An African woman to revive the WTO

Every planetary cataclysm, and the coronavirus pandemic is one, usually brings with it the disappearance of old international institutions and their replacement by new ones or the enthronement of those that fill the regulatory vacuum following the emergence of parameters other than the existing ones. Such is the case of the UN, which succeeded the obsolete and incapable League of Nations, or the new ones that emerged after the Second World War, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for example.  

Of all human activities, trade is probably the most decisive in terms of a country's or region's ability to project its own influence, boost both its own prosperity and that of the countries with which it interacts, and establish beneficial cooperative ties on a multilateral basis. Countries that have successively led in trade throughout history have also led the world in many other fields, from culture to medicine, manufacturing to innovation.  

The World Trade Organisation (WTO), the body that governs trade in goods and services on a global scale, had been in a coma for a number of years. China's meteoric rise, helped in large part by Beijing's lack of respect for the WTO's multilateral rules, had dealt it a stab in the back, although it was the previous US president, Donald Trump, who gave it an almost fatal blow by preventing the necessary renewal of the organisation's dispute settlement tribunal, in fact the very raison d'être of the WTO. To ensure its demise, Trump also blocked for many months the appointment of a new director general to replace the Brazilian Azevedo, who resigned for personal reasons, among which his weariness could not be ruled out, aware of his powerlessness to prevent the foreseeable burial of the organisation.  

The new occupant of the White House, President Joe Biden, has lifted the veto on the candidate who has finally been chosen to lead trade on a global scale, Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a veteran politician and technician at the World Bank, where she spent 25 years, who also holds a US passport, and who held the Finance and Foreign Affairs portfolios of her native Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, and which all projections place as overpopulated with 750 million inhabitants by the middle of this century, almost doubling what is expected for the entire European Union, once Brexit has been consummated.  

At 66 years of age, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who never goes unnoticed for attending all official events in her colourful African dress, has precisely the challenge of resurrecting the WTO, something that will only be possible through a profound transformation of its bureaucratic structures, but, above all, by achieving a consensus that today seems almost impossible: for the United States and China to reach the essential consensus to agree on the rules of the game. It is clear that the resurgence of nationalism, starting with the most lacerating right now, which is related to the production and marketing of anti-COVID vaccines, does not make the task any easier. This explosion of nationalism is spreading to many other fields and products, especially technological ones. The great battle is being waged to set the very parameters that will govern world trade at least for this century, and interests are only shifting apart. This new conflagration is marked by the struggle between the United States and China, in which, for the time being, Europe is trying to do its utmost to ensure that a multilateral paradigm is imposed, the only proven way to prevent the law of the jungle from prevailing but rather that of the strongest.  

Okonjo-Iweala, in addition to a solid education, forged especially at Harvard University in Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for being a consensus builder and a fighter against corruption, something that earned her quite a few clashes in Nigeria and even the kidnapping, as a form of blackmail, of her own mother, who was 82 years old. Blackmail to which she did not give in and which was resolved with the lady's release in the face of enormous popular pressure, which sided wholeheartedly with the then minister.  

The new WTO director general will obviously have among her priorities, if only because of her origins, to achieve fairer rules so that the least developed countries can make the most of their production, and thus avoid the great imbalances of the past, but also of the present, where the replacement of the former colonial metropolises by other partners has not always led to greater prosperity. In any case, Africa's placement of one of its most highly educated natives may be a symptom that many things will be radically different after the pandemic, after all the great global catastrophe of the 21st century so far.