Former Nigeria’s Minister of Finance Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has been reappointed as the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Okonjo-Iweala was reappointed for a second term on Friday, November 29, 2024.

Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman and the first African to head the WTO, was the only candidate in the race and had been all but assured a second term.

The organisation’s 166 members “today agreed to give incumbent Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a second term as director-general,” the WTO said in a statement.

The 70-year-old Nigerian’s reappointment was approved by consensus during a special meeting of the organisation’s General Council, held behind closed doors, the WTO said.

Her current term ends in August 2025, and the appointment process for the next mandate had initially been scheduled to take months.

Okonjo-Iweala to seek second term as WTO Director-General

But with Okonjo-Iweala the only candidate, African countries called for the process to be speeded up, officially to facilitate preparations for the WTO’s next big ministerial conference, set to be held in Cameroon in 2026.

The unstated objective is to “accelerate the process, because they did not want United States President-elect Trump’s team to come in and veto her as they did four years ago”, a senior research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation, Keith Rockwell, said.

The common practice of appointing directors-general by consensus made it possible in 2020 for Trump to block Okonjo-Iweala’s appointment for months, forcing her to wait to take the reins until after President Joe Biden entered the White House in early 2021.

During Trump’s first term, the WTO faced relentless attacks from his administration, which crippled the organisation’s dispute settlement appeal system, and also threatened to pull the United States out of the organisation altogether.

Trump has already signalled he is preparing to launch all-out trade wars, threatening to unleash a flurry of tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico on his first day in office on January 20, 2025.

The Star