Tag Archives: pandemic

Excuse Me: Owning our Policy Investments, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Oct

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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Irregular Times: Narrowing the Rhetoric-Delivery Gap, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Jun
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An irregular heart beat

So many distractions, when all she wanted was silence, so she could understand what was going on. Rehan Khan

It seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.  George Eliot

The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. C.S. Lewis

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.  Robert A. Heinlein

But can we dispel “unusefulness” as worthless? For some, art and play may be “useless” but yet are fundamental ways and means for survival. Erik Pevernagie

Be beautiful if you can, wise if you want to, but be respected. Anna Gould

The UN was a veritable hive of activity this week, allowing those who logged in on the limited basis to conclude either that the world has either completely lost its mind or that it has found at least some of its ethical and policy bearings.  

Many of the “faithful remnant” who still consult these posts know a fair bit about the “lost mind” part.  The puzzling struggle in the Security Council over cross-border humanitarian access for Syrians; the seemingly endless US blockade of Cuba despite annual global condemnations; the crackdowns on journalists and civil society actors in settings from Turkey to Mynamar; the fresh casualties from our collective failure to stem the spread of new COVID-19 variants in part due to rhetorical support for vaccine access not matched by reliable deliveries; the armed groups, including forces made up entirely of children, taking lives with impunity in Burkina Faso and across the Sahel; the arms trafficking and lax measures on access and acquisition which are turned sections of the US and Latin America into weapons fortresses.

You get the point.  Even in a UN week dedicated in part to Counter-Terrorism it became clear that, despite some welcome progress on border control, weapons smuggling, human trafficking, and airline passenger data collection, terror groups often seem to be one step ahead of efforts to control their movements, restrict extremist rhetoric, and stem the recruitment of youth living in areas that offer little in the way of alternative hope.  That government actions too often feed terrorist narratives, as in the horrific example of Tigray where civilians are raped, tortured and starved and the lives of humanitarian workers are under constant siege, undermines at face value claims by some state and UN authorities that the pandemic – and not our own self-serving political interests and attendant rationalizations, is the underlying cause of our security-related breakdowns.

These are irregular times, but surely not primarily evil ones.   It is true that we have often hidden behind our bureaucracies and national interests, burying endless praise under protocol and seeking to call attention to what we are doing more than what is working, what comes next, what we need (besides money) that we don’t have, what role the rest of us should be playing to complement, and at times challenge, the decisions of states and diplomats.  It is also true that, disregarding regular calls for global and national cease fire arrangements, guns and various explosions continue to claim lives. Despite this, we continue to inadequately funnel our various human security activities, including on health, food and water access, into a more robust peace and security framework and then insist, here and now, that those tasked with such matters, especially the Security Council, do their jobs to maintain the peace or throw their collective weight behind agents and institutions that might have a better go of it.

Yes these are irregular times, but we are actually learning things, perhaps not enough and perhaps not in time, to stem the tide of violence and embrace the complex efforts of so many who are in the best sense of the term “essential workers.”  We have commented previously on the ways in which the UN honors the efforts and sacrifice of peacekeepers and other UN field staff, and has done so in ways beyond mere honoring, including mandates that narrow the gap between what is expected of peacekeepers and the training and capacity support required to do what is asked.  We also applaud that personnel able to engage communities and their most vulnerable members – including child and women protection advisers – are available to build trust and ensure context-specific protection in ways that soldiers with guns themselves cannot always do.  In this time, the honoring of peacekeepers and other field actors has evolved into something more than ceremonial, more than rhetorical, as their demands increase and threats to their safety proliferate.

And what of our front-line health workers, the “essential” professionals of this extended time of pandemic threat, those who found (and still find) themselves at the edge of exhaustion and despair trying to keep loved ones together and families and communities intact? Even more, what of those who perform these services not in modern hospitals but in makeshift clinics in urban and rural settings at times characterized by antiquated equipment, limited provisions for hungry families or vaccines for communities ravaged by the virus, and by the sounds of bombs which often distract from healing thoughts and sometimes even target their very facilities?  

In two events this week, one in the General Assembly and another in the Economic and Social Council, the UN sought to both honor these essential workers and to assess the state of affairs surrounding their grueling and often dangerous work.  We heard this week from many remarkable people, including a Ugandan woman helping to protect and empower persons with disabilities in the remote north of her country along with a bevy of other powerful policy and healing voices, some urging us in essence “to spare a thought” for those victimized by torture, pandemic, famine or sexual violence, but also for those who seek to rehabilitate them, to heal their wounds and restore some measure of the fulness of life after unimaginable ordeals.

But what made these events successful is that underlying the honoring of these workers – and we need to honor more often, more broadly, more sincerely – was the unambiguous recognition that “sparing a thought” was not nearly enough, not enough to change circumstances on the ground, not enough to restore hope in these “irregular times,” not enough to fulfill our responsibilities and ensure that we are better prepared for health and other threats to come; and thus our policy priorities must become as clear, distraction-free, respectful and sustainable as we can make them.

Where essential actions are concerned, there were in fact many urgent calls this week from UN officials and diplomats, calls for greater and more practical solidarity with front-line workers (from Costa Rica and the Caribbean community), for fresh and robust investments in health infrastructure (from the president of the General Assembly), for higher levels of mental health services for traumatized health and humanitarian workers and the victims they seek to serve (from the World Health Organization) and for a swift end to child marriage, child labor, child abuse, school attacks and other child-unfriendly practices which we should be ashamed to tolerate even one day longer (from the ICRC).

