In the same hall where calls to reform the United Nations have echoed for decades, African leaders stood this week before the UN General Assembly’s 81st session to repeat a demand that has gone unmet since it was first raised: a permanent African seat on the Security Council. What rarely makes it into these speeches, though, is the structural catch built into the request itself — any such reform requires, under the Charter, the approval of the five veto-holding powers that benefit from the current arrangement, which is precisely the arrangement the reform is meant to dismantle.

An absence written into the rules, not just political will

The Security Council has 15 members: five permanent ones holding veto power — the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and China — and ten non-permanent seats rotated among the rest of the UN’s membership every two years. Africa currently holds three of those rotating seats, and none of the five permanent ones.

What makes this arrangement so hard to change isn’t only the underlying balance of political power, but the text of Article 108 of the UN Charter itself, which requires any amendment to be approved and ratified by two-thirds of member states — “including all the permanent members of the Security Council.” In plain terms, each permanent member holds a veto over reforming the Council itself, exactly as it holds a veto over any other resolution the Council might pass.

A shared demand from a continent of many voices

This year’s renewed push came through a string of individual speeches by heads of state rather than a single coordinated statement — but nearly all of them traced back to one document: the African Union’s 2005 Ezulwini Consensus, which calls for at least two permanent seats for the continent.

Kenyan President William Ruto said the Charter treats every state as sovereign and equal, but that equality “stops at the doors of the Security Council” when it comes to matters of war and peace. Ethiopian President Taye Atske Selassie framed the question in explicitly moral terms, asking how a world guided by a sound conscience could justify denying 1.6 billion Africans an equal right to representation.

Liberian President Joseph Boakai described the status quo as “a historical injustice that is no longer acceptable,” stressing that the issue isn’t a favor to be granted to Africa but a necessity for the UN to restore its own trust, credibility, and legitimacy. In remarks delivered on behalf of Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Vice President Kashim Shettima spelled out the African demand in precise terms: at least two permanent seats with the full rights and responsibilities of permanent membership — “including the veto, for as long as it exists” — alongside five non-permanent seats in total.

Namibian President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah said it was time to acknowledge that negotiations have simply gone on too long, while Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud argued that reform is “necessary to protect the UN’s legitimacy, renew trust in its institutions, and ensure its capacity to respond to the realities of our time.”

The numbers argument: who actually sets the Council’s agenda?

African leaders didn’t rest their case on moral or historical grounds alone — they backed it with functional data. South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Ronald Lamola, noted that Africa is home to roughly a fifth of the world’s population and accounts for more than a quarter of UN member states, adding that 70% of Security Council resolutions over the past decade dealt with conflicts on the African continent itself.

That statistic is precisely what elevates the African demand beyond a procedural grievance: by this account, Africa constitutes the largest single subject of the Council’s work, without holding a permanent voice in shaping its decisions.

Prior US backing that never became reality

This isn’t the first time the demand has drawn support from one of the permanent members. The United States announced in 2024, under President Joe Biden, its support for adding two permanent African seats to the Security Council. But that endorsement came from a previous administration and has not, so far, translated into any concrete move to amend the Charter under the current one — underscoring the limits of political statements of support in the absence of a binding mechanism that could compel the five permanent powers to give up part of their unique standing.

From the Security Council chamber to the AI negotiating table

The African demand this year wasn’t confined to traditional Council representation — it extended into an entirely different file: artificial intelligence. After Secretary-General António Guterres called on competing powers in the field to cooperate in addressing its risks, and after the Security Council held a special session bringing in tech industry leaders, many African leaders insisted that decision-making on the technology include the developing countries most likely to be affected by it.

Botswana’s President Duma Boko said developing nations must have an effective voice in setting the standards and safeguards that govern new technologies, in ways that expand opportunity, support decent work, and strengthen public services while protecting human dignity, rights, and security. He called specifically for Africa’s inclusion in discussions on critical minerals, rare earth elements, and the energy resources that power these technological advances — much of which originates in developing countries in the first place.

In the same vein, Lamola said Africa has a right to help shape the rules governing the development and use of artificial intelligence, while Shettima said Nigeria refuses to “hand its technological future over to uncertainty,” noting that the technology can be used to wage wars just as readily as it can be used to advance health, education, and agriculture.

A backdrop that makes the demand more urgent, not more achievable

These calls are being made this year against a tense international backdrop: the Russia-Ukraine war continues, the war on Gaza is ongoing, and the war on Iran looms in the background of the deliberations, according to the Associated Press, which noted that many see this accumulation of crises as further evidence of the urgent need to reform the Council. But the paradox persists: the more crises the Council handles under its current composition, the more urgent calls for its reform become — while the mechanism for that very reform remains hostage to the approval of the five parties the Charter was designed to let keep their privileged position, indefinitely.

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