A Promising Change

As first female and African head of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is enjoined to advance the prospects of common development

- Charles Onunaiju

The World Trade Organization (WTO), the rule-making body for the global trading system that started life on January 1, 1995, has just had its glass ceiling shattered, with the first woman climbing to the apex of its structure. To add to the significance of the first, the woman in question, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s former two-time finance minister and foreign minister, is the first African appointed to the position. Though she has recently acquired American citizenship, having studied, worked, and lived in the U.S. for nearly four decades, she is strongly rooted in Africa where she was born 66 years ago and had her early education.

Respected economist

First appointed as Nigeria’s minister of finance in the late 1990s, Okonjo-Iweala oversaw the negotiations with the Paris club that culminated in the elimination of $30 billion of Nigeria debt, after paying a whopping $12 billion at once to the creditors.

She had argued that paying the debt would free the country of the burden of interest payments, which, according to her, would free funds for addressing the country’s huge infrastructure deficit. Critics of the massive capital flight which she engineered with the $12 billion payment insist that after the debt repayment and cancellation, there was nothing of substance that happened in the improvement of the country’s infrastructure.