São Tomé and Príncipe, 2006

As I have just been re-

elected, this is my first opportunity to speak to this

forum at the beginning of my second term. It is

therefore with great pleasure that I am here today for

this sixty-first session of the General Assembly.

Please allow me to congratulate Mrs. Haya

Rashed Al-Khalifa on her election as the new President

of the General Assembly. We are fortunate to have as

our President a diplomat with such magnificent

credentials. In addition, this is a milestone for the

United Nations which makes us all proud. My country,

Sao Tome and Principe, is a firm believer in gender

equality. I am proud to say that we have a very high

percentage of girls in our schools. A woman has held

the presidency of our National Assembly, and the

current head of our Supreme Court is a woman. We

have had two female Prime Ministers, and today

women head half of our Government ministries. We are

therefore delighted by her election and wish her every

success.

I thank also the outgoing President, Mr. Jan

Eliasson, for his remarkable work, especially in the

area of advancing reform of the United Nations. Words

are insufficient to pay tribute to outgoing Secretary-

General Kofi Annan. A very special son of Africa, he

has been an extraordinary leader of our Organization.

He has worked unceasingly, showing enormous vision

and great courage. No challenge has been too large or

too dangerous. My country and I owe a special debt of

gratitude to the Secretary-General, whose intervention

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during a 2003 coup attempt helped preserve democracy

in Sao Tome and Principe. My people and I thank him.

We can only hope that his successor will prove as

praiseworthy as he.

We are meeting here today at a time of growing

international tension and of increased terrorist attacks

on innocent civilians on every continent. We see

unending conflicts, even genocide. Never have we

needed the United Nations more than at this time, when

life as we know it on our planet is threatened by

climate change. It is tragic that in the face of all these

challenges, the United Nations is often unable to act,

because internal politics and a lack of resources

constantly hamper its ability to respond as needed.

No country can live in a vacuum in today’s world.

For better or for worse, we are together in deciding the

fate of our planet. We can no longer be only citizens of

our town, our region or our country. We also cannot

blindly think that our religion is the only religion,

when God created so many, all believing in a Supreme

Being but worshiping in different fashions. God also

painted us in a rainbow of colours and did not leave

instructions for one colour to be in charge of all the

others. Nor did He choose a special region or language

to rule over everyone else. We must pull together so

that no one is left behind. There is enough for

everybody, if only we would share. We all could live in

freedom and in peace, with work, health, education and

dignity, if only we would work together.

While we must work together for certain common

goals, we must also respect our cultural differences.

One size does not fit all. The practice of democracy in

Latin America may not be the same as democracy in

Asia. What worked to create economic growth in

Europe may not work in Africa. Each country, each

people, each region, each town must have the freedom

to decide what is best for it, while also respecting the

rights of all and everyone’s responsibility as a world

citizen.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is still out of control. In

my own tiny, isolated island country, we were long

immune from it. Despite desperate efforts at education

and prevention, our tiny population is being laid waste

by a shocking increase in the number of HIV/AIDS

cases. We have only one hospital and a handful of

doctors. We are helpless in the face of this crisis, as we

cannot afford the antiretrovirals we need for all our

sick people, nor do we have the ability to police our

maritime borders to keep out the main source of

infection. Our women and children are among the

millions of other faceless victims around the world,

and, without help, we could one day face extinction.

Climate change is already sabotaging many of the

efforts being made to achieve sustainable development

goals, augmenting poverty in developing countries,

especially in the least developed countries and the

small island developing States. There is new and strong

evidence that most of the warming observed is

attributable to human activities. As the polar ice caps

melt, my low-lying island country faces a second kind

of extinction, that of disappearing beneath the waves of

the ocean.

I cannot continue without again asking the

Assembly why a country of 23 million people is not

represented at the United Nations, where every country

is supposed to have one vote. I refer here to Taiwan, an

established democracy whose people live in freedom

and in peace. Their dynamic and technologically

advanced economy is a model for creating wealth in

today’s global economy. Taiwan is also an excellent

world citizen, generous in humanitarian and

development aid.

For centuries, the people of Sao Tome and

Principe were debilitated by endemic malaria, and

thousands died. Countless attempts to control the

mosquitoes carrying that disease failed, until Taiwan

brought the necessary know-how and resources to bear.

Today cases of malaria have been reduced by 60 per

cent. Our doctors and nurses say that there have never

been so few cases of malaria in living memory. Thanks

to Taiwan and also to the Global Fund to Fight

HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, we are well on

our way to finally bringing this scourge under control.