And for peace, blessed peace, that elusive commodity which, in its absence, makes every problem we face that much more difficult to solve, the armed violence which as noted this week by Acting USG Rajasingham complicates every aspect of health care and humanitarian access, ratcheting up dangers and demands for front-line workers in the field, and dampening hope and enthusiasm of traumatized community members who wonder amidst the noises of war if there will ever be a peaceful silence which grants them space to figure out other things, space to think great thoughts, make more culture, watch children play, and attend to other pressing needs within and beyond their own families.

Amidst the global carnage and policy partial-truths which punctuated this policy week, there were also some valuable lessons that rose to the surface, lessons grounded in dedicated efforts to heal our irregular hearts in part by narrowing the gaps between our rhetoric and our delivery.  We know that we must spend more time honoring and heeding the people who both care for us and hold up the promise of our world. We know that we must increase the solidarity needed to create more safe spaces for what can hopefully become a less harassed and stressed roster of front-line workers. We know that we must commit to build higher quality health infrastructure and take other measures to ensure that we are better focused and prepared to head off the next health crisis than we were for this one. We know we must increase access to vaccines, to potable water, to safe schools and to other measures which too many communities have been denied for far too long.

And we know that we must determine to make more peace in this world, peace in our communities, our schools and cultural institutions, our national and multi-lateral agencies.  It is a cliché to be sure, but it is hard to see how any of the problems we now face, any of the crises — current and looming — that now scar our planet and too many of its human inhabitants, can be resolved in sustainable fashion unless the guns have finally and fully gone silent.

Of all the rhetoric-delivery gaps which currently define our policy and practice, of all the misplaced promises that continue to stoke “unfavorable conditions” in our irregular world, the seemingly-endless cry for peace remains at the top of our attentions.  It is the cry, almost 18 years on in this current NGO arrangement, which we continue to hear the loudest and which we most encourage others of all ages and backgrounds to hear as well.

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Care Package: A Mother’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

9 May

Please don’t judge me too much until you are older and know more things. Ann Brashares

She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.  Rebecca Solnit

Motherwhelm isn’t a problem, it’s a rite of passage. Beth Berry

My daughter, my mother, her mother, her mother’s mother. It is as if they have left footprints in the snow. Try as I might to deviate, my feet fall gently but firmly into their well-worn grooves. Pippa Grace

For a woman to birth something other than children and then mother it with the same sense of purpose, attention, and care came as an astonishment, even to me.  Sue Monk Kidd

She caught herself working so hard at mothering that she forgot to enjoy her children. Susan Wiggs

I have seen him climbing a tree while she stood beneath him in unutterable anguish; she had to let him climb, for boys must be brave, but I am sure that, as she watched him, she fell from every branch.  J.M. Barrie

There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother’s fear of her children.  Stephanie Bishop

Earlier this week, I spent a few hours with a dying cousin, a wonderful younger man who was surrounded by extended family and health professionals offering all manner of caregiving. My role amidst this glorious frenzy of care was a relatively simple one, to help ease his transition from this life to whatever might come next.

Part of my intervention involved a series of familiar (to him) prayers and readings directed not only to him in his time of need but to those who are still ministering to him in various ways, who makes sure he eats what he can, takes what medicines are prescribed, and even ensures that stories, affections and even tears are shared while he is here to share them. Those who have cared for the sick and dying know how much can be required of them more than they imagined, more than they might even feel that they have in them.

In this time of COVID-19, many millions around the world, including so many mothers, have had their caregiving capacities pushed beyond their limits. In various global regions, in places wracked by a spreading and largely unvaccinated pandemic, in places often characterized by gross economic inequalities, empty schools, unproductive farmlands and threats to home life and health access from armed groups, mothers and other caregivers wonder how they can get their children back on track, how to summon the energy to guarantee sustenance in an environment that continues to pile challenge on top of challenge, all of which have at least one thing in common – they are not the fault of the caregivers themselves.

In this regard, I recall an image from yesterday of an Afghan man clearly doing all that he could do to hold it together as he stood alongside the bloody, lifeless body of his daughter, one of the victims of yet another senseless shooting spree in that country. Another child taken from the world much too soon. Another family having to cope with a murderous end to their season of caregiving. There are hardly words to express such sadness.

Such loss, albeit with less-tragic lines, is also a feature of more “developed” parts of the world, places where caregiving has also mutated under the pandemic cloud of these past 15 months. This week, many mothers have taken to social and mainstream media to reflect on a year of caregiving in an environment over which they have little control and have often lost much, including their careers, their self-esteem and their chunks of their mental health. One of these mothers noted the vast sums of her energy trying (and sometimes failing) to preserve her income and continue to “birth” things in the wider world; to keep her children focused on learning though games and digital screens; to show tangible support and concern over zoon as parents “distantly” age and even succumb to the virus; and to hold on to sanity amidst logistical challenges which were both unplanned and wholly unpredictable.

