Keypoints:
- Africa remains outside UN veto power
- AU demands two permanent Council seats
- Guterres calls Africa’s exclusion indefensible
AFRICA’S long campaign for permanent representation on the United Nations Security Council is back at the centre of global diplomacy at UNGA81. But beneath the familiar demand for more African seats lies a much harder question: who gets to wield real power?
African countries are not absent from the Security Council. They regularly serve as elected, non-permanent members. What Africa has never had is a permanent member able to use the veto alongside China, France, Russia, the UK and the US.
That difference is at the heart of the African Union’s reform campaign.
The AU wants at least two permanent African seats, and it says those seats should carry the same privileges as those held by the existing permanent five. If the veto survives, Africa argues, its permanent members should have it too.
So this is no longer simply a debate about getting Africa into the room. It is about what happens once Africa gets there.
Africa takes its case to UNGA81
The 81st session of the UN General Assembly in New York has given the issue fresh political momentum.
African Union Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf has made reform of global institutions a prominent part of the AU’s agenda, reflecting a wider African push for more influence over international decisions on peace, security, finance and development.
As Africa Briefing reported from this year’s General Assembly debate, African leaders have increasingly linked Security Council reform to a broader complaint: institutions created when much of Africa was still under colonial rule continue to shape decisions affecting a vastly different world.
Few institutions illustrate that tension more clearly than the Security Council.
Five countries hold permanent seats. All five possess a veto capable of blocking substantive Council decisions. None is African.
What Africa actually wants
Africa’s demand is far more precise than a general call for better representation.
Under the Ezulwini Consensus and Sirte Declaration, the AU wants at least two permanent seats and five non-permanent seats for Africa on a reformed Security Council.
That position was set out again in the African Model on UN Security Council Reform, submitted to the UN reform negotiations in April 2026.
The model says Africa should receive no fewer than two permanent seats ‘with the veto, if the veto continues to exist’, alongside five non-permanent seats.
That qualification is important.
Africa’s position is not that the veto is a good system. The Common African Position opposes it in principle. But the AU argues that as long as the power exists, it should not remain the exclusive preserve of the existing permanent members.
Otherwise, reform could simply replace one inequality with another: older permanent members with vetoes and newer permanent members without them.
The AU also insists that Africa itself should choose which countries occupy its permanent seats.
No country has yet been formally selected. Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt are often mentioned in the wider debate, but the AU position is that the choice should be made by Africa, not by outside powers.
That question would become politically sensitive very quickly if Security Council reform moved from negotiation to implementation.
The veto is the real divide
There is now significant support for improving Africa’s representation. The tougher disagreement is over what kind of permanent membership Africa would receive.
Some countries support adding permanent members but oppose creating more vetoes. Others argue that new permanent members must enjoy exactly the same rights as the original five. There are also governments that want the veto curtailed or abolished.
The US position captures the dilemma.
Washington announced support in 2024 for two permanent African seats but stopped short of supporting new veto powers, as Africa Briefing reported at the time.
For African negotiators, that goes to the heart of the matter.
If an African country were to sit permanently beside China, France, Russia, the UK and US but lacked the same authority, would that really constitute equal permanent membership?
That is why the debate has moved beyond the number of chairs around the table. It is increasingly about what those chairs are worth.
Guterres presses reform in final year
Outgoing UN Secretary-General António Guterres has given Africa’s case unusually strong backing during his final year in office.
Speaking to African leaders at the AU Summit in Addis Ababa in February, Guterres called the absence of permanent African representation ‘indefensible’.
His next line was even more pointed: ‘This is 2026 — not 1946.’
Guterres said Africa should be present whenever decisions about the continent and the wider world are being taken. At a press conference during the summit, he explicitly called for ‘two permanent African seats’.
‘Africa must be part of global decisions – not just of global consequences,’ he said.
But Guterres has not gone as far as the AU on the veto.
He has backed permanent African membership while also criticising the way veto power has paralysed the Council during major conflicts. His position has focused on representation, legitimacy and the ability of the Council to act, rather than endorsing the AU’s specific demand for new African vetoes.
At the same Addis Ababa press conference, he said the Council ‘does not represent today’s world’, noting the contrast between Europe’s three permanent members — France, the UK and Russia — and the absence of permanent representation for Africa and Latin America.
He also pointed to vetoes as one reason the Council has repeatedly failed to act when wars demanded a collective response.
There is no contradiction between that criticism and the AU position.
Africa’s argument is essentially pragmatic: abolish the veto if the world agrees to abolish it, but do not preserve it for five countries while denying it to new permanent African members.
Guterres returned to the wider issue of institutional reform in his final address to the General Assembly on September 22, as he prepared to end a decade at the helm of the UN. His term expires on December 31.
Security Council reform will be among the major unfinished questions he leaves behind.
Why reform remains stuck
The obstacle is not simply political reluctance. The Security Council is deliberately difficult to change.
Its structure is written into the UN Charter. An amendment requires approval by two-thirds of the General Assembly and ratification by two-thirds of UN member states.
Most importantly, all five permanent members must be among the countries ratifying the change.
That gives the existing P5 an extraordinary role in deciding how — and whether — their own privileges are altered.
There is also no common view among the wider UN membership on what a reformed Council should look like.
Countries disagree over its eventual size, the number of permanent seats, regional allocation, the future of the veto and even whether creating more permanent members would make the institution more democratic.
Those differences remain visible in the UN’s continuing intergovernmental negotiations on Security Council reform.
Russia’s position at UNGA81 illustrates the complexity.
The Kremlin said on September 22 that Moscow supports adding new permanent members but wants the veto system retained. What it did not establish was whether new African permanent members should enjoy the same veto rights as the existing P5.
Supporting a bigger Security Council, therefore, is not necessarily the same thing as supporting an equal one.
Support for African reform broadens
Africa’s case has nevertheless moved much further into the mainstream of the reform debate.
The continent has 54 UN member states and is central to many of the peace and security issues considered by the Council. Yet it remains entirely outside permanent membership.
The African reform model submitted in 2026 also points to language in the UN’s Pact for the Future recognising the need to address Africa’s historical underrepresentation as a priority.
That gives African negotiators more than a numerical argument. Their case is also about the legitimacy of an institution whose most powerful membership category still reflects the world that emerged from the Second World War.
The discussion reaches well beyond the UN.
As President John Mahama has argued in discussing Africa’s place in a changing global order, African governments are also pushing for greater influence in international finance, debt governance and other institutions whose decisions have profound consequences for the continent.
The AU’s admission to the G20 demonstrated that institutional reform is possible when political agreement exists.
The Security Council is a much harder test because the countries most affected by reform are also the countries with the power to block it.
What happens next?
For now, Africa’s campaign goes back into the slow machinery of UN negotiations.
Member states continue to disagree over the size of an expanded Council, who should become permanent members, how regions should be represented and whether the veto should be expanded, limited or eventually removed.
That leaves a considerable gap between growing support for permanent African representation and agreement on what powers those seats would actually carry.
And that is the real question behind the headline.
Africa already has a voice on the Security Council through elected members. What it does not have is a permanent place among the countries able to stop a Council decision with a single vote.
Guterres will leave the UN at the end of 2026 without seeing that structure changed.
But his final-year interventions have added weight to an argument African leaders have made for years: a Security Council created for the geopolitical realities of the mid-20th century is struggling to explain why an entire continent remains outside its permanent membership in the 21st.
For Africa, getting permanent seats would be historic.
The harder question is whether those seats would come with the power that makes permanent membership matter.
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