UN General Assembly
2014

First of all, I thank the General Assembly for electing His Excellency Mr. Sam Kutesa, our Minister for Foreign Affairs, as President of the General Assembly at its sixty-ninth session. As the Assembly knows, the United Nations system needs reform to reflect the new needs and realities in the world today. Uganda will use the time of its presidency to make a small contribution towards the reform of the United Nations and its organs by pushing for the African agenda on that issue. Those reforms, as will be agreed by all of us, will strengthen the United Nations, not otherwise. Africa, Uganda included, is at long last emerging from the long night of decline that the continent has been through in the last 500 years — ever since 1472, when the Portuguese started encroaching on the African coastline. Those 500 years witnessed great traumas inflicted on the African continent, including the slave trade, colonialism, neocolonialism, plunder, human haemorrhage and, in some cases, even genocide. Those traumas resulted in the haemorrhage of the population