A second mother wrote about having to accept being “merely OK” in meeting these logistical challenges. A third noted the strains that come with spending more time together with nuclear family than they ever imagined would be the case. A fourth spoke of shrinking circles of concern as friends and family struggle to maintain connective tissue during this long season of fear, uncertainty and isolation. Still another, a mother who just recently gave birth, described herself as almost “invisible” at a time when friends and family members would normally be flocking to hold the baby and offer whatever practical assistance they were able. One particularly thoughtful writer, Sari Azout, described the challenges of keeping the many dimensions of her life afloat while “mothering humans who never sleep,” a situation which may or may not be adjustable in the short-term, but one which is certainly unsustainable.

If “motherwhelm” is indeed a rite of passage, it is a rite accompanied by levels of anxiety, fear and disappointment to at least rival any time in our past. Some mothers in this time of pandemic are so busy working at being mothers that they have forgotten how to enjoy their children. Other mothers, who may not have seen their children for months on end, struggle to maintain connection to lives in flux, lives that they fear might be slipping away from them, slipping into a mode more forgetful and inattentive.

While it might not seem automatically relevant, the fears and courage of caregivers have bear a direct message for those of us who ostensibly create policy norms for the global community. While there is surely much to discuss, we talk endlessly in UN spaces about women, but rarely about mothers. We talk endlessly about children, but rarely about those who struggle to provide that practical, tangible care that can be so tenuous but which is indispensable to keeping alive their physical, emotional and cognitive well being. And it is much too easy for many of us in policy settings, especially those of us not actively caring for children or aging parents, to ignore or forget about the vast gulf which often separate our resolutions (even with their sometimes considerable protection and humanitarian consequences) and the often-relentless logistics of caregiving at local level, especially care administered under a cloud of multiple stressors.

Amidst all of the policy concerns at the UN this week, including not-unproblematic elections for senior leadership, eliminating the still-vast disparities of global digital access, and the horrific, unresolved violence affecting people in Tigray, on the streets of Myanmar and in the mosques of East Jerusalem, Estonia hosted a Security Council Arria Formula meeting to asses the impact of COVID-19 on children and communities already under strain from armed violence, climate change and a lack of health, protection and other government services.

We were grateful for the discussion as we are for the diverse UN capacities in the field seeking to end child recruitment by armed groups, restore educational options, address chronic food insecurity and much more. While conflict prevention remains an elusive goal in the Council and other UN chambers, the organization has done much to provide lifesaving assistance and advocate state responsibilities for children too often under siege.

That said, and as we noted at the time, talking about children in distress is low-hanging fruit for all of us in policy settings. There may be no other space in which we can easily appear so sincere while under-playing the specific policy changes that we need to both enable and enforce, part of which involves accompanying mothers and other caregivers whose interactions with children and community are so intensely practical, who continue to find ways to “make do” when the logistics of “making” are so fraught with difficulty.

Yes, as noted by Canada (Group of Friends) during this Arria session, we need more child protection advisors in the field alongside UN peacekeepers and experts. Yes, as noted by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, we need better verification and monitoring mechanisms to track and address abuses against children. Yes, as noted by the US we must prioritize services to support children with disabilities whose prospects in conflict and pandemic zones are even more dire. Yes, as noted by Tunisia, we must do more to ensure that children under “suspicion” of being part of armed groups are freed from prisons where they routinely “languish in unsafe and unsanitary conditions.” And yes, as noted by UNICEF’s Fontaine, we need more “sustained engagement” with armed groups on child protection and release and, despite the pandemic, we must also pledge to “stay close to where children need us.”

All good, but these are needs which are not news to us and as several states willingly acknowledged, have yet to receive sufficient capacity response either in personnel or in funding. Moreover, in the two hours which I was engaged in this meeting, I don’t recall a single reference to caregivers; not the valiant UN responders but the mothers and others who are doing the hard, practical work — and often making the hard decisions — regarding how to maintain some modicum of tangible progress in enhancing the best interests of the child.

These are the questions looming for us over this otherwise fine policy session. What is likely to change in the field in response to events such as these? Will there be more funding? More protection advisors? More international accountability for child-abusing states and armed groups? More determined effort to stem the violence which does more than anything else to limit options for children? But beyond this, how do we support caregivers, the mothers and others whose bag of remedial ideas might well have largely emptied, caregivers who can barely attend to children and others in their circle while their own mental and physical health is in demonstrable decline? How do we support the care that mothers often struggle to provide, care which is both indispensable for children and for which no UN agency can possibly be a reliable surrogate?

I wrote a piece a few years ago entitled “Other Mothers,” an ode to caregivers who share love and perform services normally (and not without reason) associated with biological mothers. As we recognize, there remain numerous, viable paths to caregiving, even in this time of pandemic limitation. But while many of those paths are now strewn with debris and explosive remnants of various sorts deposited by the more selfish, narcissistic and violent among us, these are paths that still merit risking the journey. Indeed these are the paths which bear the promise of a future less-affected by the emotional and physical scars of the present; a future that is healthier and safer for both children and caregivers; a future that can restore the promises embedded in the “well-worn grooves” of our snowy footprints; promises to children who may now never seem to sleep but who are also free to play and learn, to risk and dream; a future where caregivers need never again confront the blunt and unimaginable end of young lives snuffed out long before their time.

