Tag: UN

Dr. Mohamed Ibn Chambas – the Story of How I Ended Up at Mfantsipim

Dr. Mohamed Ibn Chambas is a Ghanaian lawyer, diplomat, politician, and academic. He is a respected peace and security mediator and has been involved in mediating conflicts in Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sudan.
He has not only served his country as a public servant, starting as a Member of Parliament and Deputy Minister, but has also been active on the international scene, leading ECOWAS and the ACP, and working for the UN and the AU.
At the moment, he serves as the African Union High Representative for Silencing the Guns. He also chairs the mediation efforts of the Quintet, a group made up of the African Union (AU), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the League of Arab States, the European Union (EU), and the United Nations (UN) to bring peace to Sudan.

Before all these great achievements, Dr. Chambas attended Mfantsipim School, where the foundations of his illustrious career were laid.

Mohamed Ibn Chambas was born on Dec 7th, 1950, in Bimbilla in the Northern Region of Ghana. Most of the schools in the North at that time were local authority (L.A.) schools and a good number of teachers were not from the North. Mohamed thus attended an L.A. primary school in Bimbilla where the headteacher, a Presbyterian from Santrokofi in the Oti Region, changed his first name from “Mohamed” to “David”. It would be years later at the University of Ghana in Legon before he would change it back to “Mohamed”.

The story of how he entered Mfantsipim in 1963 – a school that was 578 km away school and at the time had only one other student from the North, and maybe 10 of the Muslim faith – shows the brilliance and promise that young Mohamed exuded even at that age. It also showed his ability to face and take on challenges with courage, a trait that would be made more evident with his later career as a mediator.

Back then, one took the Common Entrance Exam to get into a secondary school. Students in Forms 2 – 4 in middle school were allowed to take the exam. The exam was administered by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC). It consisted of four subject papers written in a single day: English Composition, English Comprehension/Grammar, Mathematics, and General Paper. The exam was graded out of a maximum of 400 marks, and to get into the top schools of the day, like Mfantsipim, Wesley Girls, St. Augustines, Adisadel, and Achimota, one needed a score above 290, preferably 300.
On registering for the Common Entrance, students had to pick three secondary schools they wanted their scores sent to. These schools were ranked in order of preference, with the 1st choice being the most preferred. Excellent students would pick the top schools of the day as the first choice.

Mohamed took the Common Entrance exam in 1963 when he was in Form 2 at the Bimbilla L.A. Middle School. On the day the students in Forms 2 – 4 at the school were filling out the registration forms for the exam, the headteacher, Mr. Daniel K. Puni, went from class to class listing all the top Schools on the left side of the blackboard in each classroom. He advised the students not to pick any of those schools as their chances of getting in were slim. On the right, he listed the schools they had higher chances of getting accepted to.
When he got to Mohamed’s Form 2 class, after writing out the lists, he walked over to the desk where Mohamed sat and said, “But you should select Mfantsipim as your first choice school”.
Mohamed stared at him, totally surprised. Mr. Puni assured him he would get in, and so Mohamed picked Mfantsipim as his first choice. What made it even more remarkable was that the headteacher, Mr. Puni, a Catholic, was an Old Student of St. Augustine’s College.

A few months after the exams, he got a letter of invitation to the Mfantsipim interview. Back then, student interviews were part of the admission process.
Mfantsipim held the interviews for the southern sector of the country at the school in Cape Coast and for the northern sector in Kumasi. He had his interview with the headmaster, Rev. Brandful, in August 1963.

He was accepted and entered Mfantsipim in September 1963, where he would earn the nickname “Chambo”. He was in Schweitzer House, which was later merged with Lockhart House to form what is now Lockhart-Schweitzer.

About his time in Mfantsipim, he said it instilled a lot of self-confidence in him. However, one was also constantly reminded by the headmaster and the staff that it is not where you are but what you do with the opportunities there, and so one always had to think and look ahead. And he did. His life epitomized that.

Dr. Mohamed Ibn Chambas is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim School, a Botwe boy and an active member of MOBA 1968.

Kofi Annan, the Diplomat

Seen in his lifetime as Africa’s foremost diplomat, Kofi Annan, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, was born on April 8, 1938, in Kumasi in the then Gold Coast. He attended Mfantsipim School from 1954 to 1957.

In 1958, he started studying economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology (later KNUST), a degree he completed in 1961 at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, thanks to a Ford Foundation scholarship. He would go on to earn a degree in International Relations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1962, and a Master’s in Management from MIT in Boston, MA, from 1971 to 1972.

His diplomatic career started as a budget officer in the World Health Organization. After stints at various positions in the UN, he was appointed Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping in 1993. In this position, he oversaw peacekeeping efforts in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnia in 1995. He became the UN Secretary-General in 1997.

His time at the UN was marked by his work to revitalize and reform the organization to make it more effective. He also advocated for human rights, and the rule of law, the Millennium Development Goals, for Africa, and forged ties with civil society and the private sector. He played a central role in the creation of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, the adoption of the UN’s first-ever counter-terrorism strategy, and the acceptance by Member States of the “responsibility to protect” people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The “Global Compact” program he launched in 1999 has become the largest worldwide effort to promote corporate social responsibility.

He was quite active as a diplomat, too. He mediated in conflicts between Timor-Leste and Indonesia, Lebanon and Israel, Hizbollah and Israel, and Cameroon and Nigeria.

For having revitalized the UN, given priority to human rights, supporting the fight to stop the spread of HIV in Africa, and his declared opposition to international terrorism, the Nobel Committee decided to split the Nobel Peace Prize between Kofi Annan and the United Nations in 2001.

After retiring from the UN in December 2006, he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation the next year. The foundation was an independent, not-for-profit organization that aimed to “work to promote better global governance and strengthen the capacities of people and countries to achieve a fairer, more secure world”.

Even after retirement, his diplomatic efforts continued either under the umbrella of his foundation, as a member of “the Elders” (a group of independent global leaders who work together on peace and human rights issues), or on behalf of governments or international organizations. He would mediate in conflicts in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Syria, and Myanmar.

He also served on several corporate boards and was active in the affairs of many non-profit organizations, both in Africa and around the world. In Ghana, he served as Chancellor of the University of Ghana, a position he held until his death.

After a short illness, Kofi Annan passed away at the age of 80 on August 18, 2018, in Bern, Switzerland. His body was returned to Ghana for a state funeral on September 13, 2018. He is buried at the new Military Cemetery at Burma Camp in Accra.

Besides the Nobel Peace Prize, he was honored with many other awards during his life and even posthumously, like the “Four Freedoms Awards” in 2004 and the Max Schmidheiny Foundation Freedom Prize” in 2006.

He was also honored with the enstoolment as the “Busumuru” of the Asantes in Ghana by the Asantehene, Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu II, in 2002.

The UN released a stamp in his honor in 2019.

Institutions named in his honor include the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center and the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Center of Excellence in ICT, both in Accra, Ghana; the Kofi Annan University of Guinea in Conakry, Guinea; and the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.

Kofi Annan’s impact on the UN and attempts to make the world a peaceful place cannot be denied. His education and upbringing at Mfantsipim not only laid the foundation for the leader he was going to be – he organized a successful strike for better food while at the school – but, like he is reported to have said, the school taught him that “suffering anywhere, concerns people everywhere”. It is no wonder he spent his life trying to alleviate suffering through diplomacy and mediation.

Kofi Annan is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.