UN General Assembly
2014

relations, paternalistic global governance regimes and overreliance on official development assistance. Moreover, it was driven by external prescriptions for development that were heavy on political instruction, but light on economic and social transformation. We now know better. We know that our social and economic transformation shall come first from within our nations, our region and our continent, and only secondly from the complement of external ideas and resources. Equally important, those external contributions must recognize the primacy of our aspirations and ideas. They must value and safeguard, rather than simply exploit and consume, our domestic resources and the product of our people’s labour. For the post-2015 development agenda to be transformative, therefore, it must first embrace the primacy of developing countries whose people seek sustained development most. Anything less will be a recipe for failure. We cannot speak of development or of transformation when millions of the world’s people are mired in and are broken by unrelenting poverty, disease and hunger. The business of ridding the world of those plagues, touched upon but not fully embraced