Why Olara Otunnu is the best choice for Secretary-General

When the Security Council settles down in the coming weeks to choose the tenth Secretary-General of the United Nations, it will do so by secret straw ballot — coloured slips, no vetoes announced, preferences narrowed round by round until a name survives. Members will reach for that procedure without a thought, the way one reaches for a light switch.

It is worth pausing over, because the procedure was not handed down at San Francisco in 1945. It was invented in December 1981 by the man who was presiding over the Council that month, a thirty-one-year-old Ugandan named Olara Otunnu. The UN has used his formula ever since. This year, for the first time, his own name will be on those slips.

Let me declare my interest. Olara Otunnu is my countryman, my friend, whom I have known for fifty-nine years. He was a year ahead of me at King’s College, Budo, where he already had an eloquence that left a listener thirsting for more and a gift for handling people two decades beyond his age. In a normal country he would have risen to the top on merit. Ours was not a normal country, and he was among the first of our intellectuals to flee it under threat of death.

None of that is an argument, and I do not offer it as one. The other candidates — Michelle Bachelet, Rebeca Grynspan, Rafael Grossi, Macky Sall, María Fernanda Espinosa, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Ivonne A-Baki — are serious people who would each give the organisation competent leadership. My argument is narrower: of the field, Otunnu is the best prepared for the job on offer.

Consider what that job now is. The next Secretary-General inherits an organisation short of money, shedding peacekeepers, and presiding over a Council so regularly paralysed that its paralysis has stopped being news. Wars in Sudan, eastern Congo, Ukraine, and Gaza grind on while it issues statements. What the thirty-eighth floor at the Secretariat Building needs is not chiefly an administrator but a breaker of deadlocks: someone who can enter a room where two blocs have dug in and leave with something both will sign.

That skill is not established by holding high office. It is established by having done it, and Otunnu’s record of doing it is documentary rather than anecdotal.

He did it in 1981 with the straw ballot, when the Council could not agree how to choose a Secretary-General without humiliating the losers, and again in 1983, when the Grenada crisis deadlocked the Soviet and American blocs over credentials in the General Assembly.

He did it most consequentially for people with no vote at all: as the first Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, he persuaded the Council to treat war-affected children as a matter of international peace and security — Resolution 1261 of 1999 — then built consensus for Resolution 1612 of 2005, the regime that names and monitors the armies and militias that kill, maim and recruit children. He led the campaign that wrote child-specific war crimes into the Rome Statute, provisions that have since put men in the dock at The Hague.

A man from a small and broken African country arrived at an institution famous for producing paper and left behind law that binds and machinery that runs. Few international officials of any era can claim as much.

He also knows how to talk to everybody, which is the other half of the job. He chaired the Group of 77 in the Law of the Sea negotiations and the UN Commission on Human Rights, served as Vice-President of the General Assembly, ran the International Peace Academy for eight years, helped build the OAU’s conflict management mechanism, and won a child protection mechanism from ECOWAS heads of state. He is at home in the Global South without being a stranger to the West.

Two honest objections deserve honest answers. The first is rotation. Many feel the post belongs this time to Latin America and the Caribbean, which has not held it since Javier Pérez de Cuéllar left in 1991. The claim is real and I would not insult it. But rotation is a custom, not a rule, and the Charter’s only test is fitness. In 2016 it was said to be Eastern Europe’s turn, and the Council chose a Western European. If the convention could be set aside then, it can be weighed against merit now.

The second is that it is long past time for a woman to lead the United Nations. On that I agree without reservation, and if the Council elects Bachelet, Grynspan or Espinosa I shall applaud. I decline only to accept that the question of sex must be settled before the question of fitness. On the evidence of the record, the fittest is Otunnu.

As for the objection nobody states aloud — he turns seventy-six next month — the job wants judgement, stamina and a full contacts book. He has all three, and something rarer: nothing left to prove and no career to protect.

Uganda’s nomination came late, in July, thirty years after it should have. The nomination is late. The man is not.

Which brings me to the part that concerns us at home. If the Council chooses otherwise, President Museveni should not file Olara Otunnu back among the awkward. Having told the world that this is the ablest Ugandan he can offer it, he cannot credibly tell Ugandans that the same man is unfit for work at home. A nomination ending in a handshake and a photograph would confirm the suspicion it should have dispelled.

Give him something real. The office of Prime Minister would do. So would a mandate to lead national reconciliation and the machinery of the transition that is coming, whether or not the government cares for the word. Not an advisory post with a car and no telephone. A brief with authority attached, and the standing to give the President counsel he will not enjoy hearing — which, at this hour, is precisely the counsel a ruler needs.

Otunnu’s political choices in 1980 and 1985 were held against him for forty years, in a country that still mistakes a different party for an enemy. That is water under a bridge we should have crossed long ago. He co-founded Rocco Paco to help heal the Acholi community and led the campaign that made February 16 a national day in memory of Archbishop Janani Luwum. These are the acts of a man who builds things that outlast him.

The world should take him. If it will not, Uganda should.