A Ugandan statesman has entered the race to become the next secretary-general of the United Nations, the latest entrant in a contest that includes six others who want to succeed Antonio Guterres at the end of this year. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.

Backed by Uganda, Olara Otunnu is traveling in New York “to meet delegations and engage in interactive dialogue” with the U.N. General Assembly and the U.N. Security Council, said Adonia Ayebare, Uganda’s permanent representative to the U.N. Otunnu had to get visa assistance, with Ugandans currently barred from entering the U.S. as part of measures to prevent the spread of Ebola.

Otunnu, 75, is a veteran of the U.N. system who has been in retirement since unsuccessfully contesting the Ugandan presidency in 2011. He was once seen as a favorite to replace the Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali as U.N. secretary-general in 1997, but was blocked by the Ugandan authorities now nominating him. Then the president of the International Peace Institute in New York, Otunnu was not on good terms with the government of President Yoweri Museveni. Ghana’s Kofi Annan won the job.

Annan named Otunnu a U.N. under-secretary-general and his special representative for children and armed conflict. Otunnu served in that role between 1997 and 2005, the year he won the Sydney Peace Prize for “his ceaseless efforts to protect children in time of war and his promotion of measures for the healing and social reintegration of children in the aftermath of conflict.”

Educated at Oxford and Harvard Law School, he was Uganda’s representative to the U.N. between 1980 and 1985, serving for a year as president of the Security Council. He also briefly served as Uganda’s foreign minister in the 1980s. He is widely respected in Uganda as an elder statesman.

“Even though the U.N. is now occupied with a number of issues across the board, the most important single mandate for the U.N. remains the issue of peace and security,” Otunnu told reporters last week. He pointed out that as president of the Security Council, he designed the system of straw balloting, which is still in use as the so-called Otunnu Formula, first deployed with the selection in 1981 of Peru’s Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.