World at breaking point.

JOHANNESBURG: Saying we are on the verge of collapse, the UN Secretary-General made a sweeping turn Saturday to finish the worldwide inequalities that sparked this year's massive anti-racism protests and are further exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Covid-19 has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures within the fragile skeleton of the societies we've built, Antonio Guterres said as he delivered the Mandela Annual Lecture.

It is exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere: The lie that free markets can deliver health look, after all, the fiction that unpaid care work isn't working, the delusion that we sleep in a post-racist world, the parable that we beat an equivalent boat.

He said developed countries are strongly invested in their own survival and have did not deliver the support needed to assist the developing world through these dangerous times.

The UN chief’s address marked what would are the birthday of former South African president and Nobel Peace lottery winner Mandela.

South Africa, the world’s most unequal country a quarter-century after the top of the racist system of apartheid, is quickly becoming one among the world’s hardest-hit nations within the pandemic and now makes up roughly half Africa’s confirmed coronavirus cases. Already its public hospitals are nearly overwhelmed.

The speech by the UN chief took aim at the vast inequality of wealth. The 26 richest people within the world hold the maximum amount of wealth as half the worldwide population, Guterres said and other inequalities involving race, gender, class, and place of birth.

These, he said, are seen within the world’s fragmented response to the pandemic as governments, businesses, and even individuals are accused of hoarding badly needed testing, medical, and other supplies for themselves.

The legacy of colonialism still reverberates, Guterres added, and it shows in global power relations.

Developing countries, and particularly African nations, are under-represented at the amount of power including at financial institutions just like the "> just like the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and political ones like the UN Security Council, whose five most powerful members the US, Britain, France, Russia, and China go back the 1940s when the planet body was created.

Inequality starts at the top: in global institutions. Addressing inequality must start by reforming them, Guterres said, offering some solutions.

A new generation of social protection is required, including universal health coverage and maybe even a universal basic income he said, adding individuals and corporations must pay their justifiable share.

Education spending in low and middle-income countries should quite double by 2030 to $3 trillion a year, he said. And within the face of enormous shifts thanks to global climate change, governments should tax carbon rather than people.

Answering questions after his speech, Guterres involved “massive support” for the developing world including debt write-offs. He said the suspension of debt payments until the top of this year, which was prescribed by the G-20, the world's 20 major economic powers, is clearly not enough. And he noted, without naming names, that leadership and power aren't always aligned.

"Let's face facts, Guterres said in his address. the worldwide political and financial system isn't delivering on critical global public goods: public health, climate action, sustainable development, peace.

The UN chief involved a replacement model of worldwide governance with inclusive and equal participation.

We see the beginnings of a replacement movement, he said, adding its time to right the wrongs of the past.

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