Mr President,

My congratulations on your election and my best wishes for the coming year. Also my great appreciation to your predecessor, His Excellency Theo-Ben Gurirab, for his fine work and guidance over the past year.

I would like to start by thanking our Secretary-General for his report to the Millennium Summit. It was comprehensive, ethical and most impressive. We have never had anything like it before.

One effect it has had is to give deep meaning to the expression 'the international community'. In the past, I think we have often used this term far too lightly. Now we know what it stands for.

It is spelled out in the Final Declaration made by our Heads of Government. This is now a textbook for the coming years of this organisation. Its great ideas still echo in this chamber. Its noble aims light up the future.

Mr. President,

In our view, it has given us precise targets that can really help developing nations and, for the first time, we can distinguish clearly between immediate issues and long term ones.

This is very important because many of the things on which we spend so much time and resources are not today's issues. They are sad legacies passed on by the twentieth century.

That is not to say they are unimportant. Each one is tragic in the consequences it has for ordinary people's lives. But they are all primarily the responsibility of governments and regional organisations. The more they dominate the affairs of this organisation, the more they stop us concentrating on the deep-seated problems of developing nations.

Those are truly today's issues and, as the Secretary-General highlighted in his summit report, they are becoming very serious indeed.

We have even had to give them a new name "transnational issues".

They each have academic titles technological problems; demographic problems; socio-economic problems; environmental problems. But take away the grand language and they all add up to a simple fact.

They are far too big for individual governments to deal with. Or even regional organisations.

It is all too clear that they will not be solved in the market place, either. The solutions will not trickle down. In fact, the global market economy has lengthened the list of them and has created its own set of special problems.

It would all be very depressing indeed, Mr. President, but for one thing. The summit declaration has clearly invited us all as members of the United Nations to accept a joint international responsibility to find solutions.

This is very good but, if we are to do it successfully, we have to let the world body concentrate on what it does best and is best equipped to do.

By this, I mean the practical, urgent work done by its organs and agencies and its professionals and volunteers, in the field, close to the people. Much of this represents development in areas such as education and training which are absolutely critical if the people of developing nations are to move beyond a day-to-day struggle for basic food, shelter and medicine and take part successfully in the new global economy.

It means that the work being done by agencies such as UNESCO, UNICEF and the W.H.O. is vital. It needs to proceed urgently and not be held back by constraints imposed on the United Nations because sorely required funds are diverted to solving ancient problems.

In other word,, the vital tasks of the United Nations today should not be held hostage by the twentieth century. It has urgent new work to undertake for developing nations.

This, Mr. President, can be simply summed up.

It is to ensure that the words "developing nations " actually do mean nations that are "developing" rather than just a polite expression for what is tending now to mean the very opposite.

The summit declaration offers us all the chance to do just this in friendship and cooperation. I hope we can all do everything we can to implement its provisions.

It would be the best form of appreciation we could offer to the secretary- general and his staff at the end of a remarkable year's work.

Thank you.