During this pandemic, many mothers worldwide have felt obliged to take a step back in lives which were already under considerable stress, some of whom might even be doubting if the children who now pack the spaces inside their multiple dwellings will ever have a chance to overcome sickness, trauma and disappointment, will ever again be able to enjoy lives of nutrition and education, of health access and economic opportunity. These are the caregivers who need more of our attention, those who hold the key to children who no longer need to hide from the assaults of a world which seems to be spinning out of orbit. We owe these caregivers more, on Mothers Day for sure, but everyday.

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Wobble World: Calming our Personal and Planetary Shaking, Dr. Robert Zuber

25 Apr
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Wake up. If your eyes are sleeping then wipe them gently. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death.  Kamand Kojouri

Longer than an earthquake, a pandemic shakes your life and living. P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.  John Keats

On what slender threads do life and fortune hang!  Alexandre Dumas

As anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded.  Charles Emmerson

Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities. Haruki Murakami

Humans can’t be strong because of the comfort & can’t be comfortable because of instability.  Sonal Takalkar

April is my favorite month of the year.  The gentle rains.  The longer sunlit days. The moderating temperatures.  The lightening of human moods, even in the midst of a pandemic that has lasted longer than most could have predicted or imagined, at least the moods of those of us privileged by health care access and vaccinations in a world still waiting – and waiting some more – for its fair turn.

And of course the trees and flower beds bursting with color.  In the north, April is the month that reminds us city dwellers of nature’s capacity – assisted in many instances by some truly remarkable urban gardeners – to regenerate itself and thereby tweaking the human race regarding the need for its own regeneration, its own need to recalibrate its relationship to the rest of the natural world, to (as UN SG Guterres says) “stop our war on nature.”

All this “Earth Week,” amidst a bevy of UN meetings alternately hopeful and maddening, I have been taking multiple, daily walks through nearby daffodil hillsides and under cherry blossoms and tulip trees.  I’ve also been spending evenings binge watching (for me) the stunningly filmed BBC nature programs hosted by the indefatigable David Attenborough.  I can’t get enough of either, not this week, not this month.

But all the color and the natural drama, the beautifully manicured parks and other scenes of a natural world bursting with new life also come attached to a blinking warning light, a warning that the flowers and species that make our hearts race are now under siege.  The biological rhythms that keep life in balance, indeed that help keep potential pandemics in check and our agriculture functional, are increasingly out of whack.  As our lands dry and our seas warm, species from bees to whales must find alternate survival settings on a planet increasingly hostile to their interests.

This “uproar” in the natural order, largely a consequence of human activity, is increasingly hostile to our own survival as well.  Those of us who are trying to stay vigilant, trying to stay awake and focused on our increasingly wobbly planet, seem so often to possess in our persuasive arsenal more warnings than we have solutions.  We know that deforestation ruptures food chains, destroys biodiversity and increases the likelihood of future pandemics at a moment when we have barely regained any firm footing from the current one. We know that our collective food security is regularly undermined through conditions from drought and flooding to soil erosion and the absence of pollinators. We know that levels of ocean plastics threaten to contaminate sea harvests on which many of the world’s peoples depend.

And we know that a warming planet continues to release both abundant methane into our atmosphere and vast quantities of precious fresh water into our oceans, altering both temperature and pH. In addition, a recent article by Brian Kahn chronicles the growing evidence that a combination of ice cap melting and groundwater depletion is causing a “wobble” in the very stability of our planet, a shifting (subtle for now) in the movements of the “rotational poles,” shifts in gravitational pull related largely to rapidly rising sea levels.

As the world wobbles on in response to our carbon addictive warming, so too do many of our fellow humans.  As noted at the UN this week, the current pandemic has been a boon to garden-variety narcissism but also to criminality in diverse forms – trafficking in persons and weapons, violence against cultural minorities, even the consolidation and expansion of extremist movements.   As the representative of the Maldives reminded this week during a UN General Assembly event on “urban crime,” cultivating a “sense of belonging” remains key to effective crime prevention. In its absence, criminal elements can establish (and have established) an increasingly malevolent, destabilizing presence, widening social divides and increasing levels of insecurity and anxiety within and across populations.

Such a “sense of belonging” has certainly been hard for us to come by during this pandemic.  So many of us, even the vaccinated and otherwise privileged among us, even those of us who have not been victimized by crime or lost those we love to a creeping virus, even we are now less stable, more wobbly, than we might otherwise admit.  Many of us have retreated to places that offer more comfort than growth; many of us have recalibrated relationships and passions and made the decision to shrink our circles rather than pushing them outwards; many of us have abandoned the goals and gifts that once animated our lives and provided hope for others as we “ride out this storm” that never seems to run out of destructive consequences.  We have at times allowed the insecurities in our immediate spaces rob our attentiveness to the almost unimaginable insecurities of others bereft of health care, bereft of security from traffickers and other criminal elements; bereft of food security as once viable croplands turn into non-productive deserts. 

And yet, despite our efforts to protect ourselves and those closest to us, it is not at all clear that we have put the threat from wobbles to rest. As the pandemic evolves and as our long social isolation and chronic uncertainty slowly begin to lift, many of us find that some aspects of our competence, our confidence, even our essential sanity, have taken a hit. 

As the buds and flowers of April spring open, they communicate what should be a hopeful signal to the rest of us:  If they can open to the world, so can we.  If they can spread their color, sharing the best of what they have to offer to brighten our sometimes dismal, lonely spaces, we can do the same for others.  If they can honor their annual biological commitments despite the wobbles of pollution, temperature and pollination, we can overcome our own struggles; indeed we can address the anxiety and even depression that will otherwise continue to impede our engagement with a human-saturated world that needs our sustainable caregiving input as much as it ever has.

