THE Nigerian-born, American Director General of the World Trade Organisation, WTO, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, visited her old country on August 14, 2025.
A consummate politician, she told the Bola Tinubu administration what it loves to hear: that it is doing quite well. She told the suffering population what they know: that they are suffering. She then presented an ancient solution: a social safety net. This is like applying anaesthetics rather than treating a wound. For this, social media eunuchs praised her as an “expert”. She smiled at all and returned to her home.
When Okonjo-Iweala at the Presidential Villa had said: “We think that the President and his team have worked hard to stabilise the economy…So the reforms have been in the right direction”, the Presidency was quite pleased. It appeared a neutral party had given expert advice that its reforms are effective. However, for millions, these are not reforms but poverty-inducing deformities. But who else will the fly ally with but the man with open sores?
The Tinubu ‘reforms’ are the same Okonjo Iweala carried when she was Finance Minister and Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy under the Obasanjo and Jonathan administrations. These are the same reforms which at its inception ten years ago, the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, characterised as the “PDP sixteen years of waste.” So, I won’t take seriously people who think her endorsement is a watershed.
Indeed, the Tinubu reforms have led to a hundred per cent devaluation of the local currency in an import-dependent economy. The result is mass poverty. The reforms include a 400 per cent increase in fuel prices, which has led to prohibitive transport costs, so much so that the cost of transporting food to the urban centres across the country is more than the cost of production. Factories continue to close, foreign loans multiply, and hunger prances across the land like an armed bandit taking hostages.
There were 118 million children out of school when President Muhammadu Buhari handed over power to President Tinubu. This has not reduced.
It is true that with the so-called removal of fuel subsidy, the Federal, State and Local Governments receive higher monthly allocations. But it is like giving more bananas to a monkey. Essentially, the poor is being robbed to further enrich the ruling elites.
So, the Tinubu administration needs to listen less to people like Okonjo-Iweala and more to the people whose stomachs are rumbling for lack of food.
Okonjo-Iweala had also said: “We need to put in social safety nets so that people who are feeling the pinch of the reforms can also have some support to be able to weather the hardship. So that’s the next step.”
Wrong, Ma, that is not the “next step”. That step has been endlessly taken for centuries. Social safety net, as an informal support system, has been in place since ancient times and is an integral part of the Nigerian culture.
The structured social safety net has also been in place for centuries. When the West imposed crippling structural adjustment programmes on over 30 African countries between 1986 and 1992, it was so-called social safety net that was introduced supposedly to cushion the effects. The military regimes between 1986 and 1999 had a plethora of these deceitful safety net programmes. Okonjo-Iweala, as Minister, implemented some of them under the Obasanjo administration.
One of such was called the Poverty Alleviation Programme, PAP. She also did under the Jonathan administration, one of which was called SURE-P. Social net safety is the cash transfer under the APC government. So, she is merely suggesting the old programmes that have repeatedly failed, rather than pro-people programmes based on Chapter Two of the Nigerian Constitution.
But I am not surprised because she has played these same games time over. In any case, that was how she became the DG of the WTO. Let me refresh our memories. The Europeans have cornered the International Monetary Fund, IMF, to the extent that only Europeans can lead it. On the other hand, the US owns the World Bank to such a degree that only an American citizen appointed by the US President can become its President. The rest of the world had only the WTO leadership open for contest.
Nigeria decided to contest for that position in the 2019 election. We had a very good candidate in Dr. Yonov Frederick Agah, who was then the WTO Deputy Director General. Other candidates from Africa were Eloi Laourou of Benin Republic and Egypt’s Abdulhammed Mamdouh. The African Union, AU, decided to streamline the African candidates to ensure victory. Nigeria got the nod.
But after this endorsement of Dr Agah, Okonjo-Iweala worked in the shadows, and before we understood the intrigues, President Buhari had been manipulated into believing that Nigeria’s best chance was Okonjo-Iweala, so he switched our candidate for her. But Nigeria and, indeed, Africa did not realise it was being manipulated. It turned out that Okonjo-Iweala had actually switched nationality to the US. So, the US ended up leading both the World Bank and WTO!
Okonjo-Iweala has done such a wonderful job for her bosses that her second term, from September 1, 2025, is assured. But in reality, the WTO under her is mercifully on life support.
The WTO had been established in 1995 as a forum for trade negotiations, to provide a framework, structure trade agreements, administer them, reduce trade barriers and settle trade disputes. Also, the WTO was used as an instrument to force down the throats of weak nations, capsules as the drastic reduction in social spending, privatisation, so-called market-determined exchange rate and deregulation.
But Okonjo-Iweala’s home country of US, under President Donald Trump, has taken over the duties of the WTO. It has also transformed its White House into a court for the settlement of international trade disputes.
Therefore, when on April 25, 2025, Okonjo-Iweala described the WTO at its 30th Anniversary “as a bedrock of predictability in the global economy – and as a platform for dialogue and cooperation on trade,” she was being economical with the truth.
But were the WTO to collapse, there would not be much tears for it because it is one of the most iniquitous international institutions in history.
When HIV/AIDS ravaged humanity and there were generic drugs that could be cheaply produced, it was the WTO that blocked the process. As a result, victims that could have been saved died like flies. It took the courage and will of people like Nelson Mandela to call off the WTO bluff. Despite threats of severe sanctions by the Western-backed WTO, countries like India and South Africa went ahead to produce the life-saving drugs. The result was that the drugs became so cheap that in many countries, including Nigeria, they are offered free.