The World Trade Organisation (WTO), On Friday announced that Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has been re-appointed to serve her second term as the Director-General of the global trade institution.
An earlier report had confirmed that Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman and the first African to head the WTO, was the sole candidate for the position.
According to the organisation, Okonjo-Iweala’s reappointment was approved by consensus during a special meeting of the organisation’s General Council, held behind closed doors.
It added that the 70-year-old Nigeria’s former finance minister, had affirmed her willingness to serve a second four-year term on September 16.
Her current term ends in August 2025, and the appointment process for the next mandate had initially been scheduled to take months.
But with Okonjo-Iweala as 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 Trump’s team to come in and veto her as they did four years ago”, said Keith Rockwell, a senior research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation.
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
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