President Buhari has nominated Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala for the position of director-general of the World Trade Organisation(WTO). According to the letter seen by the Cable, The Federal Government of Nigeria withdrew the candidacy of Yonov Frederick Agah, Nigeria’s permanent representative to the world Trade Organisation to be replaced by the ex-coordinating minister.
The election is scheduled to hold in Geneva, Switzerland in 2021 for a four-year term that would run from 2021 to 2025 after Roberto Azevedo, former director-general of the organisation stepped down a year to the end of his second term, in the wake of the global financial crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Okonjo-Iweala is the current chairman of Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), a public-private global health partnership with the goal of increasing access to immunisation in poor countries. She also sits on the board of Twitter and was a former managing director (operations) at the World Bank.
In 2012, she contested to become the World Bank president becoming the first female black candidate. She was listed among one of the top 100 most powerful women in the world by Forbes for four consecutive times from 2011 to 2014. She has been listed as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine in 2014.