World Trade Organization chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was reappointed Friday for a second term, in the shadow of the coming return of Donald Trump and his disdain for international trade rules.
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.
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 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.
The overwhelming support for Okonjo-Iweala’s second term came “not so much (because) everyone loves Ngozi”, a source close to the discussions told AFP.
Rather, members were “worried that if she doesn’t get reinstated, then it’s possible that the administration in Washington would slow things (or) block other contenders”, leaving a void at the top, the source said.
“The alternative of no-one leading the organisation is unacceptable to them.”
Rockwell, a former WTO spokesman, told AFP that speeding up Okonjo-Iweala’s reappointment “creates tensions in the relationship with the United States, for sure — tensions which would probably have been there under any circumstances, but now this raises the stakes”.
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.
And 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.
“The festival of tariffs announced to date shows that he has no intention of following any rules,” said Elvire Fabry, a researcher at the Institute Jacques Delors think-tank.
“The United States would not even need to withdraw from the WTO,” she told AFP. “They are freeing themselves from the WTO rules”.
In this context, the WTO chief will have “a firefighter role”, she said.
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