Africa tells UN, "You must do better"

By Orla Ryan, KUMASI, Ghana (Reuters) - In the streets of his hometown Kumasi in central Ghana, Kofi Annan is known by the accolade Busumuru - "the best of the best".

Many Africans share Ghana's pride at his rise to secretary-general of the United Nations, but when it comes to his organisation's work, emotions range from gratitude to outraged feelings of betrayal. From its disastrous failure to stop Rwanda's 1994 genocide to routine yet vital tasks like feeding children in northern Kenya or fighting polio in Ethiopia, the United Nations wields perhaps its biggest influence in Africa.

As the organisation prepares to host the largest gathering of world leaders in history this week to discuss ways to reform the 60-year-old institution, the message from the continent is clear: "We need you, but you must do better."

"They could do a lot more to help Africa," said Erica Kyere, 25, who works at Kumasi's Kuapa Kokoo cocoa firm.

"Even where there is war, they are not doing so much. They should try to do more where there is famine as well," she said, delivering a verdict from the relative stability of Ghana that could have come from almost any of Africa's troublespots.

Burdened with roles from feeding the hungry to ending wars, the United Nations often finds itself caught between the high expectations of Africans on one side, and indifference among member states who provide its funds and mandates on the other.

But with reforms on everything from streamlining management to finding new ways to help countries recover from conflict on the table in New York, many Africans hope the world body will start by confronting its own failings as an organisation.

"The fundamental objectives of the U.N. system are to maintain peace and security and prevent wars," said Charles Murigande, foreign affairs minister of Rwanda.

The second U.N. objective, he said, should be to foster international cooperation to fight poverty. "But the U.N. has failed on both these two fundamental objectives," Murigande told Reuters. "This therefore calls for overhauling the entire U.N. system."

Keeping the peace

With a network of offices dealing with tasks as varied as collating AIDS data to saving Africa's great apes, its is hard to generalise about the United Nation's performance across the continent, much less recommend universal reforms.

But what does emerge from a cursory survey, particularly in West Africa, is that deploying U.N. troops to guarantee peace agreements is one of its most important roles.

In Liberia, 16,000 troops are providing security during elections next month aimed at breaking a cycle of civil war, and the United Nations is likely to remain committed for years.

"They have established some security in the country and their presence has given Liberians faith in the electoral process," said Silas Siakor, the head of the Sustainable Development Institute in the capital Monrovia.

"But unless the underlying issues of good governance, security, and resource management are addressed this crisis will not end with the elections," he said.

In neighbouring Sierra Leone, which also welcomed U.N. troops after a devastating civil war, some politicians want the United Nations to play a wider role in fostering democracy across Africa - a call critics say amounts to wishful thinking.

"I believe that the U.N. needs to do more by coming in and putting checks and balances to our countries' corrupt practices in Africa, rather than waiting to send troops and spend big money for peace," said member of parliament Issa Mansaray.

Tied hands

Such enthusiasm for the theory cannot hide wider concerns about the performance of the U.N. in practice, perceived by critics as a top-heavy, bloated bureaucracy more concerned with obeying the letter of its mandates than saving lives.

People who have lost relatives to massacres or starvation find cold comfort in complaints by U.N. administrators that the Security Council's orders were too restrictive for more robust peacekeeping, or donor funds arrived too late to supply aid.

Many Africans would welcome calls from Canada, backed by South Africa and others, to more clearly formulate the United Nation's responsibility to prevent war crimes and genocide, but recent memory has chipped away at faith in the blue helmets.

Residents of the eastern Congolese town of Bunia watched with a mixture of horror and contempt in 2003 when peacekeepers from the U.N. mission MONUC stood by as militias slaughtered their neighbours, while many say a U.N.-backed peace process has rewarded dangerous warlords with positions in government. U.N. troops have also been accused of sexual exploitation of women and girls in Democratic Republic of Congo, where the peacekeeping mission is the world's largest with 16,700 troops.

"MONUC is there but the Congo is still not working so what are they doing?," said Francois, a taxi driver in the capital Kinshasa. "This is not the first time the U.N. has tried to come in here and they didn't do anything last time either," he said.

Such weariness, whether justified or not, reflects a global current of frustration with an organisation that embodies ideals to which all can aspire, but which so often lacks the money, personnel, agility and backing by its members to implement them.

Africa, scene of some of the greatest U.N. triumphs and disasters, is as impatient as any for signs of improvement.

"There is a crisis of confidence with the international community in general and the U.N. in particular," said Abdi Samatar, a Somali professor at the University of Minnesota.

"There are still plenty of ways that the U.N. can redeem itself," he said. "There are a lot of jewels in the United Nations in Africa." (Additional reporting by Alphonso Toweh in Monrovia, David Lewis in Kinshasa, Christo Johnson in Freetown and Arthur Asiimwe in Rwanda).