Nepal’s candidate for the presidency of UNGA, Kul Chandra Gautam got defeated by Qatari candidate Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser at a voting in UN headquarters, New York on Friday. The number of votes each candidate received was not made public as per the understanding of group nations.
Qatari candidate Nasser, also the permanent representative of Qatar to the UN, emerged strong as all countries of the Arab region backed him.
Although Nepal had announced candidacy for the post of president for the 66th UNGA back in 2001, it picked Gautam as the candidate only six months ago. Gautam is a former Under Secretary General at the UN.
From the South Asian region, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan have become presidents of UNGA in the past.
According to the new system, the Asian region gets turn to preside over the UNGA every five years. The other Asian countries which have presided over the UNGA in the past are Bahrain, South Korea, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Iraq.
Generally, the president of general assembly is chosen unanimously. This is probably the first time a voting took place for the post of UNGA president in the history of UN
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What a shame!
Action #1: fire Nepal’s UN ambassador and his deputy right away. Good for nothing bureaucrats. If any humility left on them, they should resign. For god’s sake, recall them immediately before giving a sack.
Action #2: Blacklist Sujata. There is more than enough ground to believe that she did not do enough. She was too involved in looking after her own welfare and promoting herself.
Action #3: Relieve the current Foreign Secretary from his job. Also blacklist the last few Foreign Secretaries who did not (could not) do enough to promote the candidacy of Gautam. Mere clearks, what can you say of them!
Action #4: MKN should publicly apologise Nepali public for such a humilation. He was too involved in retaining and prolonging his own job.
Nepal faced the same kind of humilation when Dr. Bekh Bahadur Thapa’s wife Dr. Rita Thapa stood in election for a regional director post. She lost it badly. Did we not learn a lesson from it?
Form a commitee of independent individuals to find out what happened and whether there were enough homework and preparations made. Recommendations and lessons learned from it should be applied for any such future bid.
Lastly to Kul Gautam, I am sorry you lost it but also the country lost it with your humilating defeat. Lesson: Do not ever try to hang into a coattail of a person like Madhav Nepal who himself was defeated in places in the last CA election.