About these and other challenges, Prensa Latina spoke to Sheikh Manssour Bin Mussallam, Secretary General of the OCE, who recalled that the founding of the organization on January 29, 2020 in Djibouti was a moment of celebration and pride not only for those who fought for its creation, but also for the member states.
Mussallam specified that being able to formulate a new multilateral instrument was considered the greatest achievement at the time, but after a few weeks they realized that the known world had disappeared with the arrival of Covid-19.
“And of course that was a big challenge for the organization as a collective, not just because states were struggling with this health crisis, but because their priorities rightly had other priorities. Saving lives takes precedence over ratifying any instrument or charter,” he said.
Still, he added, states showed their commitment to that organization’s vision by ensuring that this charter went into effect in less than a year and four months amid a pandemic.
The great challenge was to bring the gathering together amid the wave of the Omicron variant of the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes Covid-19. The organization was created and established at a time of great uncertainty for member states and the Secretariat, but also for the world, he acknowledged.
Closer to the present and with the establishment last month of the OCE headquarters in Addis Ababa, in his opinion the capital of Africa, which through our presence has become the capital of integration of our countries of the south, new challenges are imposed.
“I think that the biggest challenge we will face is no longer the engagement of the member states, because in reality the vision of the member states has been confirmed and ratified with the arrival of Covid-19. The charter not only spoke of an inclusive, balanced education, but also of strengthening our ability to carry out transdisciplinary research.”
He emphasized that Covid-19 has highlighted the urgency of this mandate. Our countries didn’t ask for charity, we wanted to buy vaccines, but some monopolized production, so we need to expand our capacities, Covid-19 has shown that.
The technological divide was also exacerbated in 2019, but confirmed what was already contained in the charter, namely the development of our own technology, adapted to our context, which stimulated the creativity of our youth and the economy.
“Now that we are in the leadership phase of the organization, we understand the fundamentals of South-South collaboration,” he explained.
South-South, real regional cooperation
Looking to the future, for the Secretary General of the OCE, Sheikh Manssour Bin Mussallam, “the challenge is that the mandates for the member states and by states I mean peoples who have dreams, the greatest challenge is to live with dreams and ideals renew.” “.
He argued that the current international discourses are no longer dreams as we have moved from building societies of shared prosperity to a discourse about poverty reduction and the impact of climate change.
On this last issue, as to why we are not moving forward in this struggle and that it also poses a challenge for the OCE, the first thing to teach is that change is possible. We’ve gotten to a point where people are exhausted before the fight has even started because we don’t believe change is possible.
He reasoned that while fear is legitimate in a climate catastrophe, at best it is purely reactive and reacting to things to prevent the worst, but at worst it is completely crippling.
The second challenge is the lack of a vision of what will come after the ecological transition, because without reconstruction plans there can be no deconstruction. Third, and most seriously, we are so caught up in the individualism of our development models that we forget the importance of collective action.
“Collective action does not mean that many people are doing the same thing at the same time. Collective action is a determined struggle on multiple fronts to achieve a common goal and I think this idea of rebuilding a collective is the collective feeling “important part”.
He warned that without dreams there is no mobilization and no transformation. We are an organization that believes there is no future without the collective and no future without South-South cooperation, and when I say South-South cooperation I mean the recognition of authentic regional integration.
I think one of the biggest challenges as an organization is that we speak of the South without being aware of the South, we still don’t have a sense of belonging to the South. Many in Latin America think they have nothing to do with Africa, in Africa they think they have nothing to do with Latin America.
But when we share, when we are very diverse, unity only comes from diversity, because you don’t unite what is already the same, you unite what is different, he concluded.
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