Kofi Annan buried

Ghanaian former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan has been laid to rest today, September 13, after a state funeral graced by some world leaders, diplomats and traditional authorities among others.

He was buried at the new Military Cemetery at Burma Camp after a state funeral service was held in his honour at the Accra International Conference Centre.

Kofi Annan led the UN from 1997 to 2006 as the first black African to occupy the secretary general position. He died on August 18 aged 80 at his home in Switzerland after a short illness.

The current head of the world body, Antonio Gutteres, attended the funeral in Accra. Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa was also present including other African heads of state such as Alassane Dramane Ouattara of Ivory Coast, George Weah of Liberia, Hage Geingob of Namibia, and Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger.

Ghanaians from all walks of life have been filing past and paying their last respect to the global icon whose body was laid in state since Tuesday after it arrived from Switzerland on Monday.

In his tribute, the Secretary-General of the UN, António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres said: “Kofi Annan was the United Nations and the United Nations was Kofi Annan.”

According to Guterres, the late former Secretary-General of the UN, who died on August 18, 2018, in Switzerland after a short illness was “an exceptional global leader” and also “someone virtually anyone in the world could see themselves in. Those on the far reaches of poverty, conflict and despair always found in him an ally.”

Guterres continued: “Kofi Annan was courageous, speaking truth to power whilst subjecting himself to intense self-scrutiny.” Kofi Annan, he said, had an enormous mystical sense of the United Nations as a “force for good in the world of ills.”