Viola Onwuliri

Life

Onwuliri was born in Mbaise in Imo state in 1956. She attended Owerri Girls' Secondary School before the University of Nigeria in Nsukkawhere she achieved a 2:1 in Biochemistry. She also attended the University of Jos where she achieved a PGCE, an MSc and a PhD. She then went for certificate courses at Howard University and Harvard School of Public Health in the USA.

Onwuliri returned to Nigeria where she took a job as a graduate assistant in 1981 and worked her way up to a professorship in Biochemistry in 2004 at the University of Jos. She has over 53 publications and she was at Jos until 2006.

In 2011 she was a candidate to be a deputy governor of Imo state, but she became a junior minister and she made the news when she called for Libya's ruler, Moammar Gadhafi, to resign as the Libyan rebel council best represented the Libyan people. The same month, as the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, she visited the scene of the Abuja United Nations bombing which killed over 20 people. She was quoted saying: "This is not an attack on Nigeria but on the global community. An attack on the world." Another disaster was the Dana Air Flight 992 plane crash in June 2012 that killed her husband Celestine Onwuliri and over 150 others. He had been the Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology.

In 2013 she was one of the delegates chosen by the President to attend the Papal inauguration of Pope Francis together with David Mark, President of the Senate and Stella Oduah-Ogiemwonyi, Minister of Aviation. Onwiliri is a Catholic and in 2014 she was presented with an award by the Diocesan President of the Catholic Women's Organisation in recognition of her role as a "pillar of the CWO".

President Goodluck Jonathan moved her from the Foreign Office to be the Minister of State for Education in October 2014 when Ezenwo Nyesom Wike resigned.