November 29, 2024
The 166 members of the World Trade Organization, WTO, on Friday, agreed to give incumbent Director -general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a second term in office.
Okonjo-Iweala, is the first woman and the first African to head the WTO and was the only candidate in the race.
According to a statement, Her reappointment was approved by consensus during a special meeting of the organisation’s General Council, held behind closed doors.
Her current term will end in August 2025, and the appointment process for the next term had initially been scheduled to take months.
However, Okonjo-Iweala being 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.
READ MORE; Okonjo-Iweala Seeks Second Term At WTO
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.