In addition to humanitarian and development aid,

Taiwan also maintains productive commercial ties with

many United Nations Member countries and is a

member of the World Trade Organization, the Asian

Development Bank and the Asia Pacific Economic

Group. The principle of universality is consecrated in

the United Nations Charter. Permanent members of the

Security Council should not continue to ignore the case

of Taiwan.

Another issue that continues to require the urgent

attention of all of us is the embargo on Cuba. This is a

relic of the cold war that should be lifted immediately.

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While mentioning the Security Council, I must

say that my country supports the calls that have

reverberated through these halls for more than a

decade. We must reform the Security Council. Its

membership and institutional structures reflect

outdated geopolitical realities and political thinking

that was shaped by the world of 1945. Giving only five

permanent members the veto power and special

privileges puts the Security Council out of touch with

the world. Africa, for example, does not have a single

permanent member. This is not acceptable.

I will close by talking about poverty, or rather

what we are all seeking, which is the end of poverty.

The Millennium Development Goals are a noble

project. Sao Tome and Principe is grateful to Secretary-

General Kofi Annan and the Goals’ Director Jeffrey

Sachs for their tireless efforts to pull poor countries out

of what Professor Sachs so rightly calls the poverty

trap.

But how did so many countries get into the

poverty trap? We are unlikely to get out, or stay out,

unless we know how we got there in the first place. I

think it is time we all faced some of the unspoken

truths about poverty. Why are we poor? Economists

traditionally told us that economic wealth comes from

a combination of man-made resources, such as roads,

factories, machines, telephone systems; human

resources, hard work and education; and technological

resources, technical know-how and technological

machinery. But if this were true, then poor countries

could simply build some schools, pave roads and buy

some computers, and we would quickly catch up with

rich countries.

But there is something wrong here. While

Taiwan, South Korea and China have all been doubling

their incomes every decade, many poor countries

making these changes are not growing faster than rich

countries. In fact, they are growing more slowly, or

even getting poorer. So there is a new theory that says

the more you have, the faster you grow. This could

explain why rich countries stay rich, and poor countries

fall farther behind — except that it does not explain

how Chile, India, Singapore, Mauritius and Botswana

are catching up. These dynamic countries — not Japan,

not Switzerland, not the United States — are the

fastest-growing economies on the planet. Fifty years

ago they were trapped in poverty. That is no longer the

case.

Why have so many other countries been left

behind? The newest theories tell us that the answer is

simple. With or without natural resources, with or

without human resources, with or without technology,

badly governed countries are poor countries. Bad

government causes poverty. When States do not protect

property and people; when national revenues benefit

self-interested political insiders who oppose any

actions that would lead to more equal distribution of

income and resources; when Government officials

waste funds; when people are hired on the basis of

being from the right family or region or political

grouping; when nobody monitors Government

spending; when corruption is noted but never punished;

and when illegal activities are not restrained by law,

the press or democratic opposition, then miserable

results follow.

We have all heard of the “natural resource curse”,

which shows that large amounts of oil or diamonds, for

example, tend to make democracy and good

government less likely. But recent studies have also

found that there is also an “aid curse”. Without

meaning to do so, multilateral and bilateral donors can

actually make Governments worse. And just as badly

governed countries tend to be poor, so badly governed

aid projects, without transparency or accountability,

also tend to fail.

Humanitarian aid has proven far more successful

than long-term development aid, because it is given in

highly targeted bursts. It is also usually given as

medicine, food, clothing or tents and taken directly to

the location of the tragedy, with doctors and nurses on

the ground rather than consultants.

Of course, there have been some beautiful

successes in aid programmes, mostly in health care,

with victories over smallpox, drug-resistant

tuberculosis and river blindness. Adult literacy has

risen, as had life expectancy until the AIDS pandemic

wiped out that improvement.

Aid gives hope to millions of people around the

world. We simply need to mend it, not end it. My own

country has certainly suffered from its own share of

bad governance — for the most part unwittingly,

because of our own inexperience. But we are learning

quickly in our short history, and we now have one of

the most stable and robust democracies in all of Africa.

We have the prospect of oil in our waters and in

waters shared with our neighbour, Nigeria. We have

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already taken steps to ensure that any potential

petroleum resources are not wasted but are protected

for the benefit of all our citizens with an oil revenue

management law that was passed unanimously in our

parliament in 2004.

We cannot let the past bury the future. We can lift

billions out of poverty. When I was first elected

President of my country five years ago, I lit a candle of

hope for the long-suffering people of Sao Tome and

Principe. We are not there yet, but the light is getting

brighter.

If development were easy, everyone would

already be developed! We cannot sit in supine

indifference. Let us renew our efforts and work

together with respect, dignity and dedication for the

benefit of all the peoples of the world and for the fate

of our beautiful planet.