I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse. Florence Nightingale
To rush into explanations is always a sign of weakness. Agatha Christie
There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving. Jean-Paul Sartre
The heart has its reasons but the mind makes the excuses. Amit Abraham
For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal. Søren Kierkegaard
Excuses and complaints are signs of a dreamless life. Bangambiki Habyarimana
An archer must never blame a target for missing it. Matshona Dhliwayo
Sometimes you find yourself walking alone on the road. That doesn’t mean you are on the wrong one. Akol Miyen Kuol
This week, amidst policy concerns ranging from the daily abuses occurring in Tigray record high temperatures for late September in several global regions, and the more subtle crises related to our unsustainable agricultural practices and shocking levels of food waste, the UN witnessed some potentially important leadership shifts. In the Security Council, Kenya has replaced Ireland as president, continuing a trend of high-profile and at times bold and outspoken leadership by elected members in a Chamber that has had more than its share of issues telling the truth about what it has and has not done, what it is able and unable to do, as it struggles to maintain the peace and security on which the dreams of a weary planet increasingly depend.
And, on Friday, the newly-minted president of the General Assembly, Abdulla Shahid of the Maldives, gave his first press conference in that role, conveying both the core priorities of his presidency and the importance of making the UN – and more specifically the GA – a stronger and more relevant player in solving a host of problems that we are running out of time to solve and that present to us obstacles which – once again as they have in the past — will surely test our collective mettle; indeed the very sincerity of our policy convictions.
During his press briefing, president Shahid noted that he “would rather be seen as naïve than as a doomsayer.” He would also rather invest energy in raising levels of GA engagement with obstacles to progress rather than getting bogged down in endless explanations for why we can’t act, why we can’t solve, why we can’t do more to restore a sense of possibility to the hungry and the skeptical. His “presidency of hope” will surely absorb charges and challenges of naivete, but as his predecessors have often noted before him, the multilateral system of which we are all part must attend to the often self-inflicted wounds of suspicion and disinterest which are only growing as its policy bubbles thicken and become, in more than a few instances, both self-referential and tone deaf.
The formula for making president Shahid’s “hope” more consequential, more believable beyond the boundaries of the bubble, is not complicated: more delivery and less deliberation, delivery which is inclusive, thoughtful and contextual; delivery which does not require us to navigate an endless parade of political concerns, protocols, procedural impediments and state interests. Such delivery is more about our determination to solve and less about excuses when our “solving” is impeded by a gauntlet of national interests, funding expectations, and uneven levels of accountability both to stakeholders and to those who claim to represent them.
For those who have somehow forgotten this, the UN is largely beholden to the interests of its member states, and more specifically its most powerful and largest donor states. Many UN briefings, in our view at least, take on the flavor of funders exchanges, with agencies trying to put their activities in the most favorable light such that pledging states will both honor and step-up their funding commitments. This “dance” between skilled agencies and state donors is common in UN spaces, leading too often to discussions about “what we’re doing” rather than “what is working.” It is also a dance which, over the course of the past 20 years, we have chosen to sit out, not out of any naivete regarding the power of money and politics, but because we recognize that these are not the only characteristics of a system that can covey hope to the hopeless, convey a sense that not only is a better world within our grasp but that the multilateral system is committed to doing what is needed, and all that is needed, to grasp it.
In our very way over many years, we have done our small part to contribute to a core mandate of the groups and organizations in our sector – increasing the transparency of the institutions with which we interact, holding them accountable to their promises, insisting that the sum of activities is designed to increase hope rather than dampen it through inaction or indulgence in the “swarm of excuses” which seems at times to hover over all our deliberations, an indulgence which seems perpetually to beckon as policy promises proliferate like bait on a hook, once attractive to metaphorical fish which have now largely wised up to its allures.
Regarding this indulgent path, needless to say, we are not exactly knights in shining armor. Our sector is equally prone to self-interest, to playing up to funders, to collapsing our policy attention even more tightly around organizational mandates. We don’t always see carefully or deeply enough to contribute to the hopefulness which the UN system seeks to convey, indeed is morally obligated to convey. We also make excuses for our own failures or half-successes that could have been navigated more successfully. I have done so also. It is unsavory at best.
And yet, despite our serial over-branding and excuse making, it is hard to see how the promises of the GA president can be realized in our collective absence. Sadly, for almost two years now, we have been barred from the UN castle. As I predicted might turn out to be the case back in spring 2020, the “excuse” of the pandemic has resulted in the complete barring of all NGOs from UN headquarters, with no plan as of this writing to restore access to us as it has long been restored for some other segments of the system; and with no platform for discussion established which would allow us to vet together the implications of procedures which allow unvaccinated diplomats to enter headquarters, but not vaccinated NGOs, including folks like us who previously spent as much as 10 hours a day walking those halls, each and every day, over an entire generation.
To be clear, our “drama” around access is a matter of petty concern when measured against the standards of famine and armed violence, genocide and ecological collapse. Those victims could (and should) care less about whether we get our coffee in the Vienna Café or in the kitchens we are privileged to have in our homes. But this serial denial of access is bad news all around, for our own work of course but also for the many groups – indigenous people, persons with disabilities, refugees and others – whose access to this policy space is a cardinal reassurance that the UN system is paying attention to them, that they are an integral part of our circle of concern rather than an afterthought.
As we have noted in other contexts, while the pandemic has set up many obstacles, it has also exposed longstanding flaws in our economic and social systems that, despite vast testimony from civil society leaders and others, have not been duly addressed. But as the pandemic constitutes a genuine, far-reaching global crisis, it does not constitute an excuse. It is not an excuse for any failure to fulfill the promises of the sustainable development goals. It does not excuse the weakening of our democratic norms, the fostering of hate speech, or our current (and too often violent) bursts of nationalist fervor. The pandemic is also not the cause of the conflicts we fail to resolve, the resolutions we pass that have no teeth, the disaster warnings we hear but fail to heed. It is not an excuse for widening inequalities regarding health care access, opportunities for sustainable livelihoods, digital connectivity, and certainly not for our grossly unequal patterns of vaccine distribution.
And it is not an excuse for the thickening of our policy bubbles, for shifting the presence of diverse policy actors from in-person presence to online exile, certainly not in the absence of proper consultation. Such represents an interruption of our work, especially with diverse young people looking forward to their time inside UN Headquarters. But it is also represents a level of disrespect which no diplomat would rightly tolerate for themselves but which few have done much of anything to prevent from happening to others. We acknowledge that we chose this work, we chose these issues, we chose this institution in which to practice our evolving craft. Respect or no, such choices remain in operation, at least for now.
What we also know for certain is that, with whatever time we have remaining in this policy space, we are done with the “poisonous breath” of excuse making. For the sake of a planet on the edge, for the sake of millions of people in the midst of an interminable wait for practical, loving acts of solidarity and relief, we will continue to walk whatever road is available to us, however isolated that road might sometimes be, encouraging others with access to the levers of policy and power to seize this moment, to stop “explaining” why we can’t honor our values and commitments, and to instead sustain the changes that much of the world is now begging us to make.
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