Do we like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long public-service record, real good done for girls' education and vaccines, and no proven wrongdoing, but the record on LGBTQ+ issues is a blank.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the first woman and first African to run the World Trade Organization. Before that she was Nigeria's finance minister twice, most recently 2011 to 2015, and its foreign minister in 2006. She also had a long career at the World Bank, ending as a managing director.
The main stoush from her years in government came in 2015, when allegations surfaced that she had authorised the diversion of recovered Abacha funds under President Goodluck Jonathan. Her media adviser denied it, calling it a campaign of falsehood, and said a memo of hers had been distorted. Her side's version wasn't independently verified in the report, and we found no finding against her in the sources we read.
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up. She has talked publicly about opening doors for women and said she hoped her time in the job would leave “women will have the door of opportunities open”. We found no statements from her on LGBTQ+ rights, for or against, so that's a gap, not a tick.
The recent news is about trade, not scandal. Opening the WTO ministerial in Cameroon in March 2026, she said the multilateral system “has irrevocably changed”. Coverage noted African countries are facing a 10 per cent baseline US tariff, with higher rates for some, including 14 per cent for Nigeria.
The good stuff is real. She chaired the board of the vaccine alliance Gavi from 2016 and was named a special envoy for the COVID-19 ACT Accelerator in April 2020. In 2020 the charity Theirworld gave her its International Women's Day Award, where she talked up girls' schooling and vaccines.
So where does that leave us? A technocrat with decades of public service, one set of denied old allegations and no harmful words found. The only thing stopping a higher score is that we couldn't find where she stands on LGBTQ+ people, which matters here.