“We need to do better,” says President Ruto at the UN meeting, calling for changes around the world

Kenya’s President William Ruto has said again that developed countries are to blame for the global debt problem, climate change, and inequality.

In his first speech at the UN General Assembly’s Summit of the Future in New York on Sunday night, Dr. Ruto said that the UN had not done enough to deal with ongoing global problems.

“The Earth is getting hotter, our climate is in trouble, the oceans are rising, deserts are spreading, and wars are breaking out all over the world.” “Millions of people have been forced to move, are poor, and can’t get to basic services,” Dr. Ruto said.

He said that multilateral systems had failed to solve problems like climate change, injustice, and debt.

Dr. Ruto stressed how important it was to act right away to stop the unprecedented global disaster that is climate change in its early stages.

Rather than just talking about it in meetings, he asked the UN to do something to help fight the effects of climate change on a global level.

“We have no choice but to get rid of old systems and build a new system of international cooperation that works for all eight billion of us.”

“This means redesigning the international financial system and strengthening partnerships for common security. It also means bridging the digital divide and investing in human capacity, especially to give women and young people more power. But the window of opportunity to do all of this is closing quickly,” he said.

He was proud of how well Kenya ran the first African Climate Summit and said it was a good example of how to make changes that can be used to fight climate change. He also talked about Kenya’s big plan to plant 15 billion trees.

He asked everyone else to do the same things to stop climate change from destroying the world.

“Our goal in Kenya is to plant 15 billion trees to increase forest cover by 30%. This is a project that is mostly being led by our young people.” I started Climate Works two weeks ago, a program that will hire 200,000 young people to work on infrastructure and restoring the environment. He said, “This is the way to go.”

Regarding the ongoing wars around the world, the President praised his soldiers on the peacekeeping mission in Haiti and said that the mission was Africa’s gift to world peace, which is why the continent should have permanent seats on the UN Security Council.

“A year ago, I promised that Kenya would help with an international security mission to Haiti. Yesterday, I went to Porto Prince to see how far Kenya’s mission has come, even though it has limited resources. What seemed like an impossible mission is now a present and real possibility for peace in Haiti,” Dr. Ruto said.

When asked about representation on the UN Security Council, he said, “As a matter of justice, we must address the historical injustice of Africa’s lack of permanent representation at the UN Security Council.”

Also, region-led peace operations that are sustainably paid by UN access contributions are very important for dealing with today’s complicated security problems.

The United States recently made a big statement. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who is the US ambassador to the UN, said that the US was ready to support two permanent seats for Africa on the UN Security Council (UNSC) and one non-permanent seat for a small island state.

She did say, though, that the US would not back giving the two permanent African seats veto power like the five original permanent members—the US, China, France, Britain, and Russia.

Ambassador Greenfield says this is because the veto has made the Security Council useless because any permanent member can stop decisions they don’t agree with.

The Council is made up of 15 non-permanent members who represent different parts of the world and five regular members who can veto decisions.

Many people say that the regular members’ ability to veto makes the Council useless because they rarely agree and often use their veto power. This means the Council can’t do anything about important issues of world security.

In his speech, Dr. Ruto also talked about the Sustainable Development Goals and said that African countries are having a hard time meeting them because they don’t have enough money.

“The 2014 Sustainable Development Goals report paints a bleak picture. Only 17% of the targets are on track, mostly because financial commitments have not been kept. Developing countries, especially in Africa and the global south, are facing severe funding shortages, and the gap is growing,” he said.

“There needs to be a bigger window of affordable financing for developing countries so they can provide important public services, invest in changing their economies, and set high goals for climate change.”

A new report from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) was released at a side event during the 79th United Nations General Assembly in New York. It shows that Kenya’s debt crisis is making it very hard to pay for health and HIV services, leaving the sector permanently short of funds.

Not only that, but it also showed that many African countries are drowning in debt, making it hard for them to pay for health care and AIDS services.

The report “Domestic Revenues, Debt Relief, and Development Aid: Transformative Pathways for Ending AIDS by 2030” shows that it is harder for countries to get the money they need to care for HIV patients, which is putting at risk the progress that has been made in Eastern and Southern Africa to end AIDS.

The study says that high public debt, high inflation, weak public finances, and a drop in foreign investment are making it harder to get money for the HIV response just when it’s needed the most.

It’s possible that other priorities could take much-needed foreign funds away from health and the HIV response. It would have the most significant effect on eastern and southern Africa, where 52% of all people living with HIV live, if the world’s governments renewed their promise to fully pay the HIV response.

The study says that Kenya, Ethiopia, Malawi, Namibia, and South Africa still haven’t seen their income levels return to what they were before the pandemic. Over the course of the decade, tax receipts dropped from 16.1% of GDP in 2017 to 15.1% of GDP in 2023, a drop of 0.9% of GDP.

In 2020 and 2021, when the COVID-19 outbreak was at its worst, the drops were the biggest.

From 2017 to 2023, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, and Zimbabwe all saw a drop in their domestic tax collections of at least 3% of their GDP. Kenya only got 24% of the money it was supposed to get in 2022, which is making it harder to pay for HIV programs.

Malawi, Mozambique, Somalia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe are five countries in the region that are “in debt distress.” Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan are three countries that are at “high risk,” and Lesotho, Madagascar, Rwanda, the United Republic of Tanzania, and Uganda are five countries that are at “moderate risk.” There is no such thing as a low-risk country.