Perhaps the signature event of this past week available on UN Web TV was actually not a UN event at all, but a Climate Summit convened by the US White House, bringing a range of global leaders together (virtually) to strengthen commitments to stem the steady march of a warming, species-threatened, plastics-inundated planet.  Despite a stream of largely predictable statements long on concern and short on change; and despite the opening warnings of UN SG Guterres that we are now risking a “mountain of debt on a broken planet,” there were a few genuine bright spots.  US VP Harris opened the Summit with surprising references to the “indigenous insight” and “nature-based solutions” that offer a tangible path forward, much of which was reinforced this week at the UN’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Later on, the president of the Marshall Islands, stressed the need for his oft-vulnerable people to find “safe harbor” amidst the current tempest, noting that the safest of all would be policies and actions to keep global temperature rise at or below 1.5 degrees C.  He also noted the importance, as did other leaders, of using this “rare chance” provided by pandemic recovery to “to reset our economies and societies.” Perhaps reset ourselves as well.

All of this was helpful and hopeful, but as German Chancellor Merkel intoned, we face a “herculean” task requiring a thorough revision of the ways in which we now do our business.  Indeed, her statement raised questions, for me at least, about the sufficiency of our institutions, the wisdom of our policies, but even more about the resilience of our collective psychology, our ability to shed our pandemic cocoons, to find ways to stop our shaking and steady our wobbling, to do our best to overcome the anxieties and insecurities which have taken root during our long hibernation, to lay aside grievances born of social isolation and chronic instability and remain awake to a world which has been waiting anxiously for us to take up, once again, our engaged and caring roles, providing inspiration for healing that other people need and that might not exist if we don’t find the courage and capacity to share such ourselves.

As our world wobbles on, as we struggle to recover our economic and emotional health, the tasks lying before us seem to be growing in intensity not shrinking.  Of all these current “herculean” matters, perhaps the most daunting relates to recovering our own strength to overcome the after-effects of a most difficult time and play our role in this “life or death” moment for our world, embracing possibilities that might appear uncertain on the surface while making space for a wider and healthier range of global constituents to enter the conversation and share their own revision strategies.

The clear, consistent messaging coming from this UN week is that “we are running out of time” to change the way we do our business, to ensure that there will be more flowers and buds in springtime, more species able to dodge extinction, more people freed from pandemic anxieties and access inequities that continue to take such a heavy toll. We are running out of time to stabilize our now-wobbly planet and we urgently need to enable and support more of us still-shaken humans to remain awake to that task.

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Voice Lessons: Ceding Space for Those Waiting Their Turn, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Apr
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I know you can’t live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. Harvey Milk

No voice is too soft when that voice speaks for others.  Janna Cachola

Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. Morgan Carroll

You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they MUST protect them. Wangari Maathai

The people who are trying to be on our side have reduced us to a mere calculation. Sarah Kurchak

I was always taught that when you’re lucky enough to learn something or have some advantage you should share it.  Areva Martin

It is not loving to impose our own grid onto others.  Matt Perman

There have been a series of articles lately by journalists and academics expressing concern about the long-term affects of a pandemic that seems “determined” not to release us fully from its grip.  

We know about the COVID “long haulers,” those unlucky individuals who have been unable to shake the effects of the virus months after their initial infections.   But there are other “long haul” effects that we have only begun to assess, the economic, educational and psychological consequences that we have done our best to hold in abeyance, hoping for conditions that will allow our children back in school before they’ve forgotten what they’ve learned or lost touch with their dreams; conditions that will allow our small businesses to survive a year of numerous adaptations and little income; conditions that will allow some healing for those whose psyches have been battered over this past year by social isolation, fear of the loss of loved ones and incomes, and now concern about whether or not we have what it takes to successfully engage with people who seek to become for us, once again, more than a screen presence.  

Clearly, we are not “out of the woods” and are unlikely to be so even after available vaccines have finally been evenly distributed and this particular pandemic has been finally brought under control.  The sun will indeed rise post-COVID, but it will shine on a world that in many key aspects has lost its way, if not altogether lost its mind.   Despite our own privilege and general good fortune, we wonder if some of those aspects don’t equally apply to ourselves. 

It has been over 13 months now since we have set foot inside UN headquarters which, as most of you realize, is the setting for most of our work, the primary space where we have been “lucky enough” to learn some important things and then “using our advantage” to share what we think we’ve learned with others.  Over these long months, we have missed the personal diplomatic interactions, the rapid movements between conference rooms and issues more connected than acknowledged, the endless coffee breaks to discuss what we’ve heard, what we’ve failed to hear, who impressed and failed to impress, what comes next (or should come next) for our advocacy and outreach, and even the surprise visitors to UN spaces who allow us to better direct our energies and modest assets in the service of interests those visitors help to refresh.

Throughout this long physical hiatus, one which shows no signs of abating, we have managed to keep track of UN processes almost exclusively through digital means.  This past week, for instance, the United Nations and its excellent technical team managed a remarkable set of digital engagements, including a sober ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, important discussions in the Security Council on threats from landmines and the current crisis unfolding in Myanmar, and events celebrating the restoration of diplomatic engagements by the US, specifically on Climate and Security and on addressing the care of Palestinians through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. 

