Former UN Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Kofi Annan has died at the age of 80, his foundation said on Saturday.
Annan, a Ghanaian national, died in hospital in Bern, Switzerland, in the early hours of Saturday, two of his close associates said.
In Geneva, the Kofi Annan Foundation announced his peaceful death with “immense sadness” after a short illness, saying he was surrounded in his last days by his second wife, Nane and children Ama, Kojo and Nina.
Annan served two terms as UN Secretary-General in New York from 1997 to 2006 and retired in Geneva and later lived in a Swiss village in the nearby countryside.
“In many ways, Kofi Annan was the UN. He rose through the ranks to lead the organization into the new millennium with matchless dignity and determination,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, whom Annan had chosen to head the UN refugee agency, said in a statement.
As head of UN peacekeeping operations, Annan was criticized for the world body’s failure to halt the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s.
“The UN can be improved, it is not perfect but if it didn’t exist you would have to create it,” he told the BBC’s Hard Talk during an interview for his 80th birthday last April, recorded at the Geneva Graduate Institute where he had studied.
The Nobel Laureate died after a brief illness.
See tweet:
It is with immense sadness that the Annan family and the Kofi Annan Foundation announce that Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations and Nobel Peace Laureate, passed away peacefully on Saturday 18th August after a short illness… pic.twitter.com/42nGOxmcPZ
— Kofi Annan (@KofiAnnan) August 18, 2018
The Ghanaian was the second African to head the UN after Egypian Boutrous Boutrous Ghali, who was in charge between January 1992 to December 1996.
His tenure as UN secretary-general coincided with the Iraq War and the HIV/Aids pandemic.
After serving for 10 years at UN, Annan served as the UN special envoy for Syria, leading efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.
Kofi Annan described his greatest achievement as the Millennium Development Goals which – for the first time – set global targets on issues such as poverty and child mortality.
Annan was born in Kumasi Ghana on 8 April 1938. After studying at Kwame Nkrumah University, he went on to study Economics at Macalester College, international relations from the Graduate Institute Geneva and management at MIT.
He joined the UN in 1962, working for the World Health Organisation’s Geneva office. He went on to work in several capacities at the UN Headquarters including serving as the Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping between March 1992 and December 1996.
He was the first UN Secretary General to be appointed from within the organisation’s bureaucracy.
His first marriage was to Nigerian Titi Alakija, from 1965 to 1983. After the marriage collapsed, he married Nane Maria Lagergren in 1984.
He is survived by his wife, Nane and three children, Kojo, Ama and Nina.
Reuters/NAN
