The Commonwealth has a new Secretary General, the first from Africa since Nigerian Chief Emeka Anyaoku left the role in 2000.
Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, the 61-year-old foreign minister of Ghana beat her Gambian counterpart Mamadou Tangara and Lesotho senator Joshua Setipa to the prestigious position.
Twenty four years since Anyaoku had the honour, it was Africa’s turn to once again produce the next secretary general of the Commonwealth, according to the rotational rooster of its secretariat.
The Commonwealth’s 56 members voted for her to replace outgoing secretary general Patricia Scotland at the ongoing Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa between 21-27 October, 2024.
As the winner she would bask in the honour and prestige reserved for leading a body which has grown from a moribund club of former British colonies into a bloc which in recent years brought into its fold other nations without any shared colonial heritage with Britain.
Mozambique, Rwanda, Togo and Gabon all of them in Africa are recent additions to its membership in a global geography which spans 29,958,050 square kilometres and contains over 2 billion people.
She was university-trained in Ghana and the United Kingdom.
The Ghanaian government thanks to its far superior diplomatic leverage over anything small Gambia and Lesotho could muster clearly handed Botchwey an advantage.
Of the three, no other candidate has a more personal relation with the Commonwealth than Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, the face of Ghanaian diplomacy for the last seven years. During her campaign for election she spoke oF a personal affinity with the organisation, being the beneficiary of a scholarship programme which had strengthened her understanding of human resource development ”as a vital condition for building resilience”.
This she said informs her hope to lead with a fierce conviction which would leave a profound legacy in the form of educational exchanges, uniting peoples and breaking new grounds in the socio-economic development of member countries still on the lower rungs of the development scale.
Botchwey was the only woman in the race to win the leadership of the Commonwealth.
Many of her compatriots conjure up images of her as something of an iron lady, being not one to flinch from making tough decisions as long as the end renders them justifiable. Ghanaians got more than a hint of this when last year she demonstrated her knack for toughness by sacking a coterie of officers at the Accra passport office incriminated in corruption. It is this hard exterior that her backers expect will burnish throughout her stint as head of the Commonwealth. They reason that if the Commonwealth begs for strong leadership, it is inconceivable to look beyond her.
A single mother of two, Ms Botchwey brings a touch of feminine energy into the fray given her experience as a member of the Gender and Children Committees of the Ghanaian parliament.
Widely respected in some circles for being instrumental in shaping policies on gender and children which culminated in protective legislation, Botchwey will take this activism to the power circles of the Commonwealth where such issues have been gaining traction under the stewardship of past secretaries-general since the turn of the century beginning with the New Zealander Sir Don McKinnon (2000-2008).
Many within Commonwealth circles say Botchwey shares King Charles’s concern for climate change, a phenomenon which continues to haunt her continent despite being the least emitter of greenhouse gas.
She had also made her position on reparations over the trans Atlantic slave trade the inclusion of it into the agenda of CHOGM 2024 had divided opinion between members such as a group of Caribbean states and Africa on the one hand and Britain on the other.
The UK which had been a notable participant in the trading in enslaved Africans for 300 years has been reluctant to accept the issue as part of the themes of the summit and blocked moves to add it in the communique.
Botchwey’s immediate task would be to address this gulf between those demanding conversation about reparations over the slave trade and those resisting this growing call for inclusion.
Many of her compatriots conjure up a no-nonsense image of her as something of an iron lady, being not one to flinch from making tough decisions as long as the end renders them justifiable.
The Accra-born former member of parliament for Anyaa-Sowutuom was deputy foreign affairs minister and state minister at the Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing under the government of former president John Kufuor.
She is a card-carrying member of Ghana’s ruling New Patriotic Party.
Although Africa may be the only winner in all this irrespective of the outcome, Botchwey’s diplomatic chess games with her two male rivals already puts the weight of expecation back on the continent which has come a long way from the 1990s to the early 2000s when one of its illustrious citizens bossed the Commonwealth.
WN/as/APA