It is all but certain that the next head of the influential World Trade Organization (WTO) will be an African by birth and a woman. But neither is what makes the all-but certain naming of Nigerian-born Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala cause for alarm. Rather it is who she is and who she presently is tied to that insure she will implement the unfolding agenda of the Great Reset transformation of the world economy, using the coronavirus pandemic as a prime lever. She presently heads an organization created by the seeming omnipresent (not omniscient) Bill Gates together with the Davos World Economic Forum—both involved in implementing the Great Reset–and she is deeply tied to the prime institutions of globalization and international finance. Some background we should know about.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has just won the unanimous support of the 55 nations of the African Union, defeating an Egyptian candidate. As of this writing she faces certain approval over her South Korean opponent. On October 17, the 55 member countries of the African Union voted to back Okonjo-Iweala against her only remaining opponent, Yoo Myung-hee of South Korea, their current Minister of Trade. The Nigerian candidate claims also to have the backing of a group of Caribbean and Pacific states, bringing the number of countries officially endorsing her candidacy to 79 out of the 164 states that comprise the WTO. It looks like a done deal.
Who is Okonjo-Iweala?
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala comes from senior ministerial posts in Nigeria, one of the world’s most corrupt states with a 2019 Transparency International index of 146 from 180 states evaluated. Notably, she was Finance Minister in the Nigerian government twice, first under President Olusegun Obasanjo from 2003–2006. Then again, from 2011–2015 under President Goodluck Jonathan when she was named Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy. Though she was never charged with corruption, in 2015 almost $20 billion was discovered “lost” after an audit by PriceWaterhouseCoopers of state oil revenues. She also convinced Goodluck Jonathan to lift gasoline subsidies in 2012 triggering massive street protests as many Nigerians see cheap gasoline as the only benefit they get from the country’s vast oil wealth. Cutting such subsidies is standard World Bank fare.
As Finance Minister she backed the usual IMF/World Bank demands for slashing state subsidies for gasoline and privatization of electricity. It was no surprise, as Okonjo-Iweala was with the World Bank in Washington for 25 years. After Obasanjo terminated her first stint as Finance Minister, she returned to the World Bank to become Managing Director of Operations from 2007–2011. Several times she made clear her ambition to become head of the World Bank, a post traditionally filled by an American Citizen. Indeed, she went so far as to take American citizenship in 2019 when the World Bank post again became vacant, but to no avail.
The World Bank is one of the pivotal UN-based instruments for advancing the globalist corporatist economic agenda, along with the IMF. Like the IMF the World Bank uses its money as a carrot to impose draconian conditionalities on recipient governments in developing countries. This is called the “Washington Consensus” and imposes an unsuitable “free market” agenda that inevitably includes demands to slash state budgets, cut state subsidies to food and fuel, make the currency convertible and cheap, and eliminate protectionist barriers. The Structural Adjustment Programs of the World Bank and IMF in West Africa led countries to prioritize debt payments over investment in public services including in education, infrastructure or basic health services. In short, it is a brutal form of what has been called technocratic neo-colonialism, far more sinister than the British or French or Belgians ever managed because they use Africans or other developing country technocrat “faces” to impose the draconian austerity that forces countries to open to foreign plunder, typically by the western corporate giants.
GAVI and Gates
Okonjo-Iweala left the corrupt government of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 to become Chairman of GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, where she sits until today. GAVI stands for Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. It was founded in 2000 with an initial $750 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates was joined by the World Bank and GAVI was all agreed at the Davos World Economic Forum, the globalist hub at the center of the Great Reset. GAVI claims to have spent more than $4 billion on vaccines. Its main target is vaccinating every child in Africa, India and the developing world. GAVI declares on its website, “As part of its mission to save lives, reduce poverty and protect the world against the threat of epidemics, Gavi has helped vaccinate more than 822 million children in the world’s poorest countries.”
