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By Brendan Cole
Senior Reporter
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The next United Nations secretary-general must reform the body which has been assailed by financial crises and criticism by President Donald Trump, a leading contender for the world's top diplomat has told Newsweek.
Olara Otunnu, Uganda's former permanent representative to the UN, made the comments ahead of talks that started on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi aimed at breaking the deadlock in the Ukraine War.
With no diplomatic breakthrough in the war, Trump has previously accused the UN of peddling "empty words" which do not solve conflicts and imposing a "far-left agenda."
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The U.S. president has also criticized bloat at the body, halted U.S. engagement with the U.N. Human Rights Council and extended a funding freeze on the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
When asked for his view on Trump's misgivings about how the UN operated, Otunnu said that "there may be areas in which things have been expanded, have got too wide, in which the UN began to be spread too thin."
As such the UN "should return to the fundamentals and the basics" which are peace and security, social development, and human rights, Otunnu said.
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The U.N is in financial trouble because of member states failing to pay their assessed contributions in full or on time.
At the end of September, unpaid contributions swelled to $1.46 billion for the UN regular budget and $4.1 billion for peacekeeping.
After outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres had warned the UN was in a "race to bankruptcy," the General Assembly voted in June to change a budget rule giving refunds to members regardless of whether they had paid into its budget.
Otunnu has pledged financial and administrative reform to make the UN leaner.
This would build on the UN80 reform program—named after the 80th anniversary of its 1945 founding—which has cut posts, relocated staff, and consolidated administrative functions.
But bureaucracy and duplication needed to be cut further and senior management posts, which have accounted for only 3 percent of agreed UN80 cuts, must be streamlined, he said.
"Mobilizing finances for the operations of the UN is only one aspect of reform—the reform agenda has to be a larger one about where the UN is going," said Otunnu.
Has Trump Changed Diplomacy?
Otunnu was speaking before the first trilateral negotiations on the war since February start in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.
Ahead of the talks, Trump said Ukraine could take a "different shape" days after he teased an unspecified "beautiful deal" to end the war.
The diplomacy of Trump's envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, yielded no breakthrough so far in Ukraine and their outsized roles representing the U.S and lack of diplomatic experience has been under scrutiny.
Otunnu said that Trump's more personal approach did not mean that diplomacy had changed.
"There is nothing new about that," Otunnu said, "we've always had efforts by the major powers taking initiatives, seeing what they could do."
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When the next secretary-general takes up their role on January 1, they will likely inherit crises like in Ukraine, Iran and Gaza.
Otunnu's mission statement also prioritizes conflicts less in the public eye such as in Sudan and DR Congo.
Moving from war to peace with impartial mediation involving the secretary-general is "the most important single mandate of the United Nations."
"What is important about these efforts is that they should be brought together, they should be coordinated," he added.
How is the UN Secretary-General Appointed?
Currently co-chair of Rocco Paco, a group rebuilding postwar northern Uganda, Otunnu had been Uganda's permanent representative to the UN from 1980 to 1985 and under-secretary-general of the United Nations between 1997 and 2005.
He is among six contenders left to replace Guterres, who has been in post since 2017, in a process enshrined under Article 97 of the UN Charter.
The other five candidates include Ivonne A-Baki and María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, from Ecuador, and the Argentine head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi.
Also in the frame are Costa Rican politician Rebeca Grynspan, and Carolyn Allison Rodrigues-Birkett, a diplomat from Guyana.
The UN's five permanent members effectively have a veto which means that any one of the U.K., China, France, Russia, and the U.S. can block a candidate, making the acceptance of all P5 members the critical hurdle.
Candidates are nominated by member states, assessed in public dialogues, and then considered in private "straw polls" by the Security Council which recommends one candidate to the General Assembly.
The next secretary-general will take up the position on January 1.
The straw poll system was in fact devised by Otunnu in 1981 and allows members to privately express their views on candidates without turning the process into a diplomatic confrontation.
Members are asked which candidates they would "encourage" and "discourage" revealing those with broad support and those who faced opposition from powerful members.
"I obviously didn't have a clue that one day I would be subjected to the Otunnu formula," he told Newsweek, "this is a good case of no good deed goes unpunished."
Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Robert Greenall and Tobias Meyjes
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