Saturday 20th February 2021
Competition for Guterres
34-year-old Canadian wants to become head of the UN
UN Secretary General Guterres is aiming for his re-election next year. But he is obviously getting competition: A young competitor also wants to run for the office. The 34-year-old Arora Akanksha justifies her surprising step with a threatened "irrelevance" of the United Nations.
The 34-year-old Canadian Arora Akanksha wants to become Secretary General of the United Nations next year. This emerges from a letter from Akanksha to the UN General Assembly. The 34-year-old works for the United Nations Development Program and challenges incumbent António Guterres, who has already announced his candidacy for another mandate.
"We are not keeping our goals and our promises," writes Akanksha, who was born in India in 1986 as a child of Pakistani refugees. "We are here to resolve the humanitarian crises, not to prolong them." She stressed the "urgency" of global problems and highlighted the climate crisis and the poor conditions for refugees around the world.
In her letter she also calls for a plan to provide poor countries with a vaccine against Covid-19 more quickly. You see the current organizational structure of the UN as an obstacle to solve the problems mentioned. There is too much talk and at the same time hardly any results are achieved, so that the United Nations is threatened with "irrelevance".
The Portuguese Guterres has been Secretary General since 2017. He has already received support from Germany, Great Britain and China for his candidacy. The General Assembly appoints the office on the proposal of the Security Council for five years. As a rule, the office rotates across the continents after two terms. Akanksha would be the first woman in office if elected.
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