The Board of GAVI includes, in addition to Chairman Okonjo-Iweala, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers, GSK, as well as the Gates Foundation, World Bank, WHO and UNICEF. Under the chairmanship of Okonjo-Iweala, GAVI has been involved in the scandalous spread of polio in Africa as a result of their polio vaccine strategy. As well also in India GAVI and the Gates Foundation were sued in Indian High Courts for “criminally negligent trialling the vaccines on a vulnerable, uneducated and under-informed population– school administrators, students and their parents– who were not provided informed consent or advised of potential adverse effects or required to be monitored post-vaccination.” A number of vaccinated Indian girls died after receiving HPV vaccines from GSK, a board member of GAVI.
Most recently, under Okonjo-Iweala’s term as Chairman of GAVI, cases of paralytic polio resulted in African and Indian children who had been vaccinated by GAVI and Gates Foundation Oral Polio Vaccine programs. GAVI and Gates did so despite the fact they knew that the OPV had been dropped by the US CDC in 1992 from its vaccine schedule in the US because it was causing polio. Under the GAVI-Gates polio vaccination program polio cases have been registered in more than a dozen African countries including Angola, Congo, Nigeria and Zambia and Okono-Iweala’s Nigeria. But the shocking thing is that the outbreaks are all reportedly caused by the Gates-backed oral polio vaccine. GAVI and Gates engage in a colossally corrupt and even criminal enterprise in which the tax exempt Gates Foundation invests in vaccine companies like GSK and others that then sell their vaccines to huge new markets such as Africa and India. As stock prices in GSK rise as a result of rising sales of vaccines, Gates Foundation net worth rises too. “Charity” for profit is the model.
In short Okonjo-Iweala’s role as head of the corrupt GAVI as well as World Bank and Nigerian Finance Ministry make her a superb candidate to head the globalist World Trade Organization. Looking further into her ties adds to that picture.
Revealing Board Ties
While taking the position as Chairman of GAVI Okonjo-Iweala also became “Senior Advisor” to Lazard Ltd., a US investment bank which claims to be the world’s largest independent investment bank, with principal executive offices in New York City, Paris and London. The current Lazard board includes among others Richard Haass, head of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Lazard chairman Kenneth Jacobs sits on the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group. Then in 2018, while still advising Lazard and heading Gates’ GAVI, she joined the board of Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, infamous these days for massive political censorship.
She also took a position in 2018 on the Board of the major international bank Standard Chartered, whose major shareholder is the government sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, and whose banking operations are in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In 2012 the New York Department of Financial Services accused Standard Chartered of hiding $250 billion (!) in transactions involving Iran, labelling it a “rogue institution.” The bank has been involved in money laundering US sanctions-violations also involving Myanmar, Libya and Sudan and Hong Kong, where it has major business with China. The Nigerian WTO candidate is well-connected to the world of global finance powers that be, in short.
The former Nigerian Finance Minister and World Bank official is also well-versed in the globalist dystopian UN Agenda 2030 backed by the Davos WEF and Gates. She is co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate which calls for “bold climate action,” alongside the head of the IMF, and former head of the agribusiness giant Unilever among others. She also served on the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the infamous “sustainable development” agenda. And she is listed as an “Agenda Contributor” to the Davos World Economic Forum.
The WTO Agenda
If she is elected which seems all but a done deal, she will head one of the central globalist institutions. The WTO was created in 1995 to advance the Davos agenda of globalization, arguably one of the most economically destructive agendas in history. WTO rules on agriculture trade were drafted by the agribusiness cartel companies led by Cargill to force open agriculture markets in the developing countries to agribusiness products from the global food cartel companies. Rather than eliminate food subsidies in the North American and EU producer countries, subsidies of over 40% on key products have allowed giant agribusiness companies like Unilever to flood local markets in Africa and Asia which bankrupt local small producers, forcing them to flood into urban centers for cheap labor. As one analyst put it, reforms demanded by the WTO have destroyed guaranteed prices and state-sponsored extension services, and governments of the Global South have had to dismantle programs for food security and rural assistance in favor of those that would help them meet WTO mandates.
With her ties to Bill Gates, to the World Bank, the Word Economic Forum, to international finance and even Twitter, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is well-suited to supervise the planned imposition of the totalitarian agenda of the Gates-WEF Great Reset. That she will owe her election to WTO to the backing of African and other developing country governments is a bitter commentary on the cynical manipulations of the Powers That Be in today’s world.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”