All of these activities – and many others where these came from — are important markers of a global system alternately hopeful and discouraging, a system which, in the case of the UN, is often more political than thoughtful, whose “genius” lies in crafting consensus among states more than in creating urgent remedies for those decimated by armed violence or facing long-term food insecurity from what might be irreversible climate change impacts.  We who operate in UN contexts are sometimes surprised by something we should already know well:  that while the UN has a firm stake in many issues it has limited power to resolve them; indeed that the resolution engine of the UN is largely about persuasion rather than coercion; and that the many skilled and caring diplomats assigned to UN headquarters are as beholden to the aspirations of their foreign ministries, for good or ill, as they are to UN Charter obligations.

Through the use of twitter and other dubious means, we have been able to follow the ups and downs of multilateralism, at least in part, and we have continue to share views within and well beyond the UN community on what should happen, what is not happening, and how we might better integrate our ethical and caring impulses into our policymaking going forward.  I am quite sure that the UN doesn’t miss our physical presence, doesn’t miss our constant scrutiny of its promises and working methods, doesn’t miss our relentless concern that, especially in this time of COVID, branding has too often been allowed to crowd out substance and urgency in our policy deliberations.

The “zoomification” of policy has clearly been a boon to this sort of branding.  While we continue to encourage digital events by our younger colleagues to help them define generational issues and concerns within pandemic-imposed limitations, we are also mindful of how much easier it is to organize events in digital spaces than to ensure their follow-through.  While there is no shortage now of online images of diplomats and (mostly) large NGO leadership saying things which are perhaps meant to be profound but are often self-evident and self-referential, there is too little reason to believe that any of it matters as it should, to believe that the endless statements uttered by these leaders are actually tethered to real concerns in a broken world and reflect policy priorities they are fully determined to address.

This is the dilemma faced by our sector in this pandemic age.  How do we navigate the spaces between image and substance, between the rhetorical branding of global problems that concretely and painfully impact the lives of constituents and the brand-building that allows us to fund salaries and our endless publications, creating strands of expertise that rarely reach and connect beyond the borders of our mission statements?  And how do we ensure, in the name of constituency building, that we are not also constituency-gate keeping, that we are not also oblivious to the reality that people are much more than a “calculation” to substantiate our annual reports, that we recognize people who can only speak their truths to the extent that those of us with privilege and access speak in “soft voices,” and commit to sharing the microphone rather than endlessly grasping for it?

Our sector is fond of calling for change in the UN’s priorities and working methods, as well it should, but it often fails to address the need for reform within our own ranks.  Moreover, for reasons that are only tangentially related to our organizational missions, our collective tendency has become to suggest only the changes that won’t ruffle feathers or threaten funding sources, only the changes that can be incorporated into bureaucracies that it is surely not our principle job to placate.

The damage exacerbated by this pandemic and related crises is experienced broadly by the global community, including within our own offices.  More than a few of our colleagues are also depressed and hurting, are also burned out, are also angry and frustrated that the agencies and processes into which they have poured their live energy have been able to deliver only half a loaf when a full loaf was called for. And what of our colleagues with more direct engagement with the wounds and deprivations which characterize so many communities in this world? What do we in our relatively safe policy bubbles owe those journalists, mediators and humanitarian workers who have taken on the arduous and often dangerous task of reporting on our messes, cleaning up after our messes, or negotiating an end to messes that need not have occurred in the first place? What more do we need to do in our own spaces to bring hope to communities and those who serve them without “imposing our grid” on to lives where such impositions have historically been too frequent and where they simply don’t belong?

There is now a movement among some NGOs around UN headquarters, one which to our mind is not mindful enough of our complex debt to front-line advocates and constituents, a movement which has deployed the twitter hashtag #unmute through which it seeks to organize legitimate concerns regarding access and impact. To be sure, there are people around the world doing the work for real that we purport to be doing in principle, people under siege and threat, people doing their jobs while trying to protect their children and keep from languishing in prisons where guilt is largely fabricated and release is often serendipitous. To be sure as well, there are people around the world, some of whom we have been honored to meet over many years, who are literally models of resiliency and resourcefulness, extending hands of care and promises of empowerment well beyond the attention of UN conference rooms, beyond the reach of funding agencies and international NGOs, small and large.

Let’s be clear: We who function in and around UN spaces remain more privileged than muted. Our voices connect with policymakers beyond our size and volume, likely also beyond demonstrated impact. The doors to UN headquarters remain locked to us. The interactive life inside UN buildings is becoming something of a dim memory. But we are not muted. We have a say, we always have a say, even the smallest among us, even when we have nothing fresh to contribute, even through a flat screen in the middle of a stubborn pandemic which has otherwise exposed and compromised so much in us.

The key for us going forward in these treacherous times is not so much about branding but about sharing. How can we better help people affirm a hope that is based neither on wishful fantasy nor on some externally “imposed grid”, a hope which is grounded instead in a more generous reception for the truths they can convey, truths that can make our own work richer and more relevant to shifting circumstances? And how can we do our part to help “unmute” those whose voices truly demand more attention, those who have been hoping and waiting more patiently then perhaps they should for us to voluntarily mute ourselves, to make way for contributions we need and cannot replicate?

