Marrakech – Yesterday’s vote on Western Sahara was not just another day in New York’s marble amphitheater. Through resolution 2797 (2025), the Security Council renewed MINURSO until October 31, 2026. Eleven votes were in favor, with abstentions by Russia, China, and Pakistan,  Algeria declining to take part – again.

The tenor of the Council’s deliberations unmistakably consolidated the autonomy framework under Moroccan sovereignty as the most workable horizon for a political settlement, a welcome and long-overdue clarification that many diplomats hailed as a reality-based course correction.

Even as it immediately opened a bruising argumentative front about process, precedent, and power inside a chamber that still behaves like a postwar club, the UN record captures the tally and the extension. This spectacle of selective abstention, performative non-participation, and strategic equivocation merely underlined the chamber’s chronic dysfunction.

The deeper wound Africa has endured for eight decades was once again laid bare – the structural imbalance of a system that preaches sovereignty while practicing hierarchy, and that still treats decolonization as a procedural footnote rather than a moral obligation.

Let us name that pathology with the precision it deserves and the connective tissue it demands: the Council remains a post-1945 oligarchy masquerading as universal authority. It is a body that outsources the most combustible peace and security files to African troop contributors and devotes a disproportionate share of its agenda to African crises.

Yet it systemically denies 54 African states a single permanent voice at the table, thereby institutionalizing disenfranchisement under the banner of sovereign equality; it is a contradiction so stark that even defenders of the status quo struggle to explain it without lapsing into legal formalism or geopolitical fatalism.

Last September, Kenya’s President William Ruto distilled the indictment at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) with unusual moral clarity when he called Africa’s exclusion “unacceptable, unfair, and grossly unjust.” He did not mince institutional words in demanding at least two permanent African seats with full rights, including the veto – a position that does not seek favors but insists on parity as the minimum threshold for legitimacy.

The façade of universality is collapsing fast

These are not fashionable talking points minted in 2025; they are the latest inscription in a long ledger that includes the Ezulwini Consensus and the Sirte Declaration of 2005, where Africa’s common position was codified with doctrinal exactitude: not fewer than two permanent seats with all the prerogatives of permanent membership, including the veto, plus additional elected seats, with the African Union (AU) empowered to select the continent’s representatives to avoid external horse-trading dressed up as reform.

That even the Council’s top leadership now concedes the optics are indefensible tells how far the ground has shifted beneath the marble. In a high-level UNSC debate in August 2024, the Secretary-General António Guterres was unusually explicit that a body governing international peace and security cannot lack a permanent African voice.

Even Washington has inched – haltingly – toward reality. In September 2024, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield publicly backed two permanent African seats, albeit without veto. While Washington’s subsequent endorsement came hedged with the familiar caveat of no veto, the political significance lies in the admission that the old catechism has run out of moral and strategic credit – an acknowledgment that the status quo has lost legitimacy.

This acknowledgment arrives not a moment too soon, as the Council’s normative incoherence has metastasized into operational and geopolitical self-harm. It claims to embody sovereign equality while entrenching permanent inequality; it relies on African capacities and consent while withholding title; and it manages, at once, to alienate the region it debates and to erode its own claim to speak for an international community that is younger, more southern, and far less willing to be lectured by a mid-twentieth-century design.

Africa’s exclusion corrodes the Council’s moral foundation

The charge against the Council, stated without flinching and argued without theatrics, is fourfold and mutually reinforcing. First, its legal and moral architecture is unsustainable. A permanent caste cannot credibly arbitrate universal rules, and the contradiction bleeds into every vote and mandate renewal, including yesterday’s Western Sahara file, where a decisive North-West African dossier is still being curated by a body that treats Africa as venue rather than author.

Second, the Council operates an elaborate dependency theater: it calls on African states to furnish peacekeepers, implement sanctions, absorb refugees, and stabilize neighbors, yet denies them a permanent hand on the pen when mandates are drafted and revised, thereby reproducing policy designs that are negotiated over African maps but seldom with African ownership.

Third, the Council instrumentalizes crises, Africanizing the agenda while Atlanticizing power, and then wonders why legitimacy deficits widen and compliance frays.

Fourth, in a fragmenting order, alienating a continent that will constitute a quarter of humanity by mid-century is not merely unjust, it is strategically obtuse. The chamber hemorrhages influence precisely in the arena where demographic energy, economic possibility, and security externalities will most determine the twenty-first century.

To be clear, the drumbeat for reform is cumulative, not episodic. African diplomats won the 1965 enlargement from eleven to fifteen. The twenty-first century has given us Ezulwini’s legal grammar, Sirte’s political mandate, and an emerging practice of African penholding and AU-UN docking mechanisms that already anticipate the future architecture in miniature.

Kenya’s 80th UNGA intervention did not erupt from a vacuum; it crystallized a continental file grown weary of being postponed in the name of procedural choreography, and it aligned with a rare institutional candor from the Secretary-General and a grudging, caveated, but still notable shift in Washington.

