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Johannesburg:
Coronavirus has revealed the “fragile skeleton” of societies and will push 100 million individuals into excessive poverty, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated on Saturday.
Speaking on the 102nd birthday anniversary of the late Nelson Mandela — South Africa’s first black president — Guterres stated coronavirus was “shining a spotlight” on world injustice.
“We have been brought to our knees — by a microscopic virus. The pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of our world.”
“Entire regions that were making progress on eradicating poverty and narrowing inequality have been set back years, in a matter of months,” he warned at a digital memorial lecture organised by the Johannesburg-based Nelson Mandela Foundation.
The financial fallout of the pandemic, which has contaminated greater than 14 million and killed near 600,000 individuals worldwide, is being disproportionately felt amongst casual staff, small companies and ladies, Guterres stated.
“We face the deepest global recession since World War II,” he stated. “One hundred million more people could be pushed into extreme poverty. We could see famines of historic proportions.”
Coronavirus is an “x-ray” that has revealed “fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built”, he added, citing unequal healthcare provision, unpaid care work, revenue disparity and local weather change as a number of the considerations.
“It is exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere… The delusion that we live in a post-racist world. The myth that we are all in the same boat.”
He stated the world’s 26 richest individuals maintain as a lot wealth as half the worldwide inhabitants.
“But income, pay and wealth are not the only measures of inequality,” he added.
Guterres stated individuals have been operating out of endurance on the obtrusive disparities and discrimination throughout societies.
He singled out the worldwide anti-racism motion stoked by the demise of George Floyd — an African-American man killed by a white policeman in May — as merely “one more sign that people have had enough”.
Enough of “inequality and discrimination that treats people as criminals on the basis of their skin colour”, sufficient of “structural racism” and “systematic injustice”.
Coronavirus, he stated, had additionally created a possibility for world leaders to construct a “more equal and sustainable world”.
“We are at breaking point. But we know which side of history we are on.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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