Nigeria’s Iron Lady will have to call on her steely resolve

Nigeria’s former finance minister, 66 year-old Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, becomes director-general of the Genevabased World Trade Organization (WTO) on March 1. She is the first woman and the first African to serve in the post.

Widely known as “the Iron Lady” for her tough anticorruption crusading, OkonjoIweala is a competent, courageous and intelligent Harvardtrained development economist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). She spent 25 years at the World Bank, rising to vice-president, and revels in her celebrity status as a widely networked “Davos Dame”.

The WTO was created in 1995 as the world’s main forum for multilateral trade. It has a 623-strong secretariat with a $217m annual budget. The organisation has attracted many critics who say it has become dysfunctional, having failed to conclude any global tradeliberalising deals since the collapse of the 2001 Doha round. The WTO secretariat’s Western-dominated policy intellectuals also still reflect the neoliberal ideology of the Bretton Woods institutions from which Okonjo-Iweala herself emerged.

Xavier Carim, SA’s former ambassador to the WTO, demonstrated in a 2019 paper how the organisation has used the expansion of global markets and protecting intellectual property to greatly enrich large corporations and global finance, while restricting development space for poorer countries.

He further argued that rich countries have buried the Doha developmental agenda in favour of their own more parochial interests. Many developing countries view WTO trade accords as unbalanced and detrimental to their interests, while Northern industrial policies have constrained the South’s industrialisation efforts. As antiglobalisation protesters have consistently argued, these “Lords of Poverty” have helped ensure greater unemployment and inequality globally.

Okonjo-Iweala has outlined the following priorities:

● The production of cheap generic Covid vaccines while the pandemic has reduced global trade flows by 9.2%.

● Accelerating global economic recovery.

● Championing new deals on fisheries and e-commerce.

● Reviving the WTO dispute settlement mechanism.

The Trump administration neutered the organisation’s appellate body for arbitrating trade disputes and employed bogus national security arguments to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. Though President Joe Biden will be more multilateralist, anti-China trade sentiment has become bipartisan in Washington as Beijing continues to restrict exports and subsidise stateowned enterprises. SinoAmerican tensions are thus likely to continue, though Okonjo-Iweala is keen to halt the pernicious “beggar-thy-neighbour” trade policies that have contributed to past armed conflicts.

She will, however, quickly learn that when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. Okonjo-Iweala is deeply aware that developing countries have lost hope in the WTO’s ability to deliver on their development agenda. She will thus have to walk a tightrope between rich mercantilist nations and the majority of members belonging to the Southern “trade union of the poor”.

With much less power than the UN secretary-general, Okonjo-Iweala will be more a “secretary” than a “general”. She has no authority to make governments take any actions they do not wish to. She cannot arbitrate trade disputes. She is a servant rather than a master of the 164 member states.

Her main tools are advocacy, cajoling, convincing and building alliances to get members to act. The widespread support for her candidacy should provide some political capital from which to draw.

Okonjo-Iweala has portrayed herself as a reformist new broom ready to sweep away the cobwebs of dead wood and bureaucratic inertia to establish a new organisation that is fit-for-purpose in the 21st century.

However, Nigeria’s supremely self-confident Iron Lady will soon discover from her scenic office on Lake Geneva that she has no magic wand with which to cast a spell on member states.

Adebajo is a professor and director of the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for pan-African Thought and Conversation.