Sunday, September 22, 2024
12:45 p.m. EDT
Prime Minister of Barbados Addresses the Summit of the Future
Mr. President, dear friends, we are one and we come today as one human family sharing one planet intent on building together a common future based on shared hope, mutual interests, consciously working together to find common solutions. Our interconnectedness has long been recognized in spiritual traditions and practices around the world and in the philosophy, the African philosophy of Ubuntu. Desmond Tutu explained that it is the expression that my humanity is bound up in yours.
I am because you are, I am because we are. This interconnectedness compels us as it did generations before us to find the moral courage and take the decisive steps to end the horrors faced by humanity and to create new structures and new opportunity. Generations before us ended wars, they canceled debt, they dismantled slavery, they ended apartheid, they acted to stop genocide, they declared all people equal and they gave women the vote and they ended colonialism and they built new nation states.
They generated prosperity from deep poverty. I ask you today, will we summon the global moral strategic leadership necessary? I want to congratulate the Secretary General and his deputy and the team of ambassadors from Namibia and Germany who have led us safely to this pact over the course of the last two years of negotiations. My friends, we will not succeed in overcoming our existential challenges if we are not prepared to change the global governance structures that are rooted in the outcome of World War II and have become unsuited to today’s world.
The distress in our institutions of governance, the mistrust between the governors and the governed will continue to foster social alienation the world over at the very time that we need to find as many people as possible to shape a new world, not governance but people. This approach to governance reinforces the notion that it is acceptable to have first class and second-class citizens, a notion that we all find, I hope, repugnant. The tentacles of power today remain almost as it was a century ago.
If, my friends, we do not create the space and the new voices are not heard, we will not secure the transformation needed to save people and to save planet. What the world needs now is a reset. What the world needs now is a little more love, a reset to embrace our common future, a reset that allows us to work together to navigate spaces together.
We’ve seen the floods and the hurricanes, the droughts, the wildfires, they’ve affected us all. The failure to share the world’s resources, which are more than adequate for everyone, will continue to drive us to war and to social disintegration and to migration. The absence of access to digital technologies and even basic electricity in Africa will condemn us to living in two separate worlds and may even, with AI, if unregulated, threaten completely the existence of human civilization as we know it.
We know what the world needs, as I said, and what our people want to hear from us today is that we can overcome these challenges by working together and that the visible actions that are necessary are being agreed today and tomorrow to secure the future in this pact. But our people know instinctively that this will only be talk unless there’s a fundamental change in what we do and how we do it and who is seen and heard in the corridors of decision making and that is why we continue to propel the Bridgetown initiative as a serious reform for changing the rules of the game, shock proofing vulnerable economies and indeed securing sufficient to have the SDGs and of course the climate crisis be confronted. Now is the time for us to choose hope and love over hate and division.
We can change this global governance system. We can change the structure and focus of the international financial system. We can make both fit for purpose for the majority of world’s people, not just a few.
It doesn’t require new technologies, it requires action and humanity, accepting that we are human together, that we are because of each other and that we can in this generation secure the future of human progress and I truly believe that we can because we the peoples of the world have no other choice and no other planet on which to live. The only issue will be how quickly we can act.
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