Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Jimoh Ibrahim, has renewed the country’s push for permanent African representation on the UN Security Council, describing the current structure as unjust in a world where Africa accounts for 25 percent of the global population but holds no permanent voice in the body that makes the most consequential decisions about international peace and security.
Ibrahim, speaking in an interview with ARISE News ahead of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, said Nigeria had signed the recommitment to the UN Charter on behalf of President Tinubu as an expression of confidence in the organization and its future, but that confidence in the UN’s legitimacy was inseparable from the organization’s willingness to reform structures that reflected the post-1945 world rather than 21st-century realities.
He argued that Africa’s absence from permanent Security Council membership was directly connected to the continent’s security challenges, saying that the working of the Council made permanent representation consequential in ways that advisory or rotating membership could not replicate. He said the UN-80 reform agenda lacked credibility if it failed to address what he described as the most glaring structural inequity in the existing institutional design.
Ibrahim said Nigeria was actively pursuing a permanent seat as part of broader efforts to restore the country’s international standing, describing Nigeria as Africa’s giant with an obligation to represent the continent’s interests at the highest levels of global governance. He noted that discussions on Security Council reform were ongoing within UN structures and that Nigeria intended to ensure Africa’s case was prominent in those deliberations.
