Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, has appointed Dr. Abdel-Fatau Musah, a renowned Ghanaian pro-democracy activist and peace and security analyst and practitioner, as the Director of Africa II in the Department of Political Affairs at the UN Headquarters.
He will be responsible for coordinating UN policy and conflict management strategies in West, Central and North Africa, and backstopping the operations of the UN Special Political Missions in the region.
Until his appointment, Dr. Musah was the Deputy Head of Office and Director of Political Affairs at the United Nations Office to the African Union (UNOAU), where he led the political pillar of UN’s strategic partnership with the African Union and the Regional Economic Communities on peace and security and supported mediation and good offices work in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Before joining the UN in 2014, Dr. Musah served respectively as the Senior Conflict Prevention Adviser to DANIDA and ECOWAS on West Africa (2005-2009) and as ECOWAS Director of Political Affairs (2009-2014). In those roles, he worked closely with the ECOWAS organs responsible for peace and security in West Africa. He coordinated the Commission’s electoral and security assessment missions and played the lead role in formulating and backstopping political responses to recent crises, including in Guinea, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Mali, and Guinea Bissau. He facilitated the establishment of the ECOWAS Electoral Assistance and Mediation Facilitation Divisions, and coordinated the after-action reviews of ECOWAS interventions in the Mano River Union (1989-94) and the multidimensional crises in Mali (2012-2014). He is the architect of the ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework (ECPF), the Community’s strategic document for operational and structural conflict prevention.
He has written extensively on the democratization processes and broader peace and security issues in Africa and is well known for works including Mercenaries – An African Security Dilemma (Pluto Press, 2000}; Over a Barrel: Light Weapons and Human Rights in the Commonwealth (CHRI, 1999);Small Arms: A Time Bomb under West Africa’s Democratization Process (The Brown Journal, 2002);Privatization of Security, Arms Proliferation and the process of State Collapse in Africa (Blackwell, Oxford, 2003) among others.
A product of Tamale Secondary School, Dr. Musah obtained his Bachelors Degree at the University of Ghana in 1984 and served as Greater Accra Regional Coordinator of the erstwhile NYOC (2004-2005) before proceeding to the prestigious Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he obtained his Masters Degree (Mass Communication) in 1987 and a Doctorate Degree in International Historical Relations in 1992.
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