Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, head of Unesco who presided over an era of financial and political scandal

Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, who has died aged 103, was a former Senegalese education minister who from 1974 to 1987 was a highly controversial director-general of Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Under his stewardship, Unesco acquired a reputation for extravagance, mismanagement and anti-Western bias which eventually led Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to pull their countries out.

According to the New York Times’s Flora Lewis, the agency became “a totally politicised, demoralised bureaucracy whose chief concern is to provide cushy jobs for politicians unwanted at home, and a forum for attacking the very concepts Unesco was supposed to serve: human rights, press freedom, unrestricted access to culture”.

She described the immaculately tailored M’Bow as “an ambitious man who has cultivated back-scratching to a fine art”. Members of his staff were less charitable, accusing him of paranoia, vanity, cupidity and intolerance. Envoys to Unesco complained of M’Bow’s short fuse, one departing Mexican accusing him of “bureaucratic terrorism”.

M’Bow – and his supporters in the Soviet bloc and the global South – saw Unesco’s primary function as “intellectual collaboration” on totemic political issues such as “peace”, Israel or South Africa, rather than its founding menu of scientific co-operation, literacy programmes and cultural preservation and exchanges.

His response to his critics was to accuse them of colonialist attitudes, if not outright racism. M’Bow provoked America’s representative at Unesco, Jean Gerard, into walking out by accusing her of treating him “like an American black who has no rights”.

Crucially, M’Bow – the first sub-Saharan African to head a major global organisation – championed a “New World Information and Communications Order”, which Western nations saw as an attack on the freedom of the press. This was proposed by a Commission over the Problems of Communication, set up by M’Bow and chaired by the the Irish Nobel Peace Prize-winner Sean MacBride.

The MacBride report, Many Voices, One World, published in 1980, advocated, reasonably, giving developing countries greater access to media technology so as to offset concentrations of press power and ownership, and make their peoples better informed. But it went on to propose the licensing of journalists, and requiring the media to let governments rebut stories they considered unfair.

Media organisations throughout the non-Communist world accused MacBride and M’Bow of advocating censorship. Cushrow Irani, chairman of the International Press Institute and publisher of The Statesman in India, said licensing journalists would “transform the press into an instrument of governments”. The proposal was deleted from Unesco’s programme in 1983.

In parallel with the “new information order”, M’Bow engaged 28 academics, mainly from the developing world, to produce a revised edition of Unesco’s History of Mankind, Scientific and Cultural Development to take into account the “new perspective” of African countries’ independence.

M’Bow himself declared that “Marxism plays an essential role in the defence of human rights and the right of people to decide for themselves.” Unesco under his leadership became a cover for Soviet espionage: three staff members expelled by France for spying in 1983 kept their salaries, and one had his contract extended.

Organisationally, M’Bow centralised operations at Unesco’s Paris headquarters, spending 80 per cent of its budget there while staff numbers in the field declined. The US General Accounting Office concluded in a damning 177-page report that M’Bow made “all substantive and most routine decisions”. Western states complained that while they contributed the bulk of Unesco’s budget, they were regularly outvoted.

M’Bow’s critics accused him of fostering nepotism and financial irregularities. The GAO noted that a conference in Latin America budgeted at $54,000 had actually cost $600,000. M’Bow – saying he feared for his life – had the top two floors of Unesco’s Paris headquarters remodelled into a rent-free penthouse for his family, necessitating the eviction of the Unesco Staff Association and keeping the entire building heated 24 hours a day.

By his second term as director-general, M’Bow had six official cars and an entourage larger than that of the UN secretary-general. Although Unesco rules forbade the acceptance of such honours, by 1984 he had been awarded the freedom of 11 cities, decorations from 35 governments, 42 honorary degrees and three professorships. Meanwhile, a survey showed that only 4 per cent of staff thought that Unesco recruited on the basis of competence.

The Reagan administration demanded major reforms in the hope that Unesco would “sober up”, but to no avail. In 1983, President Reagan announced a “thorough review” of America’s continued participation in Unesco, and the next year Washington withdrew. The final straw had been M’Bow’s use of funds he administered himself to award scholarships and travel grants to favoured candidates.

The UK – despite a rearguard action by the permanent secretary at the Department of Education – pulled out in 1985. Singapore also left. M’Bow warned Britain that Unesco would charge it for retaining “observer status”, and commissioned a book from a radical media analysis group in New York blaming an alleged disinformation campaign for British and American withdrawal.

M’Bow’s defenders insisted, however, that his leadership of Unesco gave an important voice to developing nations; that activities such as its “Man and the Biosphere” programme were valuable; and that the growth in Unesco’s membership from 135 nations to 158 (as more former colonies gained their independence) vindicated his approach.

Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow was born into a poor Muslim family on March 20 1921, the son of Fara N’Diaye M’Bow and N’Goné Casset. Growing up in the town of Luga, he learnt traditional farming and animal tending skills.

When war broke out, he volunteered for the French Army, then after the surrender of 1940 joined the Free French in North Africa; he ended the war in the French air force.

In 1947 M’Bow passed the Baccalauréat and enrolled at the Sorbonne to read geography.

Graduating in 1951, he taught in Mauritania, then in 1953 he first worked for Unesco, on a pioneering literacy programme.

He went home in 1955 to head Senegal’s community education service, then in 1957 became Minister of Education and Culture in the French colony’s first indigenous government. M’Bow wanted immediate and complete independence, clashing with Senegal’s future president Léopold Senghor, who favoured continued affiliation with France.

Out of government, M’Bow taught in the northern port city of Saint-Louis for six years, then in 1964 returned to a senior teaching position in Dakar. In 1965 he chaired a commission of experts on the reform of history and geography teaching in Francophone Africa.

He was reappointed Minister of Education in 1966 (and from 1968 Minister for Culture, Youth and Sport). He joined Unesco’s executive board and led Senegal’s mission to the organisation, then in 1970 he became Unesco’s assistant director-general for education.

Four years later, at 53, M’Bow succeeded René Maheu as the organisation’s director-general. Having led mainly by consensus in his first seven-year term – in 1977 launching a £32 million appeal to save the ancient monuments of the Acropolis – he was unanimously re-elected in September 1980. Then the excesses began.

In February 1986, 26 member governments announced that they would oppose M’Bow being given a third term. That October, he told Unesco’s executive board he would not run again, saying: “It is necessary, whatever the cost, to get Unesco out of the hurricane zone while remaining faithful to its democratic principles.”

He launched a vigorous campaign for a third term even so, with the backing of Zambia’s president Kenneth Kaunda. When Unesco’s 50-member executive board convened in September 1987 M’Bow got within three votes of re-election, as his rivals dropped out and France rowed in to support him. But after four deadlocked ballots he withdrew – reportedly at the urging of Soviet bloc delegates who feared a mass exodus, leaving them to finance Unesco’s operations if he were re-elected.

Federico Mayor, a Spanish biochemist and former Minister of Education, was chosen to succeed him. Even then, 20 executive members – mostly from African and Arab countries – refused to ratify the decision. M’Bow retired to Senegal, and from 2008 was president of the country’s Assises Nationales.

Britain rejoined Unesco in 1997, and the United States in 2003.

Amadou M’Bow married Raymonde Sylvain, from Haiti, in 1951; they had a son and two daughters.

Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, born March 20 1921, died September 24 2024