AFP, Geneva :
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.
