Former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala received unanimous backing on Monday to become the first woman and first African director-general of the World Trade Organization.
As director-general, a position that wields limited formal power, Okonjo-Iweala, 66, will need to broker international trade talks in the face of persistent U.S.-China conflict; respond to pressure to reform trade rules; and counter protectionism heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In her acceptance speech at the WTO, she said that getting a trade deal at the next major ministerial meeting would be a “top priority” and also urged members to reject vaccine nationalism, according to a delegate attending the closed-door meeting.
In the same speech, she described the challenges facing the body as “numerous and tricky but not insurmountable”.
A 25-year veteran of the World Bank, where she oversaw an $81 billion portfolio, Okonjo-Iweala ran against seven other candidates by espousing a belief in trade’s ability to lift people out of poverty.
She studied development economics at Harvard after experiencing civil war in Nigeria as a teenager. She returned to the country in 2003 to serve as finance minister and backers point to her hard-nose negotiating skills that helped seal a deal to cancel billions of dollars of Nigerian debt with the Paris Club of creditor nations in 2005.
“She brings stature, she brings experience, a network and a temperament of trying to get things done, which is quite a welcome lot in my view,” former WTO chief Pascal Lamy said. “I think she’s a good choice.”
Key to her success will be her ability to operate in the centre of a “U.S.-EU-China triangle”, he said.
The endorsement of the Biden administration cleared the last obstacle to her appointment.
Okonjo-Iweala becomes one of the few female heads of a major multilateral body. She is expected to join the WTO’s Geneva lakeside headquarters within weeks.
Raised by academics, the mother-of-four earned a reputation for hard work and modesty.
Okonjo-Iweala who is a special envoy for the World Health Organization on COVID-19 and, until recently chair of the board of global vaccine alliance Gavi, has said that trade’s contribution to public health would be a priority.
The WTO currently faces deadlock over an issue of waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 drugs, with many wealthy countries opposed.
High on the to-do list will also be fisheries subsidies, the subject of the WTO’s main multilateral talks that missed a deadline to conclude by end-2020.
Asked about the challenges ahead, she joked that a book she wrote about fixing Nigeria’s broken institutions could well apply to today’s WTO: ‘Reforming the Unreformable’.
“I feel I can solve the problems. I’m a known reformer, not someone who talks about it,” she said. “I’ve actually done it”.
Ime N
