-permanent African seats. The demand follows the African Union’s established common position under the Ezulwini Consensus and the Sirte Declaration.
What is different now is that the argument is no longer being made only by African governments.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has described Africa’s continued absence from permanent membership as “unjust and indefensible”, arguing that the Security Council must reflect the world as it exists today rather than preserve the geopolitical arrangement of the post-war era.
That does not mean reform is imminent. It is not. The permanent members have institutional privileges they are unlikely to surrender simply because the moral case for doing so has become stronger. Security Council reform requires negotiations among states with very different interests, and Africa itself must maintain the unity necessary to prevent its demand from becoming a competition among individual countries for individual advantage.
But the persistence of the argument tells us something important. The question of African representation is no longer merely about whether Africa deserves a seat. It is about whether an international system can continue to claim legitimacy while the distribution of authority within it bears such a strong resemblance to the world of 1945.
Africa has changed. The world around Africa has changed. The problems for which the United Nations is supposed to provide collective answers have changed.
The institution has not changed enough.
This matters because Africa is no longer peripheral to the central questions of international politics. The continent sits at the intersection of many of the pressures that will define the next several decades: terrorism and organised crime, migration, energy, food security, maritime security, climate change, critical minerals, demographic growth and the expansion of global markets. Decisions made about these issues will increasingly involve African countries, whether the international system is prepared to acknowledge that reality or not.
Nigeria has particular grounds for making this argument because it has spent much of its post-independence history participating in the difficult business of keeping regional peace. Nigerian personnel have served in peace operations in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Darfur and Mali, while Nigeria has played major roles through ECOWAS and other regional arrangements in mediation, security and political negotiations. Its argument, therefore, is not simply that Africa should be invited into a room because Africa is large. It is that African states have long been carrying responsibilities for international and regional security while remaining structurally underrepresented in one of the institutions that decides how global security is organised.
Yet there is a danger in making the argument solely in terms of historical injustice.
Africa needs representation, but representation is not the same thing as power. A permanent seat cannot manufacture the economic strength, institutional credibility or diplomatic capacity required to use that seat effectively. The continent’s case for a larger role in global affairs will ultimately be stronger if it is accompanied by the harder work of building countries capable of exercising influence rather than merely occupying positions.
This is where Nigeria’s own responsibilities enter the discussion.
It is possible to criticise the international system for preserving inequalities while also acknowledging that African governments have sometimes reinforced their own dependence through poor policy choices, institutional weakness, corruption, instability and an excessive reliance on the export of raw commodities. These realities do not erase the historical inequalities in the global system, but neither should they be ignored when Africa discusses the kind of international order it wants.
Nigeria cannot ask the world to take African agency seriously while treating domestic capacity as somebody else’s problem.
The country needs the kind of economic and institutional foundation that turns diplomatic influence into something more durable than speeches at international conferences. That means an economy capable of producing more of what it consumes and processing more of what it extracts; institutions that can enforce contracts and protect investment without sacrificing public interest; universities and technical systems capable of supplying the skills required by a modern economy; infrastructure that makes production competitive; and a foreign policy that is sufficiently consistent to preserve national interests beyond the tenure of any one administration.
This is especially important because Nigeria’s message in New York has not been limited to Security Council reform. It has also been tied to a broader argument about Africa’s place in the global economy. Nigeria has called for the continent to move beyond the export of raw materials towards value addition, manufacturing, technological innovation and knowledge-driven growth, while presenting the African Continental Free Trade Area as an opportunity to build regional value chains and expand intra-African commerce.
That is the economic side of the same argument.
For too long, the global economy has often treated Africa’s natural resources as more immediately valuable than Africa’s productive capacity. Oil can leave the ground and be sold. Minerals can be extracted and exported. Agricultural commodities can cross borders in their least processed form. The higher-value industries built around those resources, the technologies that process them and much of the capital that finances the most profitable stages of the chain are frequently located elsewhere.
The question facing Africa is therefore more difficult than whether foreigners are interested in African resources. They plainly are. The question is whether African countries can move from being indispensable suppliers of what the world needs to becoming significant producers of the goods, technologies and services that the world will increasingly buy.
That transition cannot be achieved by diplomatic rhetoric alone. It requires electricity, transport, education, financing, research, industrial policy and a business environment in which production is not punished by the very state that claims to want it. It requires governments to understand that natural resources become transformative only when they are connected to human capital and productive institutions.
There is a similar contradiction in the climate debate.