We have had the privilege to learn many things in this UN policy space. And we have enjoyed advantages of institutional access and respect, much of it unearned. As the pandemic continues its relentless eroding of our psychological health while enabling inequalities in so many forms, we will do what we can with what remains of our organizational capacity to help spread what others have come to know, the hopes they sustain and the skills they have accumulated, over our own policy deliberations. And to do so in their own voice.

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Rays of Promise: Post-Pandemic Goals Worth Winning, Dr. Robert Zuber

20 Dec
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People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung

One need not be a chamber to be haunted.  Emily Dickinson

I wonder if that’s how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.  Jasmine Warga

Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light. John Milton

They gave it up before they ever really even got started. J.D. Salinger

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.  Sylvia Plath

I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. Denise Levertov

I’m writing this morning on the darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and from a city currently with the highest number of COVID infections in a state with the highest number of COVID infections in a country with the highest number of COVID infections.  Chants in the US of “we’re number 1” have never seemed as shallow to me as they do at this particular moment, a time which continues to put extraordinary strains on those few for whom caregiving is a vocation not circumscribed by what seem to be the ever-shrinking circles of concern of so many of the rest of us.

The media is chock-full of disturbing health-related and political messaging of late, pitched alongside the hope that the miraculously rapid development of COVID vaccines will stem the current tide of death and misery early in the New Year.  Will we in the north survive this infection-saturated winter? If so, will we be able to recover our human touch or will we remain secluded our smallish worlds, defined more and more by computer screens and video distractions? Moreover, will we make good on pledges for equitable access to vaccines for the entire global community?  It would seem to be almost a miracle of another sort if we could collectively walk back the fear and self-preoccupations which have defined us through much of 2020 and affirm – through policy and practice – this global responsibility (thankfully reinforced in large measure by UN agencies) to ensure global access to vaccines which offer hope, in the short-term at least, that we can dodge full-scale damage from this plague and, once again, manage to save ourselves from ourselves.

However, many social and media commentators now recognize publicly what many of us have feared privately – that the dysfunctional personal and political traits which have accelerated in this plague year – not birthed this year – will be hard for us to shake.  We have had another long year to justify turning our backs on each other, creating enemies from conspiracies, transforming climate denialism into an art form, holding fast to beliefs about the “myth” of COVID in some instances to our last dying breaths.  The vaccines will, if all goes well, keep the pandemic in check, but they will have no direct impact on the creeping “malignity” of our spirits, darkness which we have chosen to bury inside of ourselves and which is unlikely to be dispelled either by medical breakthroughs or by the sunlight now poised to oh-so-slowly return to our northern skies.

And, sad to say, we are getting scant assistance in confessing and overcoming our darkness from our institutions of governance, which often seem trapped in their own bubbles of self-importance and self-interest.  The US is only one of what seem to be a growing number of states seduced by authoritarians and their sycophants who seem to believe that holding power is about taking advantage of opportunity rather than serving the public interest.  And in so doing, such “leaders” are reinforcing for their publics values based on a nefarious “creed” described recently by Anne Applebaum: “Everyone is corrupt, everyone is on the take.” We’re living in a world without morals or principles and “all that matters is whether or not you win.”  Such a cynical, transactional view of the world has certainly taken root in the US, and those roots are now deeper and broader than some of us are willing to admit.

Thankfully, we know that corrupt practices and winning at all costs does not define us entirely, even in this plague year. Our own social media is inundated each week with incredible acts of courage and kindness that offer hope to our present and help ensure a post-pandemic quality of life for future generations.  From tree planting in the Sahel to emptying prisons of the politically incarcerated and tortured, initiatives are underway in so many global settings to stem the current tide of normative decay and blatant cruelty. In this the UN is doing its part beyond rigorously promoting the “global public good” of vaccines.  This week alone we witnessed some good movement towards a global moratorium on the use of the death penalty, some enthusiastic support for political and peace progress in countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan, and a couple of compelling events focused on the need for human rights-based approaches to counter-terror operations and more robust institutions of accountability for those who commit mass atrocity crimes.

But like the many countries at present whose social fabrics are fraying at the edges, the UN has also been subject to increasingly stubborn postures and nasty exchanges that seem a bit startling in an institution that generally reinforces diplomatic politeness (with occasional touches of passive-aggression.)  In the Economic and Social Council, diplomats hurled vague accusations, including at ECOSOC’s current president (Pakistan), over the fate of a still-unendorsed Political Declaration that is badly needed to help galvanize state support for the UN’s Decade of Acton on sustainable development. And in the Security Council, its often-ugly and rarely-impactful discussions on Syria’s long decade of violent abuses flared up even further this week, punctuated by China’s assertion that Germany’s soon-to-be-concluded humanitarian leadership on Syria and its overall Council tenure have been a “failure.”  

We don’t share China’s judgment in this, but we are mindful of what these exchanges represent – signs of further fraying of our standards of propriety and mutual responsibility.  States are now dabbling in what too many of us in our personal realms are doing as well – shutting the metaphorical doors and windows to divergent viewpoints and basking instead in the echo chambers of our self-selected, self-interested versions of “reality.” Whether in Washington, Brasilia, Moscow, Damascus or any number of other capital settings, our leadership is increasingly acting out a cynical script, less about inspiring people to be their better selves and more about keeping our darkness locked within where it can best “haunt” personal and collective potential.

