TheUN@75: Repositioning is long overdue

Flashback. It was his comrade and contemporary, who first tested our mastery of scripture.

Prof Anthony Gingyera Pinycwa (RIP) of Makerere University, once had his entire class of International Relations on tenterhooks as we couldn’t pinpoint the link between Isaiah 2:4 and the United Nations.

Successor to the League of Nations, the United Nations Organisation (later popularly called UN), had the promotion and enforcement of world peace as its primary raison d’être. 

It is summarised in its motto: they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Tools of war turned into tools of production. This opening chapter of Prophet Isaiah heralds an era of civilisation, when all creation will be at peace with itself. 

The chapter opens the Advent period that precedes Christmas, the Nativity wherein God takes our humanity, thus perfecting it with His divinity. The divinity in man tames the animal in man.  

He will no longer seek to control, dominate and subjugate fellow man; thus, rendering the tools of war redundant. They must be reshaped into tools of production…dominating and taming nature to man’s wellbeing.

That the UN adopted this verse as its motto is not accidental. It reflects the desired world as seen by visionary founding fathers of this global body. Yet the motto and its symbolic statue have not moved beyond the UN headquarters in New York.

The verse is etched in the wall at the entrance to the UN towers. The statue welcomes you to the entrance. It depicts a giant man with a hammer aloft in one hand, while the other hand holds a sword on an anvil, being beaten into a ploughshare. 

It is instructive that the statue was donated to the UN by the Soviet Union, at the time the world was already divided into the capitalist and socialist blocs, with a cold war between the two blocs and their satellites and vassals globally. And the then Secretary General who received the statue, Dag Hammarskjold, would die in a plane crash in DR Congo, on a peace mission to the country.  

DR Congo, where peace remains elusive, despite the UN having the largest ever peacekeeping force in the country. Largest and most expensive ever. What is the missing link here? Mzee says we must answer Prof Pinycwa’s question: the UN must go back to its prima facie raison dêtre: creator and enforcer of world peace. This calls for sovereign power and ‘political’ authority. 

The starting point, he argues, must be revisiting the present charter and principles, to reposition the UN as a global sovereign government. What this means is that by subscribing to the UN, each member state surrenders a portion of its sovereignty into the UN Government, irrevocable, binding and enforceable.

An empire by consent and consensus not by coercion and conquest as of old. The UN becomes the incarnation of the global social contract between the leaders and the citizens: we surrender our sovereignty to you and expect peace and harmony from you in return. The global government reigns over regional alliances wakina NATO, which become redundant in the new dispensation. 

The Security Council loses its present structure of permanent members and rotating members. The Big Five sublimate into the larger UN Government, with agencies restructured and refocused accordingly.

Primary on the Ploughshares Programme of the UN will be the dismantling of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, so that no nation shall raise sword against nation, nor learn the art of war anymore. Aggression by any member state on a member state becomes aggression against the UN Empire and calls for appropriate retaliation from above. 

The last 75 years have witnessed the UN divert from her original mission, surrendering it to regional alliances, with global citizens left to appeal to an amorphous and phantom ‘international community’. 

We must return to the roots. For starters, even in the current dispensation, let us rebrand: the new UN logo,  the statue and the shortened slogan ‘Swords into Ploughshares’ should be the master logo everywhere, with respective agency logos coming second. We must create a lasting peace world order, if we are to lay claim to civilisation.

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