After months of discussion and selection processes, the appointment of a new director general would be unusual due to the Kovid-19 epidemic, which has shaken confidence in the liberalization of DNA of world trade, the WTO.
Okonzo-Iweala, whom some Drs. Nozi had called, the only candidate still in the race thanks to a broad consensus and support from the African Union and the European Union and the United States would not be present on the shores of WTO headquarters. Neither Lakeman Lake representatives in Geneva, who would have to debate their choice by videoconferencing. He will address the press virtually.
According to a statement released on Friday (12), the special session will begin at 2 pm GMT (11 pm GMT).
In late October, former US President Donald Trump’s government, which Tried every possible way to weaken the organization in four years, Even blocking the consensus that was outlined around the 66-year-old Nigerian.
After several months of paralysis, the Biden administration lifted the main hurdle for the nomination of Negji Okonzo Iwela as WTO Chairman on 5 February, providing “his continued support” for the Nigerian candidacy.
Hours earlier, the only other candidate still in the race, South Korean Trade Minister Yu Myung Hee, announced her RAfter consulting the United States Joe, under the Trump administration, was its chief advocate.
For two months, Okonzo-Iwela, the finance minister of Nigeria and head of Nigeria’s Department of Foreign Affairs, began his career at the World Bank in 1982, where he worked for 25 years. In 2012, he failed to become the president of this financial institution and the situation fell to American-Korean Jim Yong Kim.
She was the first woman in her country to command the ministries of finance and foreign affairs.
Until some time ago, he chaired the Global Alliance for Immunization and Immunization (GAVI) and led one of the programs of the World Health Organization to fight Kovid-19.
Now, he will be in charge of an institution, which has been run by six men since its creation in 1995: three Europeans, a new enthusiast, a Thai and a Brazilian.
His academic and professional career is impressive, but Drs. Nozzi also has demerits, who criticize him for not doing much to eradicate corruption when he was finance head of the continent’s most populous country.
1 minute The Nigerian competed for a spot with the South Koreans, who dropped out of the race in early February
The Nigerian competed for a spot with the South Koreans, who dropped out of the race in early February
The names of finalists Ngoji Okonjo-Iwela and Yoo Myung-hee were announced on Thursday (8).
Running the WTO requires “more than a few,” “audacity, courage,” he told those who considered it to lack technical knowledge in an environment governed by Byzantine rules.
Courage would, in fact, be necessary to get the World Trade Organization out of its almost existential crisis.
The epidemic spread all the fractures caused by the liberalization of world trade, from excessive reliance on productive chains, excesses of industrial rehabilitation or fragility of commercial traffic.
In mid-October, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said that he wanted to define two priorities so that the World Trade Organization was inevitable. She wants to present an agreement on fisheries subsidies at the next ministerial conference, stating that the World Trade Organization can still produce multilateral advances. And it also proposes a reconstruction of the Dispute Settlement Body (WTO Tribunal), which was torpedoed by the Trump administration.
He recently called on the WTO to focus on the epidemic. Its members are divided on the advice to exempt them from anti-viral treatments and are vaccinated with intellectual property rights to make them more accessible.
Many developing countries are in favor of patent exemption. But wealthy countries believe that the current regulations under the WTO Agreement on aspects of intellectual property rights are sufficient.
