Having survived the murky waters of politics in Nigeria, where her mother was kidnapped to send her a message, and rising to number two at the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala should have no trouble dealing with international trade negotiators in her new job at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Despite recently taking out US citizenship, she revels in being Nigerian and is fiercely patriotic - flaunting her African identity in her African-print tailored outfits.
She told the BBC in 2012 that she had in fact adopted such attire as a working mother of four to do the school run, an easy answer for a smart look - and a thrifty one at that, given she estimated each outfit cost around $25.
The Harvard-educated development economist is seen as a down-to-earth, hard worker, who told BBC HardTalk in July that what the WTO needed was a shake-up.
Ms. Okonjo-Iweala had given up a well-paid job at the World Bank and left her family in Washington, where her husband works as a neurosurgeon, to work in Nigeria, where unlike other ministers she did not have a large domestic staff or fleet of cars.
In fact, she even liked doing her own cooking when she could, with cow tail pepper soup being a favorite, a Financial Times interview revealed in 2015.
Her mother, Kamene Okonjo - a medical doctor and retired professor of sociology - was kidnapped from her home in southern Nigeria in 2012, aged 82.
Kidnapping is common in Nigeria, where it is a lucrative criminal enterprise and families often pay up as the security services do not often find those abducted.
But she says she refused to do either.
"I knew that the largest vested interest that I had recently offended in my anti-corruption work was an unscrupulous subset of the country's oil marketers," she said in her account of the event.
Mrs. Okonjo was released within five days in unclear circumstances, but her daughter's no-nonsense approach may have come to bear in the matter.
One of her sons - Uzodinma Iweala, author of the 2005 novel Beast of No Nation - has said of his strict upbringing: "My mum is a very powerful woman. She knows how she wants things done, and if you don't do it her way, you are in trouble."
Biography
Born 1954 in Nigeria
Studied at Harvard 1973-76 and earned a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1981
Spent 25 years at the World Bank, rising to the No.2 position as managing director (2007-11)
Twice Nigerian finance minister - 2003-2006 and 2011-2015 - and the first woman to hold the post
Served briefly as foreign minister in 2006, also the first woman to do so
Sits on the boards of Twitter, Standard Chartered Bank, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI)
Nominated by President Mohammadu Buhari as a candidate for director-general of the WTO in June 2020
Ms. Okonjo-Iweala's career is so much more impressive given how little respect women can be shown in Nigeria.
"She made women proud that a woman in a patriarchal and misogynistic country like Nigeria could hold her own and perform creditably contrary to what detractors thought," she told the BBC
"Women tend to be more honest, more straightforward, more focused on the job, and bring less ego to it. I don't know if it's a feminine instinct but running an economy is sometimes akin to running a household," she told the Independent in 2006.
And women are also on her agenda at the WTO.
In her job application, she said: "It should also be responsive to the challenge of facilitating the greater participation of women in international trade, particularly in developing countries, where greater efforts should be made to include women-owned enterprises in the formal sector."
Ms. Effa-Chukwuma says this all bodes well for the WTO: "We trust her to deliver on the job and ensure that developing countries benefit from international trade"
Негізгі бет How Okonjo-Iweala made history as the first woman and African to be WTO DG
Пікірлер