Expand Security Council In Favour Of Africa

President Bola Tinubu’s address to the 81st United Nations General Assembly, delivered on his behalf by Vice President Kashim Shettima, restated an argument Nigeria has made in one form or another for more than two decades: that a Security Council built on the power arrangements of 1945 has no business governing a world reshaping itself in 2026. He stressed that Africa, a continent of 54 nations regularly dominating the Council’s own agenda, still holds not a single permanent seat at the table where those crises are decided.

The demand, framed around the Ezulwini Consensus and the Sirte Declaration, calls for at least two permanent African seats with full veto rights and five non-permanent seats in total. On the substance, this newspaper finds the case difficult to argue against.

READ ALSO: Controversy Rages Over Tinubu’s Absence At UNGA

The numbers alone make Nigeria’s point better than any rhetoric could. A majority of the Security Council’s active files concern African conflicts, from Sudan to the Sahel, yet the continent whose crises consume so much of the Council’s attention has no permanent voice in how those crises get resolved. “The authority to speak for humanity carries an obligation to represent it,” President Tinubu said, and it is hard to find a cleaner statement of why a body claiming to speak for the international community cannot keep excluding an entire continent from its permanent membership.

This is not a new grievance dressed up for a general debate speech. It is a structural injustice Nigeria and its African partners have named consistently since the Ezulwini Consensus was adopted twenty years ago, and the fact that the demand still has to be restated in 2026 says as much about the UN’s resistance to reforming itself as it does about the merits of the case.

That said, Nigerians should not mistake the strength of the argument for the ease of its execution. Africa’s own internal politics complicate any push for permanent Security Council seats considerably, since Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt and other regional powers have long competed, more than cooperated, over who would actually occupy an African seat should one materialise. A demand this newspaper considers just in principle still requires a continental consensus on implementation that has proven elusive for exactly as long as the demand itself has existed, and Nigeria’s speech, forceful as it was, offered little on how that internal African rivalry gets resolved before the reform it is calling for can ever become reality.

The address ranged well beyond Security Council reform, and much of the rest of it deserves genuine credit. The case for reforming the international financial architecture, framed around debt sustainability and wider access to concessional financing, reflects a widely shared position among development economists rather than a uniquely Nigerian grievance, and the President’s point that debt servicing consumes resources that would otherwise fund education, healthcare and infrastructure describes Nigeria’s own fiscal reality as accurately as it describes the rest of the developing world’s.

The climate argument is similarly well grounded: Africa contributes under four per cent of global emissions while absorbing a disproportionate share of the consequences, and a call for fair energy transition financing rather than a false choice between development and decarbonisation is the correct position for any African government to hold at a UN podium.

Where this newspaper wants to apply more scrutiny is closer to home, and closer to the calendar. President Tinubu told the General Assembly that lasting security requires “a foundation of education, economic opportunity, accountable governance, and human rights,” a formulation drawn from Nigeria’s own hard experience fighting Boko Haram and ISWAP. That is a genuinely earned insight, and this newspaper does not dispute it. But the speech reached the United Nations only days after thirty-seven suspected illegal miners died in the custody of Nigeria’s own Security and Civil Defence Corps in Minna, a tragedy that put the very phrase “accountable governance” to an immediate domestic test the government is still in the middle of answering.

Nigeria’s government has responded to that test with what looks, so far, like a genuine investigation and an independent committee with real forensic and legal expertise. That response matters, and this newspaper has said so on this page. But a government asking the world to rebuild its institutions around accountability speaks with more authority when its own recent record backs the claim without needing an asterisk.

This is not a call for Nigeria to stay quiet on global reform until every domestic failing is resolved, a standard no nation on earth could meet before speaking at the United Nations. It is a reminder that moral authority abroad is built cumulatively out of governance at home, and that the gap between Nigeria’s eloquent case for a fairer world order and its still-unfinished case for accountable institutions within its own borders is the gap this government should be working hardest to close.

The UNSC reform Nigeria is demanding, the financial architecture overhaul it is calling for, and the climate justice it is arguing for are all causes worth Nigeria’s leadership on the world stage. They will land with greater force the moment Nigeria’s own record of accountable governance stops needing careful qualification every time it gets cited as evidence.

President Tinubu closed his address with a line worth taking seriously on its own terms: “peace is the inheritance we owe every child.” Nigeria owes its own children the same standard of accountable governance it is demanding the world extend to Africa. Getting that balance right at home is not a distraction from Nigeria’s case for global reform. It is the foundation the case still needs.