Today, the General Assembly of the United Nations will confirm the appointment of Mr Koffi Annan as the organisation's next Secretary-General; he will take office on January 1st. His appointment represents a spectacular coup for the United States, a notable defeat for France and comes as much relief to Africa which feared that the top job might go by default to another region. Mr Annan, a 58-year-old Ghanaian, could be forgiven for harbouring mixed feelings on his elevation. The UN's effectivness is diminished hugely and it is broke. The President, Mrs Robinson, was often spoken of as a candidate though she took pains to dissociate herself from the speculation. Mr Annan's appointment is for five years only so before long her name may be linked with the job once again. In the meantime, Mr Annan has much to do.
The charter of the United Nations says that its Secretary-General is the organisation's chief administrative officer. It is a role which successive Secretaries-General have largely ignored and no one more than the soon-to-be-redundant Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali. It was not just for this, however, that the US vigorously opposed his second term: American casualties in Somalia were blamed on the UN (unfairly) and there was a monumental row over a UN report which criticised Israeli shelling of the UN base at Qana in Lebanon, a report which our Department of Foreign Affairs welcomed as objective and professional.
The US is unlikely to pick fights with Mr Annan (nor he with it) because he is its choice. He has lived in the US for much of his 30 years of UN service, has an economics degree from Malacester and a master's in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The US got him promoted in 1993 and later made special envoy to Bosnia. But while Mr Annan may have cordial relations with the US Administration it might be a different matter with the Republican-controlled House of Congress.
There, the UN is seen as bloated, inefficient and devoid of fresh ideas. It is broke mainly because the US owes it $1.7 billion (out of $2.2 billion owed by members) and the Republicans won't pay up until it has been put in order. Mr Annan quickly needs to bring his management qualification to bear but there will be fears that, being a UN insider, his approach to reform will be less than root-and-branch. He also needs to come up with a renewed sense of purpose, make the Security Council more representative, end the daft veto system and scrap the even dafter filling of the top job not on merit but on the basis of which continent's turn it is.