Given this pervasive dearth of inspiration by much of our political leadership, the way out of our darkness, out of the hell that we have relentlessly manufactured for ourselves, will likely be long and hard.  And the near-miraculous vaccines now becoming available to those most vulnerable to infection will not by themselves bring the illumination that we so long for in this season.  But they might eventually help give our species one more chance – a chance to end corrupt practices in governance, increase responsiveness by our international institutions, guarantee better health and educational access, and make our political systems of checks and balances more reliable, our judicial systems better able to ensure accountability for the worst of human crimes, and our economics more equitable and eco-responsive.

Given where we now find ourselves and despite a bevy of pandemic-related disruptions and uncertainties, if winning is indeed, “everything” then surely this is the “winning” to which we should aspire. This is the “illumination” which we should now be preparing to welcome, illumination which can effectively dispel darkness to which we have become both conscious and committed to push out from our most remote inner spaces.  Indeed, if we are to reset our pandemic-infected, darkness-infused present, it will take more than governments, more than global institutions, certainly more than vaccines.  It will, as Jung noted, take more of us with the courage to “face our own souls,” to confess our dark spaces and then persevere to the brink of our capacities in illuminating and incarnating opportunities to make our world greener and less violent, opportunities that might just represent our last, best chance for life.

This evening in the northern sky, a rare convergence of planets will lead to the sighting of the “star of Bethlehem,” a “star” that was believed to settle over the manger where the baby Jesus lay many centuries ago, a mysterious star illuminating a sacred promise. This year’s version of manger season offers its own inspiration and guidance on how the promises that define our own time might best be implemented and sustained, how our current darkness might have its power over our values, priorities and actions finally and fully dispelled.  We would do well to urgently discern its message.

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Covid-19 and Global Solidarity, By Professor Hussein Solomon

17 Apr

Editor’s Note:  Reader of this space are quite familiar with the words of Hussein Solomon, a good friend of Global Action, a leader of our efforts to promote rapid-reaction peacekeeping, and a distinguished lecturer in the Department of Political Studies and Governance at the University of the Free State in South Africa. Here he rightly calls attention to global problems (including the current viral pandemic) that can only be solved through a more deliberative global solidarity. 

In April 1994 the heinous apartheid regime in my country, South Africa, came to an end as its citizens celebrated its first democratic elections. April 1994 was also the beginning of the Rwandan genocide with almost a million Tutsis killed – a stark reminder of the grave dangers of ethnocentric nationalism. The demise of apartheid South Africa, more than anything else, was a demonstration of global solidarity in action. Anti-apartheid movements existed across the globe and these put pressure on their respective governments who in turn sanctioned the apartheid pariah. At one point, 90 percent of all South African exports were under one sanction or another compelling the Nationalist Party into negotiations with its arch-rival, the African National Congress. This then paved the way for a democratic dispensation to come into being. There was no similar attention or international solidarity with Rwanda as the massacres unfolded. Indeed, the United Nations responses were woefully inadequate – a fact acknowledged by Kofi Annan himself. But, it is unfair to lay the blame on the UN itself. The UN is held hostage by the national interests of its member states and these national interests do not always accord with the global interest.

Recognizing, the imperative for global solidarity and action and in an effort to prevent more Rwandas and Bosnias I joined other like-minded people across the globe through Global Action to Prevent War to push for the creation of a United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) which was to serve as a rapid response force under the direct authority of the UN. The force was to consist of between 15,000 and 18,000 personnel and were to be a permanent, standing force pre-positioned at UNEPS-designated bases around the world. Despite our best lobbying efforts, no formal UNEPS arose as many nation-states continued to operate within the framework of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. As conflicts raged across the globe, as death and destitution became the norm from Mindanao to Darfur and Colombia, states stubbornly guarded their sovereignty whilst paying mere lip service to global solidarity. In an act reeking of selfishness, political elites recognized that in a rapidly globalizing world, insecurity anywhere threatens security everywhere; whilst at the same time refusing to surrender an iota of sovereignty to an international body to secure the very citizens they are legally obliged to protect.

Fast forward to 2020, with the Covid-19 virus having already infected 2.2 million people, and resulting in the deaths of almost 145,000 of the world’s citizens. Political elites continue to act as if national responses will turn the tide against a pandemic which shows no respect for sovereignty or national borders. The European Union’s shocking aloofness to Italy’s plight in the face of Covid-19 demonstrates that even at regional level such solidarity does not exist. Perhaps the most selfish display of this kind of “leadership” emanates from Trump’s America which saw him attack the World Health Organization and prepare to cut off funds to the organization at the very point when the WHO constitutes the only truly international body to coordinate responses to a global pandemic.

In facing an existential threat of this magnitude, now more than ever we need to surrender aspects of national sovereignty and embrace global solidarity. This would mean strengthening the authority and capabilities of the WHO. It would mean compiling a global roster of health professionals. It would mean truly global efforts at finding a vaccine. And it would mean global production of everything from masks and face shields to ventilators. Only global solidarity can see us through this crisis.

As the pandemic moves to African shores, such solidarity would mean strengthening regional structures such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and our continental body – the African Union. It would mean accepting and taking our lead from the WHO. And it would mean bringing on board expertise from non-state actors like Doctors without Borders, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. It would mean embracing the true spirit of Ubuntu.

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