President Buhari's high-performing Minister of Environment, Amina Mohammed has been finally confirmed as a U.N official.
Amina Mohammed
The incoming UN secretary general, António Guterres, has announced
that Nigeria’s Environment Minister, Amina Mohammed, will be his deputy
and appointed two other women to key leadership posts.
Guterres has made achieving gender parity at the world body a priority of his tenure, which begins on January 1, 2017.
Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, a senior Brazilian foreign ministry
official, will serve as Guterres’s chief of staff, and Kyung-wha Kang of
South Korea has been appointed to the new position of special adviser
on policy.
Mohammed had been widely tipped to become UN deputy secretary
general after she led successful negotiations on the sustainable
development goals – 17 targets agreed by the United Nations to end
extreme poverty by 2030. She succeeds Jan Eliasson of Sweden.
Viotti, currently Brazil’s undersecretary for Asia and the Pacific,
has previously served as ambassador to Germany and as UN envoy. She
helped shape Brazil’s role within the Brics club of emerging economies
and has worked as director for human rights in the foreign ministry.
Kang is currently head of Guterres’s transition team and has served as deputy UN aid chief since April 2013.
Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal who led the UN
refugee agency for 10 years, won election as UN chief despite calls from
some member states for a woman to be chosen for the first time in the
organisation’s 71-year history.
He said after taking the oath of office on Monday that “gender
parity is a must” and “will become a clear priority from top to bottom
in the UN”.
Guterres will succeed Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean foreign minister, who led the UN through two five-year terms.
It’s an honour to Nigeria – PMB
President Muhammadu Buhari has welcomed the appointment of the
minister of Environment, Amina Mohammed, to join the next United Nations
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as his deputy, saying it is an
honour to Nigeria.
Speaking with the in-coming secretary- general, Mr Guterres, who
called to inform President Buhari of his decision to name Mohammed as
the deputy secretary-general earlier this evening, the President used
the opportunity to reiterate his support and congratulations to Mr
Antonio Guterres on his upcoming tenure in the service.
In a statement by his senior special assistant on media, Garba
Shehu, he endorsed the excellent selection of Amina J. Mohammed as the
next deputy secretary general of the United Nations. “By her
appointment, Nigeria has been honored,” said the President.
President Buhari thanked Mohammed for her untiring contribution to
transform Nigeria and said he looked forward to sustained collaboration
between the UN and Nigeria.
He said he had no doubt that she would continue to make Nigeria
proud at the global level. It is expected that the Mohammed will be
transitioning to her new role in March 2017.
In the meantime, it is expected that she will continue to lay
strong foundations with various important ongoing initiatives critical
to the government’s success in the Environment sector.
These include, but not limited to implementation of our Nationally
Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Climate Agreement, the
successful launch of the Sovereign Green Bonds in 2017, the ongoing
Ogoni clean-up and development of the Great Green Wall.
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