More Comment on the SG's Mandela Address: Kul Gautam writes to the SG's Chef de Cabinet

Note:
Article refers to earlier comments by Jan Vandermoortele, and by Steve Umemoto and Tom Olsen

Dear Maria Luiza,


Like so many others, I felt very proud & inspired by the brilliant Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture by our dear S-G Antonio Guterres. It has been a long time since we heard such bold and visionary speech by an incumbent S-G or any other top UN leader. The last time I recall listening to such a speech was Kofi Annan's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech two decades ago.


It is wonderful that the S-G put much emphasis on the need to tackle multiple pandemics - not just COVID-19, but also the climate crisis, systemic racism and other forms of discrimination, and the challenges and threats to the achievement of SDGs. I am glad he emphasized the need for bold and genuine reform of the original birth-defects of the highly undemocratic voting system of the UN Security Council, the World Bank and IMF. My hats off to the S-G for his courage and forthrightness.


I was especially happy with the headline of the S-G's lecture focusing on inequality and illustrating how it impacted all aspects of human progress and dignity.


However, one of my former UNICEF colleagues, a brilliant development economist and a strong champion of the UN and multilateralism, Jan Vandermoortele, has pointed out that there is a big discrepancy between what the S-G says about inequality in his Mandela Lecture versus what his 2020 SDG progress report issued in April 2020 for discussion at the UN High-level Political Forum. This is what the latter says about the inequality target: In 73 of the 90 countries with comparable data during the period 2012–2017, the bottom 40 percent of the population saw its incomes grow. Moreover, in slightly more than half of those countries, the bottom 40 percent experienced a growth rate in income that was higher than the overall national average.


A casual reader of the HLPF report might think that everything is ok regarding this target, whereas more than half of those 90 countries are actually off-track. The word ‘moreover’ is particularly misleading. The paragraph is probably based on the World Bank inputs, but it will now be attributed to the UN Secretariat and the S-G himself.


I trust you will agree with me that the UN should not simply copy and paste World Bank and IMF figures in the S-G's reports on SDGs, but should do its own analytical work and be prepared to present alternative facts and interpretation when warranted.


You will recall that in the past there have been many occasions when the UN has taken a position that was not only different from but also challenged certain prevailing World Bank/IMF orthodoxy.


In the 1980s, when the WB/IMF policy prescriptions on "Structural Adjustment" were negatively impacting the well-being of women, children and other vulnerable groups, UNICEF published a study called "Adjustment with a Human Face" that challenged the Bretton Woods institution's policy prescriptions. Initially, the Bank and the Fund dismissed or resisted the UNICEF critique but eventually, they accepted and accommodated the calls for more human development-centric adjustment policies.


More recently, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, has challenged the World Bank’s international poverty line threshold of US $1.90 per day as utterly unfit for the purpose of tracking progress towards the SDG target of poverty reduction, calling it deeply flawed and scandalously unambitious.


As Sir Richard Jolly and Prof. Tom Weiss - two strong champions of the UN - have documented in their 14-volume UN History Project publications, contrary to the popular perception, it has often been the UN system rather than the Bretton Woods institutions that have come up with many pioneering concepts of economic development and ambitious goals and strategies to achieve them.


Within the UN system, it has often been UNICEF, together with UNCTAD and ILO, and later joined by UNDP with its Human Development reports that have shaped the setting of ambitious development goals as reflected in the MDGs and SDGs, built upon the foundations of the goals set initially at the 1990 World Summit for Children and subsequent major UN Summits of the 1990s from Rio to Cairo, Copenhagen and Beijing.


I was happy to present my own brief narrative of this and a proposal for UN reform in my memoir which I presented to the S-G in 2018 with your kind help, and was grateful that you personally joined in its launch at UNICEF HQ.


The purpose of my writing this message to you is to encourage EOSG on two points:

In the follow-up to the bold vision outlined by the S-G's in his Mandela Lecture and the S-G's leadership role in mobilizing global support for the SDGs and the Paris climate agenda, let us make sure that the UN conducts its own robust, independent and critical analysis of facts and figures shared by the Bretton Woods institutions and other sources.

Let us make sure that all progress reports issued by in the name of the S-G are properly vetted to ensure consistency with the key messages given by the S-G in his public, high-profile speeches like the Mandela Lecture. 

 
In these difficult times when multilateralism and global solidarity are under threat because of many unenlightened populist leaders in some of the world's most powerful and influential countries, many of us look to the UN Secretary-General to be the voice of the world's voiceless and the champion of sometimes inconvenient truths about challenges and opportunities facing humanity. This is no time for the UN and its senior leadership to be timid and recoil in fear of the world's dangerous and demagogic leaders, but to be bold and principled to speak truth to power on behalf of the world's suffering masses.


I wish to express my gratitude, once again, to S-G Guterres for using his bully pulpit in delivering a bold and visionary Mandela Lecture befitting the courage and tenacity of Madiba himself.


With best regards,








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Kul Chandra Gautam


www.kulgautam.org


twitter.com/kulcgautam

kulgautam@hotmail.com


https://amazon.com/author/kulgautam