Nigerian economist appointed as the first African head of the “World Trade Organization”

Three months later the Trump administration refused her, ex-Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala earned popular support to become the first woman and first African director-general of the World Trade Organization. A self-declared “doer” with a track history of bringing on apparently obstinate difficulties, Okonjo-Iweala will have her task cut out for her at the business body, even with Donald Trump, who had frightened to draw the United States out of the organization, no longer in the White House.

As director-general, a status that works limited formal power, Okonjo-Iweala, 66, will require to broker international trade conversations in the appearance of a persistent US-China conflict; react to pressure to mend trade controls, and counter protectionism increased by the COVID-19 pandemic. In her reception address at the WTO, she stated that getting a business deal at the following important ministerial conference would be a “top priority” and also asked members to deny vaccine nationalism, according to a representative attending the closed-door meeting.

In the related conversation, she explained the hurdles confronting the body as “numerous and tricky but not insurmountable”.A 25-year veteran of the World Bank, where she managed an $81 billion portfolio, Okonjo-Iweala ran into seven other candidates by adopting a faith in trade’s capacity to raise people out of hardship. She considered development economics at Harvard after enduring the civil war in Nigeria as a teenager. She reverted to the nation in 2003 to work as finance minister and backers point to her hard-nosed bargaining skills that eased seal a contract to eliminate billions of dollars of Nigerian debt with the Paris Club of creditor countries 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 told Reuters. “I think she’s a good choice.”Key to her success will be her ability to operate in the center of a “US-EU-China triangle”, he said. The approval of the Biden administration removed the last barrier to her appointment.

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Okonjo-Iweala who is a distinctive representative for the World Health Organization on COVID-19 and, until the late chair of the board of global vaccine alliance Gavi, told Reuters that trade’s present to public health would be a preference. The WTO currently views a deadlock over the effect of ignoring intellectual property rights for COVID-19 medications, with many wealthy nations.