Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has booked her place in history as the first woman and an African to lead the world Trade Organization (WTO) in its 25-year history. She will also be the first American citizen to hold the organization’s top job.
It can be recalled that the South Korean opponent formally withdrew her candidacy after consultations with the Biden administration, clearing the way for Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to clinch the WTO top post after opposition from the former Trump administration.
Okonjo-Iweala, 66, who served as her country’s first female finance and foreign minister, has a 25-year career behind her as a development economist at the World Bank.
As the Director-General of WTO, 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 exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Okonjo-Iweala is aware that a big part of her job will be refereeing the trade battles between China and the west.
Most importantly, among the most significant challenges before her is undoing the deep level of mistrust between rich economies and those of the developing world.
That bad blood has given rise to protectionism — the antithesis of the WTO’s mission of “open trade for the benefit of all.
The WTO has been leaderless since September, when former Director-General Roberto Azevedo stepped down a year before his term was set to expire. Since then the WTO has been overseen by four unelected deputy directors general.
Even before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic with its devastation of the global economy, the WTO was weighed down by stalled trade talks and struggled to curb trade tensions between the United States and China.
The global trade body has also faced relentless attacks from Washington, which has crippled the WTO dispute settlement appeal system and threatened to leave the organization altogether.
The WTO has struggled to produce meaningful multilateral trade agreements, its trade monitoring function consistently underperforms and former President Donald Trump neutralized its appellate body in 2019, which effectively sidelined the organization’s role as the global arbiter of international commerce.
Though the power of the WTO leader is limited by the directives of its members, the director-general can convene meetings, and offer suggestions and strategies for addressing conflicts in the global trading system.
Okonjo-Iweala has pledged to find common ground among the trade body’s disparate membership. She hopes to score some early negotiating wins — such as a multilateral accord to curb harmful fishing subsidies — as a means to restore trust and build momentum for larger deals.
Okonjo-Iweala graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1976 and earned her doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981.
After moving to Washington, she quickly rose through the ranks at the World Bank and in 2013 was named managing director — the organization’s highest unelected position.