Tuesday, 30 September 2025

After the UN General Assembly 2025: Beginning the End of an Egalitarian Global World Order

 By Takura Zhangazha*

The United Nations (UN) recently held its annual General Assembly (UNGA80.)

It was its as social and mainstream media generally advised us the 80th anniversary of its founding.  As Africans we remain grateful for the UN and its role in our own struggles for national liberation.   Despite the contemporary reality of the fact that we do not have any veto power in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

Not for a lack of trying.  Even Zimbabwe is trying to at least get a rotational role in the same global organ and for now appears to be doing a lackluster job of it.   

Watching and listening to the speeches made by various heads of state and government at the UNGA80 one could be forgiven for asking the abstract question, “is the World at a crossroads?”  Particularly in relation to what we had assumed was a universal world order based on democracy and human rights? 

The speeches were relatively poor beginning with the host nation the United States of America (USA) whose president Trump was more concerned about escalators, tele-prompters and the invincibility of his country’s global hegemony.  

Other states were more focused on the genocide occurring in Gaza and their newfound recognition of the state of Palestine.  With the African states referring to the need to reform the UNSC (one that still falls on deaf ears) and the important challenge of the impact of climate change.  Or in a few cases the capitalist and cultural impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its primary owners.

All in all, the UNGA80 did not have any peculiar global resonance as in the past when it was addressed by the likes of for example, Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Nikita Khruschev, John F Kennedy, Samora Machel, Julius Nyerere and even our very own Robert Mugabe.   It did not give any aura of a sense of progressive global egalitarianism and the universality of human rights. 

Instead it appeared to be more about a new global strategic repositioning around superpowers. In a nostalgic “Cold War” sense.  Where again countries were being pitted against each other with regards to their loyalties to the east or the west.  With questions emerging on whether your country is with Russia or Ukraine, Israel or Palestine?  Or simply put,  a question on whether your government is with Putin or with Trump? One that many African and global south governments rarely answer directly.

What is evident with the rise of new nationalisms and what Trump referred to as a necessary closure of borders by member states of the UN is an increasingly polarized world where and when we look at the ‘never again’ principle of preventing world wars. 

Instead there is continual escalations of conflicts/wars based on exploitation of mineral wealth (Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo).  While geo-political interests between the European Union and Russia, China and the USA continue to take center stage around tariffs, trade and military technology/.  Inclusive of emergent culture wars that are emerging from techno-feudalists and AI. 

What is apparent is that we are in a global age of the end of a neoliberal global dream of a false equality.  And this is not an easy point to make.   The re-emergence of capitalist motivated nationalism and racism, cutting of global solidarity international aid and the face offs between the USA and China/Russia indicate an evident change in the previous comfort zones of global politics. 

We, as Africans at least should have seen this coming.   And now again we have to leverage our natural resources and peace against at least three global superpowers, namely Russia, the USA and China. And their variegated subordinates in the form of the Middle East’s Emirs and Kings.  

All the while facing a volatile political and economic environment where our governments are perpetually squabbling with their citizens and attempting to mimic ‘mafia style’ politics of perpetuity in power for either oligarchs or long-standing ruling parties.  In the assumed name of electoral democracy.  As recognized by the UN and other pro-democracy international bodies.

What we may need to be more honest about as Africans is the fact of our placement in the global order of issues, commerce, capitalism and the Livingstonian assumption of ‘civilisation.’

What the UNGA80 showed is that the revolutionary progress made for human equality and national sovereignty is under serious threat.  And that there is a clear hierarchy within global world politics.  With the West moving to reassert its capitalist dominance and ensure historical revisionism that deliberately makes the world unipolar again. 

Because of these developments we need to return to a more robust and historical Pan Africanism.  While non-alignment has helped in our economic development programmes in one way or the other, Africa’s engagement with eh rest of the world needs to be more grounded in our own value and less global capital’s interests.

In the final analysis, while we have new nodes of African consciousness as shared on social media, the realistic questions are around Africa’s placement in the contemporary global events as they are occurring.  We have to grasp the reality that we are low rung interests to the USA, China or Russia.  And that we regrettably remain exploitable politically and economically.  Hence we are led to our own deaths in the Sahel and Mediterranean sea.  Even if we were to become football stars in major European or North American sporting clubs. 

We just need a serious reality check after the UNGA80. It is no longer the UN we grew up knowing.  Its global egalitarian values are being diminished.  And while we cant stand up with immediacy and ask that this be stopped we may need to redraw our placement in global politics.  As Africans. 

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity  

 

 

 

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