Africa has contributed relatively little to cumulative global emissions, yet many African societies are among those most vulnerable to climate-related disruption. Agricultural losses, flooding, drought, food insecurity and displacement can quickly become economic and political problems in countries where public institutions already operate under severe constraints.
The climate question is therefore also a question about power. If African countries are expected to develop, adapt to climate change and participate in the global energy transition, then the international financial arrangements governing climate finance cannot remain detached from the fiscal realities of developing economies.
Nigeria’s call for more equitable climate finance and wider access to concessional financing is part of that larger argument.
But again, Africa’s strongest position is not to approach the world as a permanent claimant. It is to insist on fairness while building the capacity to negotiate from strength.
That distinction is important because there is a tendency in international affairs to confuse inclusion with transformation. Adding African representatives to institutions does not automatically alter the assumptions under which those institutions operate. A seat can provide access to a decision-making process, but influence depends on what a country brings into that process: economic weight, diplomatic skill, credible alliances, technical knowledge and the ability to sustain a position when interests collide.
This is why the question of who sits on the Security Council cannot be separated entirely from the question of what kind of Africa is being represented there.
Nigeria, in particular, has to think beyond the symbolism of occupying a permanent seat. If Africa eventually secures permanent representation, the continent will still face the problem of coordinating positions among states with different economies, security concerns, political systems and relationships with the major powers. The difficult work will begin after the photograph.
That is not an argument for postponing reform until Africa becomes perfect. No major power has ever had to satisfy such a condition before demanding influence. It is an argument for recognising that international representation and domestic transformation must proceed together.
The world also has a practical reason to reconsider the existing arrangement.
The security problems of the twenty-first century do not respect the geographical assumptions of the twentieth. Terrorist networks cross borders. Organised crime follows financial and technological channels. Climate shocks produce displacement. Supply chains turn minerals and energy into strategic concerns. A conflict that begins in one region can alter food prices, migration patterns, investment decisions and security calculations thousands of kilometres away.
In that environment, excluding a major region from permanent participation in the institution charged with maintaining international peace and security is not merely a question of symbolism. It can weaken the institution’s ability to understand and respond to the world it is supposed to govern.
This is perhaps the strongest argument for reform.
The world does not need to grant Africa permanent representation because African leaders have asked politely enough. It needs institutions whose composition reflects the political reality they are intended to manage.
The African Union has been explicit that its demand is not for one country to be elevated above the rest of the continent. Its common position calls for at least two permanent African seats and five non-permanent seats, with the African Union determining the continent’s representatives. The position is intended to address what the AU regards as Africa’s historical under-representation in the Security Council.
Whether that reform eventually occurs will depend on negotiations far beyond Nigeria. But the argument has already exposed an uncomfortable truth about the international system.The language of sovereign equality sits uneasily beside an institutional structure that permanently privileges the geopolitical circumstances of another era.
That contradiction will become harder to defend as the century progresses.
The United Nations was created because the architects of the post-war world understood that institutions have to respond to historical change. They did not build an international system simply to preserve the political arrangements that existed before the war. They built a new one because the old arrangements had failed catastrophically.
There is no reason to believe that principle stopped applying in 1945.
The world of 2026 is more interconnected, more economically dispersed and more complicated than the world that produced the Security Council. Africa is more politically significant than it was when the United Nations was founded. Its population, markets, resources and strategic importance will make it increasingly difficult for the major powers to formulate durable global responses without African participation.
The question, then, is not whether Africa will matter.
It already does.
The question is whether the institutions of global governance will recognise that reality before the gap between formal representation and actual power becomes too wide to sustain their legitimacy.
For Nigeria, the answer cannot end with a speech in New York. The country must make the case for a reformed international system while doing the equally demanding work of strengthening itself at home. It must seek influence abroad without mistaking diplomatic visibility for national strength, and it must insist on a fairer global order without pretending that domestic failures are entirely the product of an unfair one.
That is the harder and more credible position.
Africa should not have to choose between demanding a seat at the table and putting its own house in order. It must do both.
Because the world is already relying on Africa for too much to continue treating the continent as an afterthought in the institutions that govern the future.
The international system was built at a moment when Africa was largely excluded from determining its own political destiny. That history explains the architecture, but it cannot permanently justify it.
Africa is no longer waiting to enter history.
It is already shaping the century.
The international institutions that claim to represent the world will eventually have to reflect that fact.
Stephanie Shaakaa shaakaastephanie02@gmail.com
08034861434
