The UN Secretary General: Guyana’s rise

For a country of Guyana’s size, there are moments when the national imagination is entitled to run a little ahead of reality. Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett’s emergence at the top of the latest UN Security Council straw poll is one of them. The poll is, of course, only a poll. It is not an election, and the five permanent members of the Security Council still possess the ultimate veto. But eight “encourage” votes in the latest round have put our candidate ahead of seven other contenders, and transformed what might once have seemed a romantic Guyanese fantasy into a serious international possibility.
If she eventually wins, the symbolism would be extraordinary. The United Nations has existed for more than eight decades without a woman occupying its most senior office. Rodrigues-Birkett would therefore not merely become the first female Secretary General; she would demonstrate, rather inconveniently for the custodians of the old international order, that the job does not demand another distinguished gentleman with a diplomatic résumé stretching from one European capital to another.
More significantly, she would bring to the position a biography very different from the traditional UN establishment. Born in Moruca, an Indigenous community in our Barima-Waini region, she went from teaching and community development to becoming Minister of Amerindian Affairs, Foreign Minister and Guyana’s Permanent Representative to the UN. That journey would give the world’s Indigenous peoples something more substantial than another UN declaration about “inclusion”. One of their own would actually be sitting at the top of the organisation that spends so much time discussing the rights of people who rarely occupy its highest offices.
There would also be a larger message for women. A Rodrigues-Birkett victory would puncture the tiresome argument that women must wait their turn for the world’s most important jobs. After 80 years of male Secretary Generals, the first woman would also come from a small Caribbean country whose population is smaller than that of many major cities. And that is where Guyana’s story becomes inseparable from the story of the Global South.
For decades, the international system has preached equality while preserving a hierarchy in which the powerful countries possess the largest voices, the smallest countries make the speeches and everyone subsequently goes home. A Guyanese Secretary General would offer a rather dramatic reversal of that arrangement.
It would also give the Caribbean an influence vastly exceeding its physical size. Rodrigues-Birkett would give the region an extraordinary opportunity to put climate vulnerability, development finance, small-state security and the particular anxieties of small island and coastal states much higher on the international agenda. Her campaign has already emphasised climate finance and making international development commitments more practical and effective.
For Guyana itself, however, the implications would be both exhilarating and sobering. There would be national pride on a scale never previously experienced. A country accustomed to explaining where Guyana is on the map would suddenly have its own citizen presiding over the world’s principal multilateral institution. The psychological transformation could be a game changer. For generations we have been accustomed to seeing our people leave home to become doctors, academics, engineers and professionals abroad. Suddenly one of us could be running the UN.
But we must understand that the appointment would also mean that Rodrigues-Birkett would cease, in any meaningful sense, to be Guyana’s Secretary General but become the world’s Secretary General. We could celebrate her origins, but should not reasonably expect special treatment from her office. Indeed, the greatest tribute we could pay her would be to understand that distinction. Her election would therefore be more than a personal triumph. It would be a small but remarkable correction to the geography of international power.
The world would be saying that leadership can come from Moruca as well as Manhattan; that Indigenous experience can sit alongside great-power diplomacy; that a woman from the Caribbean can arbitrate among nuclear powers; and that the Global South need not always be the object of international leadership but can provide it. For Guyana, accustomed to thinking big while being told that it is small, that would be quite a lesson.
And perhaps the most satisfying part would be this: after eight decades of men running the United Nations, the person finally breaking the ceiling could come from the little country that spent most of its history being told that it was too small to matter