"Mbeki addresses UN, Mugabe draws applause"

CAPE TOWN - The United Nations and its member countries have not yet seriously confronted the difficult issues relating to the uses and perhaps the abuses of power, President Thabo Mbeki said yesterday.

In a speech prepared for delivery at the UN's 59th General Assembly in New York, he said contemporary human society was characterised by a gross and entrenched imbalance in the distribution of power.

"That power is held and exercised by human beings. As human beings, the powerful share many things with the powerless.

"Together, the powerful and the disempowered share the common human needs to eat, to drink water, to be protected from the elements, to dream, to love, to laugh, to play, to live.

"But life itself tells us that all that and only that describes what human beings share. The rest, the relations among us as social beings, is defined by our varied access to power and its exercise," Mbeki said.

Full Article : dispatch.co.za