Top 15 Amina J. Mohammed Quotes

I think he’s given me fodder for my advocacy. Because when I go back into those sterile rooms, that somehow craft language that I don’t understand, and many people don’t understand, we can break it down. And this is where I think the partnership with the media is so important. This is a new partnership that we need to have.

I listened to an elder just three days ago, and his eyesight had gone. And all he said was ‘we’re very grateful for what you’ve been able to give us here, but there’s a lot of people you can’t see that haven’t been able to get to this’. And the first thing he said was women and people with disabilities. And it just made me think, ‘wow, this person right now is not talking about can we have more for me and my tribe’, which is what generally gets into a story, he’s been very specific about the people that are being left behind, that we don’t see.

I think there’s a disconnect between science, the 1.5 degrees and the reality on the ground. We need to link it, we need to say a third of Pakistan is underwater, because we’ve just had floods that are melting glaciers, and we can tie that to China, and it’s industrial pollution. We can do all this. So how do you tell the story?

Those are real stories. They are real situations that have to sometimes find their way into the media, into the headlines. Not so much the misery of it, but the way that we can prevent it and then link that to the 1.5 degrees.

And then the livelihoods of all these Maasai women and men that I met, their livelihoods, their cattle have died. You see the carcasses on the road. And we don’t want to talk about that much. But that’s assets that have just been taken away. And so when Kenya is dealing with that, they’re saying, ‘okay, right now, the private sector is coming in, and we’re asking them to put a fund together, so they buy the cattle before they die’. So there are resources for that community, for the hard times, and they can replenish stock. Then we have put things together that will help us to build back with a level of resilience.

There are so many. Climate for me is the biggest challenge that we have, and opportunity. So when a farmer says to me that this is not about a flood, or temperatures, it’s about I wake up in the morning and my crop is gone because of a dust storm, and that dust storm has come because of drought, and my farm is gone, my livelihood is gone.

The policy somersaults that we are feeling right now, I guess they feel them in the United Kingdom, they feel them in countries in Europe now that are going so far right from being so far left. So, it’s important, and then I think that, the more we educate people, the better constituencies we have for engaging. You can’t engage with one person, one vote, when there is quite frankly, a lack of education as to understanding why the vote, and what’s my vote worth? Is it $5? Or is it educational reform, and health services, and things that are my rights, that’s what my vote is. So it’s a little bit of a journey, as you know, the long road to freedom – the road is still being tracked.

We need to think, ‘what is the low hanging fruit for a politician that is bound by a four or five-year cycle of democracy and elective office, to one that is longer?’ Longer term means you need institutional memory; that means that the services the institutions need to be able to carry us through these different cycles of elections.

Then you hear what’s going on in South Africa with AI, and you’re thinking, ‘okay, what is the transition going to look like? How do we build that capacity? How do we look at the financial architecture, which was really built for another era, and not for our development – [what about] access courses or even profiting from the natural resources that we have, so that we can build?’ And so it’s going to be complex, because we are many, and our issues are very complex.

I think we’ve been told what to do and what’s good for us. And we have to come back and determine what is good for us. That’s why I said for education, it’s really important we think about that. And we think about what skills are going to put a kid, from when they get into school for 15 years, to the workplace? Is it the skills of tomorrow?"

So what common ground can they come together on to move us forward? And I think that the fact that we’re seeing no solidarity with Africa right now has actually empowered a conversation. I think the United Nations has been helpful for a sanguine Economic Commission for Africa that did a lot of work with the Minister of Finance. So they were able to take the issues in an international arena and argue them, and it’s quite difficult for our people to do that because essentially, they’re in their own bubble, fighting the day-to-day challenges of broken democracies and an incredibly different set of difficult situations, conflict, etc.

Even I, as an African, say to people, ‘oo, I’m the United Nations’. That’s their conversation they need to have. I can have a private one as well, as a brother or sister conversation to them. But in this piece here, give them space, because every one of them has baggage, and that baggage is colonial. And many of them are tied to it inextricably, and it’s hard.

We have a responsibility as followers to get behind them to do the right thing. So conversation, really serious conversation. Whether it happens in the African Union [AU], and I have to tell you that in the AU, when leaders try to get together to have a closed-door meeting, the international community wants to be in on it.

Everybody’s got a closet, and some worse than others. But if that person takes a good message that does no harm, that brings people together, that forwards Africa, we need to find that community.

I think people like the Arch and Madiba [Nelson Mandela] always recognized their failings. And so people didn’t have a chance to throw any stones at them. What came out was ‘okay, I’m not perfect, I’m not God, but these are the things that I believe in, these are the things that I will fight for’. So as human beings, what we look to is what they stood for. And I’m not sure today that we give so much grace to leaders. And I think that we have to think and listen to what the leader is saying and doing, rather than judge what’s in the closet.