Addis Ababa, Oct 10: India and Africa cannot remain underrepresented in global decision-making, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said, calling for reform of the UN Security Council to make global governance more democratic and representative.
Addressing a gathering at the Adwa Victory Memorial Museum in Addis Ababa on Friday, he said the existing global order disregarded the interests of both sides and accused unnamed forces of delaying reform
“The current Council neither delivers effectively nor represents fairly. And the two shortcomings are clearly interconnected,” Jaishankar said, calling for Africa to be represented fairly in United Nations Security Council membership.
Jaishankar arrived in Ethiopia on Thursday from Cote d’Ivoire on the final leg of his three-nation African tour, which also included Ghana.
Calling for a more representative international order, Jaishankar cited India’s efforts during its 2023 G20 presidency to secure permanent membership for the African Union and called for fair African representation in both categories of UN Security Council membership.
The UN Security Council has 15 members, including five permanent members — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — which hold veto powers, allowing any one of them to block a substantive resolution.
The remaining 10 non-permanent members are elected for two-year terms and do not have veto powers. Calls for reform include expanding the Council’s membership to give India, Africa and other underrepresented regions a greater role in global decision-making.
Jaishankar said India was Africa’s fourth-largest trading partner, with bilateral trade nearing USD 100 billion. More than 220 Indian-supported development projects worth approximately USD 4.5 billion had been completed across the continent, he said, adding that “development is best served by self-reliance”.
Jaishankar said Ethiopia’s victory over Italy at Adwa had inspired struggles against colonialism and racial domination across Africa and beyond. He said it resonated with India’s freedom movement, as both struggles centred on human dignity, political independence, and the right to make sovereign choices.
The Adwa museum, where Jaishankar was speaking, commemorates Ethiopia’s victory over Italian forces at the 1896 Battle of Adwa, a landmark in African resistance to colonialism that became a powerful symbol of anti-colonial struggle across the continent.
“The essential question remains: who gets to decide our future? This is the quest that brings the Global South, especially India and Africa, together,” he said.
Tracing the relationship between the two regions, Jaishankar said their ties stretched back several millennia, long before the emergence of modern nation-states. The Indian Ocean had connected their peoples through commerce, migration, languages, cultural practices and faith, he said.
He said the relationship must evolve beyond historical solidarity, with India’s vision of becoming a developed nation by 2047 and Africa’s Agenda 2063 offering complementary pathways for transformation.
Both sides place industrialisation, infrastructure, connectivity, technology, human capital and sustainable growth at the centre of their development agendas, he said.
“Our right to industrialise must not be denied by flooding our markets with cheap goods. Nor indeed, by restricting our market access,” Jaishankar said.
He encouraged Indian businesses to view Africa as an investment destination, saying Indian companies had helped create local employment, promote value addition and strengthen national economies.
India’s development partnership, he said, was guided by the priorities identified by African countries themselves. The completed projects cover power generation, electricity transmission, water, agriculture, railways, healthcare, manufacturing and public infrastructure.
Among the projects he cited were metro rail in Mauritius, hydropower projects in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Burundi, drinking water pipelines in Tanzania, and power transmission lines in Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Sudan and Benin.
He called for stronger cooperation on food security, saying conflicts in other regions were making access to grain and fertilisers more difficult for Africa and the wider Global South.
Cooperation in agricultural productivity, climate-resilient practices, value addition and food processing had therefore become more important, he said.
“Partnerships of the future must help create capabilities, not promote dependencies,” he said.
