Olara Otunnu: The man who invented the UN straw poll now faces his own test
London Letter
By Shyam Bhatia
There is a delicious irony in Olara Otunnu’s bid to become the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Forty-five years ago, as Uganda’s representative to the United Nations and president of the Security Council, Otunnu devised the informal straw-poll procedure that helped break one of the most stubborn deadlocks in the organisation’s history.
Today, that same procedure is being used to judge his own candidacy.
Otunnu, 75, is the seventh and latest candidate to enter the race to succeed António Guterres, whose second term ends on December 31. Uganda formally nominated him on July 24, unusually late in a process in which the other candidates had already undergone their General Assembly interactive dialogues.
Uganda has nominated former diplomat Olara Otunnu for UN Secretary-General post. File/ Reuters
He is nevertheless no newcomer to the organisation he now hopes to lead.
Otunnu was Uganda’s ambassador to the UN in the 1980s, served briefly as foreign minister, and later became UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, a position he held from 1997 until 2005. He subsequently headed the International Peace Academy, now the International Peace Institute.
But his journey to the top of international diplomacy began in the darkness of Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Otunnu grew up under Amin and has described the strange transformation by which a political leader who could initially appear charming and persuasive became the ruler of a murderous regime. Disappearances became commonplace. Families could lose relatives without ever knowing precisely what had happened to them.
The experience left Otunnu with a visceral understanding of what happens when institutions designed to protect people cease to function. It also shaped his view of the United Nations.
During our exclusive conversation, he returned repeatedly to the idea that the UN must recover its ability to prevent conflicts rather than merely manage their consequences.
His own career has taken him through many of the organisation’s most difficult theatres. As Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, he travelled through war zones and turned the plight of children caught in conflict into a major international issue.
He argues that today’s UN faces an even more fundamental crisis of authority.
Wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere have exposed the inability of the Security Council to act collectively. Great-power rivalry has paralysed the organisation precisely when the world most needs an effective international mediator. At the same time, the UN faces financial pressure, institutional fatigue and growing scepticism about whether multilateral diplomacy can still deliver.
Otunnu’s programme therefore goes well beyond a change of personnel at the top.
He has proposed reforms involving the Security Council, conflict prevention, peace building, climate and development. He has also called for international governance of artificial intelligence, arguing that AI is developing too rapidly to be left entirely to governments and corporations acting independently.
His argument is essentially that the UN has to become relevant to the problems that will shape the next generation rather than simply preserve the structures created for the previous one.
But Otunnu’s most unusual qualification for the job lies in the fact that he has already solved a problem which the organisation is confronting again.
In 1981, the Security Council was deadlocked over the choice of a successor to Kurt Waldheim. Several candidates had been blocked, and the superpowers appeared unable to agree.
As president of the Council, Otunnu introduced an informal secret ballot in which members could indicate whether they encouraged or discouraged a candidate or had no opinion. The purpose was not to elect somebody immediately but to expose opposition without forcing governments into an embarrassing public confrontation.
The device became known as the Otunnu Formula.
It helped clear the way for Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru, a compromise candidate who had not initially been regarded as the obvious favourite. The Security Council eventually selected him, and the General Assembly approved the choice.
The formula has survived because it answers a peculiar problem at the heart of the UN: the Secretary-General must be acceptable not merely to a majority of countries but to the five permanent members of the Security Council, each of which possesses a veto.
That means the race is never simply a popularity contest.
The candidate who starts with the most supporters is not necessarily the person who will eventually get the job. What matters is whether the leading powers can live with the eventual choice.
That may be Otunnu’s strongest argument for describing himself as a potential consensus candidate.
The first straw poll, however, was distinctly unpromising. In the July 30 ballot, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan emerged as the early leader, followed by Guyana’s Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett and Argentina’s Rafael Grossi. Otunnu was last, with two members encouraging his candidacy, five discouraging it and eight expressing no opinion.
Yet the result was not a final verdict. The process can continue through several rounds, and the decisive question will ultimately be whether any of the five permanent members is prepared to block a candidate.
There is also a powerful regional consideration. Several of the strongest contenders are from Latin America and the Caribbean, while there is considerable pressure for the UN’s first woman Secretary-General.
Otunnu therefore faces an uphill battle. But he has something few of his rivals possess: a personal history that mirrors many of the UN’s own contradictions.
He has lived through dictatorship and exile. He has represented a government at the centre of international diplomacy. He has worked inside the UN bureaucracy. He has negotiated with governments that disagreed profoundly with one another. And he has spent years dealing with conflicts in which the international community’s failure to act has had devastating consequences for ordinary people.
His recollections of Uganda’s Asian expulsion in 1972 also reveal something of the complexity of his political thinking. The expulsion was an enormous human and economic catastrophe, yet Otunnu has pointed out the uncomfortable reality that for some Asians caught up in Amin’s terror, exile may also have meant escape from a much more dangerous future.
It is precisely this ability to look at political events from several angles that he believes a Secretary-General requires.
Otunnu has a phrase for his own education: “Oxford was my first United Nations.”
His years at Oxford exposed him to a world beyond Uganda and helped prepare him for the international life that followed. But it was his subsequent experience of the real United Nations — its compromises, frustrations, private negotiations and occasional capacity to achieve the impossible — that shaped him as a diplomat.
There is another quality that runs through his career: an instinct for finding mechanisms when conventional diplomacy becomes stuck.
That was the lesson of the Otunnu Formula in 1981.
It was also the lesson of his work on children in armed conflict, where he helped turn an issue that had previously been treated as a humanitarian afterthought into an established part of the international security agenda.
And it is the lesson he now brings to a UN confronted by a new generation of problems, including artificial intelligence, climate change, fragmented geopolitics and wars in which the organisation’s authority is increasingly challenged.
The question is whether the governments that must ultimately choose the next Secretary-General believe that the man who helped devise one of the UN’s most successful diplomatic mechanisms is the person to revive the organisation itself.
Otunnu’s General Assembly interactive dialogue on August 19 will give members states their first formal opportunity to question him about his programme, leadership record and vision for the organisation. The Security Council is then scheduled to hold its second informal straw poll on August 21.
By the time these words are read, the process will have moved another step forward. But the result will not necessarily settle the race. Secretary-General selections can involve multiple rounds of bargaining, withdrawals and compromises before the permanent members settle on a candidate.
That is something Otunnu knows better than most. For he was there the last time the system became hopelessly stuck.
He was the man who devised a way of quietly discovering which candidates the great powers could — and could not — accept.
Now the straw poll carries his own name.
The man who invented the test is about to take it himself.
Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 21 August 2026
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