Olikoye Ransome-Kuti was a paediatrician, activist, and health minister of Nigeria.
Background
Olikoye Ransome-Kuti was born in Ijebu Ode on 30 December 1927, in present-day Ogun State, Nigeria. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a prominent political campaigner and women"s rights activist, and his father, Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, a Protestant minister and school principal, was the first president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers.
Education
Ransome-Kuti attended Abeokuta Grammar School, University of Ibadan and Trinity College Dublin (1948-1954).
Career
He was a house physician at General Hospital, Lagos. He was senior lecturer at the University of Lagos from 1967-1970 and appointed Director of child health at the College of Medicine, University of Lagos and became Head of Department of Paediatrics from 1968-1976. He was Professor of Paediatrics at the College of Medicine, University of Lagos until his retirement in 1988.
He worked as senior house officer at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, and as a locum in Hammersmith Hospital in the 1960s.
In the 1980s, he joined the government of General Ibrahim Babangida as the health minister. In 1986, he conveyed word of Nigeria"s first Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome case, a 14-year-old girl who had been diagnosed with Human Immunodeficiency Virus. He was minister until 1992, when he joined the World Health Organisation as its Deputy Director-General.
He held various teaching positions, including a visiting professorship at Baltimore"s Johns Hopkins University"s school of hygiene and public health. He wrote extensively for medical journals and publications.
Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti died on 1 June 2003.