Hon. Teburoro Tito

Republic of Kiribati

Hon. Teburoro Tito is currently the Kiribati Ambassador to the United Nations, the United States, and also the Kiribati Ambassador Designate to Mexico and Canada.

Prior to his appointment to the diplomatic service of his country, Mr. Tito had represented and served the people of his urban electorate of South Tarawa (home of about 30% of the Kiribati population) for 30 years from 1987 to 2017 as a member of parliament, as the Leader of the Opposition and a member of the Public Accounts Committee for 4 years (1987-1991) and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association(CPA) representing Pacific island parliamentarians affiliated to the CPA for 3 years (1987 -1990), the Deputy Leader of the Opposition (1991 -1994), and as the President of Kiribati (1994-2003). During his tenure as president he arranged for Kiribati’s membership of the United Nations and represented Kiribati at the annual UN General Assembly Summits from 1999 to 2002 including the Millennium Summit of 2000 and portrayed his country as a democratically governed nation providing reasonably good care of its people who generally enjoy a basically satisfactory and meaningful and peaceful way of life based on strong community, family blended with dominant Christian values, all working together caring and sharing for one another to the extent that Kiribati has the capacity to contain and resolve its own internally caused problems and to contribute to global efforts for the enhancement of human peace health and prosperity and in the fight against root causes of hunger, poverty, violence, conflicts, terrorism and climate change.

It was also during the first term of his presidency that the international date line (IDL) was shifted to place the whole nation on one side of the IDL which was done in his consultation with the United Nations , thus solving the long historical problem of losing two working days every week between the eastern and western parts of Kiribati. That led five years later to the declaration of the Association of Press and Television News (APTN), a body organizing the around the world welcome celebration of the year 2000, that Kiribati’s most easterly island of Millennium Island (formerly Caroline island) was the first spot on the planet to enter the new millennium and where the live celebration of the millennium would begin. So it was on Millennium Island that the welcome ceremony for the historic first January 2000 was inaugurate with a message by President Tito on behalf of humanity followed by his self composed millennium song that he sang together with the Kiribati millennium dancers in which he called on all leaders and peoples of the world to work together to build a better world by rebuilding and reviving social, cultural, family and human values over and above economic and dollar values. This leading role of Kiribati was later acknowledged by the UN Secretary, H.E. Kofi Annan, in the document that was published to guide and inform the deliberations of the United Nations Millennium Summit that resulted in the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals. Due to his leading role in the millennium celebration, President Tito was presented with the award of Honorary Doctorate of World Peace by the Maharishi University of World Peace in Holland on 15th May, 2001.