UN Chief's Africa Promise: What Gets Left Behind After December

GUTERRES AND AFRICA: WHAT REMAINS UNFINISHED

“Africa sempre (always).” António Guterres spoke those words in his native Portuguese at the 39th African Union summit in Addis Ababa in February, pledging that even after leaving office on 31 December 2025, Africa would remain “at the centre of my concerns and my active solidarity.” For the millions of people living through the continent’s wars, displacement crises, and climate shocks, the question his decade in office leaves behind is a practical one: how much did that commitment actually change their lives?

The gap between rhetoric and results defines much of what experts say about his Africa legacy. Gustavo de Carvalho, Acting Head of African Governance and Diplomacy at the South African Institute of International Affairs, characterizes Guterres as “rhetorically ambitious” but operationally more “secretary than general.” He struggled, de Carvalho argues, to translate his Africa rhetoric into tangible political outcomes.

Guterres came to the UN’s top job in 2017 after defeating 13 other candidates. His path was unconventional. A former Prime Minister of Portugal and member of the centre-left Portuguese Socialist Party, he had led the UN’s refugee agency between 2005 and 2015. That humanitarian background shaped everything that followed. Addressing the General Assembly upon his appointment, he said his decade as High Commissioner for Refugees had shown him firsthand “the suffering of the most vulnerable people on earth.” He promised a “humble approach,” one in which he would not “seek to impose his own views.”

Those who worked alongside him during those UNHCR years speak to that quality. Abdullah Jafar, a former senior programme assistant at UNHCR’s Kuwait office, notes that Guterres chose the humanitarian route after leaving political office. “He didn’t need to be High Commissioner for Refugees at the time, having held the higher rank of Prime Minister,” Jafar says. “That shows humility.” Monique Nsanzabaganwa, a former Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission from Rwanda, recalls encountering Guterres at an airport carrying his own suitcase with no entourage. “This is what they call servant leadership. You are at that high level, but it is not about you as a person. You are humble and relatable,” she says.

That instinct carried into how he engaged with Africa’s deepest crises. Karim Soumana, project director for global order and peacemaking at the International Crisis Group and part of Niger’s Security Council team in 2020-2021, observed that “Guterres brought genuine depth to the humanitarian dimensions of Africa’s crises, especially when it came to displacement, food insecurity and climate change.” His UNHCR experience, Soumana adds, “showed in his personal engagement in those areas.”

On institutional matters, the record is more clearly positive. Guterres deepened the relationship between the UN and the African Union, championed African representation, and advocated forcefully for reform. He appointed Amina Mohammed, who holds Nigerian and British nationalities, as his Deputy Secretary-General, and she became central to his work on the continent. “You could feel the chemistry, even just by observing them. They shared the same vision about Africa. They pursued it,” Nsanzabaganwa recalls. Abiodun Williams, Professor of the Practice of International Politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, describes Guterres’ approach as “normative, institutionalist and multilateralist,” supporting “African agency, greater African representation in global institutions, including permanent seats on the Security Council.”

Guterres pushed hard on that last point. In February 2025, he framed the absence of African permanent representation on the Security Council as a direct consequence of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “Africa was under colonial domination when today’s multilateral system was created, and that injustice endures,” he said. “There is no excuse that Africa still lacks permanent representation in the 21st century.” The current 15-seat Council includes five permanent members with veto power (the US, UK, China, France and Russia) plus 10 rotating non-permanent seats. Africa, according to UN estimates, has the world’s fastest-growing population and continues to occupy a substantial share of the Council’s agenda.

He used similar historical framing on climate. “Africa has done the least to cause this emergency yet suffers some of its most devastating consequences,” he said at a 2020 press conference. Rita Abrahamsen, a Professor of African Studies at Oxford University, sees strategic logic in this approach. “The UN needs Africa at this moment in time, and the Secretary-General is probably aware of that,” she says. “The UN is probably at its weakest. It’s got a very low level of influence and legitimacy in the global sphere.”

Where the record becomes far more contested is on conflict resolution. Sudan stands as perhaps the starkest test. Three years into a war the UN describes as producing the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, Guterres has increasingly characterized the conflict as driven by forces beyond his control. In January, he called Sudan a “playground” for international actors whose interference prevented Sudanese parties from reaching agreement. When a journalist suggested that he had just said he lacked the power to stop atrocities, Guterres did not dispute the premise. He pointed instead to the Security Council, arguing that the next Secretary-General’s effectiveness would depend on whether the Council itself could act.

Mali represents another significant setback. After successive military coups, the transitional government requested the immediate withdrawal of UN peacekeeping troops. Guterres acknowledged that the organisation’s work there was a peacekeeping operation where “there is no peace to keep.” A UN Peacekeeping lessons-learned report found that the mission operated in an increasingly difficult geopolitical environment as Mali’s international alliances shifted and divisions among major powers deepened. The result was a mission caught between the Malian government and armed groups, weakening the unified political backing that UN peacekeeping requires.

Meanwhile, Williams assesses the overall record as mixed. “He has amplified Africa’s voice at the UN, but has fallen short on conflict mediation and resolution. Africa has experienced major conflicts during his tenure, including in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Guterres has been unable or unwilling to use his political authority as Secretary-General to push for negotiated settlements to ongoing conflicts through creative diplomacy.”

Soumana identifies another gap. “Where I think the knowledge has been thinner is on the political architecture of the continent, mainly the dynamics of the AU, and the intricacies of African politics, and it has been visible on how his Office engaged with some of the crises,” he says.

There were genuine diplomatic achievements. The UN-mediated Libyan ceasefire of 2020 stands as a notable one. And the most durable advances generally came when African regional powers were united enough to lead, with the UN acting as facilitator rather than peacemaker-in-chief, an approach Guterres himself advocated.

Soumana is careful to note that many failures attributed to Guterres were actually failures of the international system itself. “A lot of the failures that were attributed to Guterres were failures of the international system that he leads but does not control. The next SG will also have to navigate those constraints,” he says. Between Trump’s disruption of the UN, the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and resurgent violence in the Middle East, the pressures on his tenure were extraordinary.

Guterres leaves office having genuinely prioritized Africa while struggling to translate that commitment into decisive political results on the continent’s most intractable conflicts. Whether his successor can do better, or whether the constraints of the office itself are the real obstacle, is the question that will define the next chapter.