Even public opinion trackers and niche media in the UN ecosystem have started to treat African permanent membership as a “when,” not an “if,” with informal soundings frequently clustering around South Africa and Nigeria. It is a useful sentiment, albeit not dispositive and certainly not a substitute for AU-led, criteria-based selection.

Morocco embodies Africa’s new grammar of power

It is in this context – one of overdue recognition and structural blockage – that Morocco’s case should be understood, not as a petition for indulgence but as a credible demonstration of institutional fitness, coalition craft, and agenda-setting sobriety.

Morocco has shown, repeatedly, that it can assemble cross-regional majorities around complex, identity-laden files. Whatever one’s priors on Western Sahara, the diplomatic choreography surrounding resolution 2797 (2025) showcased an ability to navigate P5 fissures, hold the center against performative veto politics, and keep a political process tethered to a realistic baseline – in this instance, the autonomy framework – without torching the broader fabric of Council consent.

That is how permanent members behave when they are intent on making the Council work rather than turning it into a stage for maximalist signaling.

Equally salient is Morocco’s geometry. It is, at once, an Atlantic-Mediterranean-African country plugged into Western partnerships, the Arab world, and sub-Saharan economic networks, with economic arteries that run south-south as well as north-south. The kingdom further benefits from its track record in peacekeeping, counter-terrorism cooperation, maritime security, energy transition diplomacy, migration governance, and religious diplomacy that privileges operational delivery over rhetorical grandstanding.

A Council in search of relevance needs states that bridge constituencies, translate between normative registers, and bring problem-solving muscle to the table. Rabat has invested in the hard wiring of collective security rather than rhetorical maximalism – an operational posture that aligns with what a permanent seat should mean: capability, not just symbolism.

Morocco’s multiregional anchoring and coalition habits are not symbolic adornments; they are the connective capacities a re-legitimized Council requires if it is to be representative rather than insular and paralyzed.

Presence first; parity next

Critics will ask, not unreasonably, about competition among African contenders and the risk that continental solidarity fractures at the gate. The reply is embedded in Africa’s own constitutional grammar: Ezulwini vests selection in the African Union precisely to prevent external powers from turning reform into a beauty contest and to ensure that the legitimacy of any African permanent member is African-conferred.

The Council’s reform is a Charter problem, not a beauty contest; Africa’s process must be African-owned – criteria-based, rotational if needed, and anchored in a continental code of good conduct to discipline behavior once inside the club. The argument is not that Morocco is the only plausible candidate; it is that Morocco is a high-credibility one, capable of carrying continental expectations and building cross-regional bargains without mortgaging agency to any single bloc.

Others will argue that accepting permanent seats without the veto entrenches second-class status; the sequencing answer is that presence precedes parity and helps to manufacture it, because responsible agenda-setting from inside the chamber strengthens the case for either universalizing the veto or abolishing it on principled grounds rather than rhetorical indignation.

Yet if sequenced smartly, the veto is a negative instrument (a blocking device), not a magic wand – its power lies less in possession than in the credibility earned through responsible, agenda-setting participation.

And of course, great-power politics will continue to jam the gears, but the very legitimacy crisis laid bare by paralysis in Ukraine, Gaza, the Sahel, and climate-security means the P5 now need African buy-in to stabilize the very system they preside over. The aperture for Charter reform is not wide, but it is real – and it widens when the reform demand is precise, unified, and procedurally literate. Even the US has accepted the direction of travel; the Secretary-General has put the moral marker down; and member states have the procedural map for Charter change. The window is open – and Africa must force it wider.

What follows from this is a program of action rather than another well-meaning panel. The AU should table a single, time-bound reform package at the Intergovernmental Negotiations that mirrors Africa’s common position – two permanent seats, five elected seats, AU-led selection, and a review clause on the veto within a specified horizon – while constituting an African reform troika drawn from current, incoming, and outgoing African-elected members to coordinate draft language, floorcraft, and cross-regional bargaining across cycles.

Candidates, Morocco included, should bind themselves ex ante to a continental code of conduct that routinizes consultation with the AU Peace and Security Council, shares penholding on African files, and reports transparently back to Addis on how African priorities are advanced within the Council’s day-to-day mechanics.

And African diplomacy should use moments like yesterday’s Western Sahara vote not as victory laps but as proofs of concept that the continent is not a reactive venue but an agenda-setting author capable of curating compromises, delivering votes, and translating principles into workable mandates.

The Security Council is not an oracle; it is an architecture, and right now the architecture is biased by design, withholding permanent voice from the continent it most debates, demanding African troops and taxes while denying African title. That is why Africa’s exclusion is not a procedural glitch but a structural scandal.

Morocco, with its coalition-building record, multiregional bridges, and operational seriousness, is not the only plausible African permanent member, but it is a compelling one whose elevation would help convert reform from a moral plea into an institutional fact.

The real question is whether Africa arrives as a supplicant or as an architect. The blueprint exists in Ezulwini; the diplomatic aperture has opened; the legitimacy crisis is acute. It is time to seat Africa where it has always belonged – permanently, authoritatively, and unapologetically – inside the Council, not simply on its menu.