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. United Nations In July 1963, at age 30, he was posted to Nigeria's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. His first child, Adiba, was born in the New York Lying-In Hospital on 20 November 1963, two days before President John F. Kennedy of the United States was assassinated. A few weeks previously, Nigeria had become a Republic, with Nnamdi Azikiwe as the first President. At his duty post at the United Nations, Anyaoku as Nigeria's alternative representative in the United Nations special committee on Apartheid drafted the resolution – presented to the General Assembly by Nigeria in 1965 – that established a trust fund to enable governments to contribute to the defense of political detainees in South Africa. He got embroiled in the crisis triggered by the Ian Smith administration in the then Southern Rhodesia in Southern Africa, who announced Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain. Anyaoku spoke at various forums to condemn this development. It was during one of these occasions that the news of Nigeria's first military coup d'état of 15 January 1966 reached him. The Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the powerful Premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello, and a number of other leaders of the post-independence state were assassinated during the coup d'état. The coup d'état had taken place just one day after the Prime Minister hosted other Commonwealth leaders including the new Secretary-General, Arnold Smith, to a meeting in Lagos where they discussed the issue of Rhodesia. Commonwealth years In July 1965 the decision by Commonwealth Heads of Government to set up a Commonwealth Secretariat was implemented with the appointment of a very distinguished Canadian diplomat, Arnold Smith as the first Commonwealth Secretary-General. The Secretary-General was in the process of assembling a multi-national, multi-cultural team at the core of the new Secretariat. On his visit to Nigeria in November 1965, Smith had met and told the Prime Minister, Sir Tafawa Balewa in the presence of the then Nigerian's Foreign Minister and the Permanent Secretary, that he was looking for a young Nigerian foreign service officer who would "help him to make nonsense of racist myths." After Smith left, the Prime Minister asked the Foreign Ministry to give him three names that would