The Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) will on Saturday at its 59th convocation ceremony in Kaduna confer honorary Doctorate Degrees on three Citizens of Africa, including Nigeria’s President of the Senate , Senator David Mark who is an aluminus of the prestigious military institution, president of Liberia Mrs. Ellen Sirleaf Johnson and former Commonwealth Secretary General Chief Emeka Anyaoku.
Commandant of the NDA, Major General Emeka Onwuamaegbu said the awards are in appreciation and recognition of the awardees immense contributions to the development of the society and human resources.
Senator Mark belonged to the 3rd regular course of the NDA. He graduated from the NDA in 1970. Before enrolling into the NDA , he attended the famous Nigerian Military School, Zaria between 1962 and 1966.
On completion of the NDA programme in 1970, Senator Mark who specialized in Telecommunication Engineering, proceeded to the School of Signals Blandford , England .
Between 1971 and 1975, he was at the College of Military Engineering, Poona as well as Military College of Telecommunication Engineering Mhow.
Senator Mark was also at the Command and Staff College Jaji between 1978 and 1979, National Defence University Washington DC 1990 to 1991 and Harvard University Harvard Boston between 1991 and 1992.At present , he holds the enviable record of being the longest serving president of the Senate in Nigeria.
He is reputed for bringing stability to the Senate and by extension the national polity.
Emeka Anyaoku.
Emeka Anyaoku, GCVO, CON (born January 18, 1933) was the third Commonwealth Secretary-General. He is a Nigerian of Igbo descent.
Born in Obosi, he attended the University College of Ibadan, then a college of the University of London, from which he obtained an honours degree in Classics.
In 1959, Emeka Anyaoku joined the Commonwealth Development Corporation.
Following
Nigeria’s independence, he joined Nigeria’s diplomatic service, and in
1963 was
posted to its Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York.
In 1966, he joined the Commonwealth Secretariat as Assistant Director of International Affairs. In 1968-69 there was a campaign by the Nigerian military government for the recall of Anyaoku; which said he was not a suitable Nigerian nominee, and they were anxious about his loyalty to the country of his birth. But Emeka had resigned from the Nigerian Foreign Service and Arnold had no difficulty in turning aside the demand.[1]
In 1977, the Commonwealth Heads of Government elected him as Deputy Secretary-General. In 1983, Nigeria’s civilian government appointed Anyaoku to become Nigeria’s Foreign Minister. After the overthrow of the government by the military later that year, he returned to his position as Deputy Secretary-General with the support of the new government in Nigeria and the endorsement of all Commonwealth governments.
At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at Kuala Lumpur in 1989, Anyaoku was elected the third Commonwealth Secretary-General. He was re-elected at the
1993
CHOGM in Limassol for a second five-year term, beginning on 1 April 1995.
President Sirleaf.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (born 29 October 1938) is the 24th and current President of Liberia. She served as Minister of Finance under President William Tolbert from 1979 until the 1980 coup d’état, after which she left Liberia and held senior positions at various financial institutions. She placed a very distant second in the
1997
presidential election won by Charles Taylor.
She won the 2005 presidential election and took office on 16 January 2006.
She
successfully ran for re-election in 2011. Sirleaf is the first elected female head of state in Africa.
Sirleaf was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakel Karman of Yemen.
The women were recognized “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”[1]
While working at Citibank, Sirleaf returned to Liberia in 1985 to run for Vice President on the ticket of the Liberian Action Party in the 1985 elections. However, Sirleaf was placed under house arrest in August of that year and soon after sentenced to ten years in prison for sedition as a consequence of a speech in which she insulted the members of the Doe regime. Following international calls for her release, Doe pardoned and released her in September. Due to government pressure, she was removed from the presidential ticket and instead ran for a Senate seat in Montserrado County.
Though the elections, which saw Doe and the National Democratic Party win the presidency and large majorities in both houses, were widely condemned as neither free nor fair, Sirleaf was declared the winner of her Senate race. Sirleaf refused to accept the seat in protest of the election fraud. After an attempted coup against the Doe government by Thomas Quiwonkpa on 12 November, Sirleaf was arrested and imprisoned again on 13 November by Doe’s forces. Despite continuing to refuse to accept her seat in the Senate, she was released in July 1986 and secretly fled the country to the United States later that year.
At the beginning of the First Liberian Civil War in 1989, Sirleaf supported Charles Taylor’s rebellion against Doe, helping to raise money for the war.
However, she
later went was opposing his ways of handling the war. By 1996, the presence of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) peacekeepers allowed for the cessation of hostilities, resulting in the 1997 general election, which Sirleaf returned to her native Liberia to contest. As the presidential candidate for the Unity Party, she placed second in a controversial election, she got 25% of the vote to Charles Taylor’s 75%. Sirleaf left the country soon after and again went into exile in Abidjan.
After the end of the Second Liberian Civil War and the establishment of a transitional government, Sirleaf was proposed as a possible candidate for chairman of the government. Ultimately, Gyude Bryant, a political neutral, was chosen as chairman, while Sirleaf served as head of the Governance Reform Commission.
Sirleaf once again stood for president as the candidate of the Unity Party in the
2005 general election. She placed second in the first round of voting behind footballer George Weah. In the subsequent run-off election, Sirleaf earned 59% of the vote versus 40% for Weah, though Weah disputed the results. The announcement of the new leader was postponed until further investigations were carried out. On 23 November 2005, Sirleaf was declared the winner of the Liberian election and confirmed as the country’s next president.[12] Her inauguration, attended by many foreign dignitaries, including United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and First Lady Laura Bush, took place on 16 January 2006.
In January 2010, Sirleaf announced that she would run for a second term in office in the 2011 presidential election while speaking to a joint session of the Legislature.[13] Opposition leaders noted that in doing so, she had broken a promise made during her 2005 campaign to only serve one term if elected.[14] Sirleaf was renominated as the Unity Party’s presidential candidate at the party’s national convention on 31 October 2010.[15] That same day, Vice President Joseph Boakai was nominated by Sirleaf and confirmed by the delegates as Sirleaf’s running mate.[15]
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Sirleaf four days prior to the election sparked criticism from opposition parties, with Congress for Democratic Change candidate Winston Tubman calling the award “undeserved” and “a political interference in our country’s politics.”[16] Sirleaf called the timing of the award a coincidence and avoided mentioning the award during the final days of campaigning.[17]
Sirleaf garnered 43.9% of the vote in the first round, more than any other candidate but short of the 50% needed to avoid a run-off. Tubman came in second with 32.7%, pitting him against Sirleaf in the second round.[18] Tubman called for a boycott of the run-off, claiming that the results of the first round had been fraudulent.
Sirleaf denied the allegations, and international observers reported that the first round election had been free, fair and transparent.
As a result of the boycott, Sirleaf won the second round with 90.7% of the vote, though voter turnout significantly declined from the first round.[21] Following the election, Sirleaf announced the creation of a “national peace and reconciliation initiative,” led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, to address the country’s divisions and begin “a national dialogue that would bring us together.”[22] She took presidential oath for her second presidency on 16 January 2012.