Name: Kofi Anan
Age: 67
Nationality: Ghanaian
Claim to fame: Guilty or just a case of another witch-hunt by Uncle Sam?

Everyone of any consequence takes advantage of their positions at one time or the other. And as long as they are on the right side of the forces that matter, nobody bothers about it. But once the winds change, so do their fortunes and the skeletons start peeking out from the cupboards.

Kofi Annan, the acclaimed moral leader and UN Secretary-General, has been having a tough time facing allegations of corruption. He has been accused of approving the UN’s grant of a multimillion-dollar contract to Coteena, a company that employed his son, Kojo, who got kickbacks for it. An independent panel investigating possible corruption in the UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq, for which Coteena was hired between 1989 and 2003, has recently delivered a mixed verdict on the Secretary General Kofi Annan.

On the most critical issue, Kofi Annan has been exonerated of personal corruption in the awarding of the contract as it found that the contract was awarded by officials who had no idea the son even worked for the company. But the panel faulted Mr Annan for failing to begin a serious investigation six years ago when his son’s involvement became known. For this lapse, the United Nations is now paying the price as critics accuse it of conflicts of interest and corruption in high places. On his side, Kojo Annan defends his father and has called the whole attack on his affairs as “a witch-hunt from day one as part of a broader Republican political agenda”.

The whole scandal has overshadowed Annan’s past achievements — his settlement of the East Timor crisis, his resolving of US’ financial arrears issue, his 2000 Millennium Report, his willingness to undertake probes of the Serbrenica and Rawanda massacres where his own role was faulted, his proposal of major UN reforms, his winning of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

Although the Cotecna contract was a small slice of the oil-for-food programme, the link to the secretary general has triggered calls for Kofi Annan’s resignation from critics who were displeased by his opposition to President Bush’s war with Iraq.

Until now, Annan’s opponents have had difficulty directly attacking the reputation of this Nobel Peace Prize-winner. It really doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that Mr Annan is being basically taken to task by the right-wing Republicans in the US Congress who blame him for the Security Council’s failure to back the American invasion of Iraq — even though it was France and Russia that really thwarted the Council’s assent on the grounds that there was no real threat from Baghdad. By tarnishing Mr Annan’s reputation, if not ousting him from office, they are sending a clear message to the rest of the UN community that Washington exercises ultimate control over the world body and anyone who doesn’t follow their line will be made to pay for it.