Kofi Anan: Farewell To An African Peacemaker
By Adekeye Adebajo Ghana ’s Kofi Annan, whose death at the age of 80 was announced on Saturday, was the first black African to serve as Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), between 1997 and 2006. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the UN in 2001, though his most noteworthy mediation was in brokering a settlement in violence-stricken Kenya in 2008, failing in Syria four years later. *Kofi Anan During his ten-year tenure as Secretary-General, the Ghanaian diplomat courageously, but perhaps naïvely, championed the cause of “humanitarian intervention.” After a steep decline in the mid-1990s, peacekeeping increased again by 2005 to around 80,000 troops. African countries like Sudan , the Congo , Liberia , Ethiopia/Eritrea, and Côte d’Ivoire were the main beneficiaries. Annan also moved the UN bureaucracy from its creative inertia to embrace views and actors from outside the system: mainly civil society and the private sector. At the time of his appointment, Annan was wi...