Ngozi Okonjo Iweala: How A Biafran War Survivor Became The World Bank Vice President

The WTO is the only international organisation dealing with the global rules of trade. Its main function is to ensure that world trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible through its trade agreements.

Breaking institutional and generational records is not new to Okonjo-Iweala. In fact she’s a woman of many firsts. She’s Nigeria’s first female minister of finance and now she’s recording a global first.

Ngozi Okonjo Iweala is the first woman and the first Afrcan to head the World Trade Organization
since its inception in 1995. Designer: Tobi Yinka.

Born June 13, 1954, Okonjo-Iweala is not only a board room guru, she also has royal blood. Her family, the Okonjos rule Ogwashi-Uku kingdom in Aniocha South Local Government Area, Delta State in the oil-rich Niger Delta area of Nigeria.
Okonjo-Iweala is from a family of brilliant minds. Her mother was a medical doctor and sociology professor who was married to her father for 66 years, and had seven children.

Her father, the late Professor Chukwuka Okonjo, was a renowned professor of mathematics and an activist, who moved to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka from the University of Ibadan during the Nigerian Civil War.

Ngozi Okonjo Iweala is royalty. Her late father Professor Chukwuka Okonjo was the late Obi of Ogwashi-Uku Kingdom and her mother, Dr Kamene Okonjo, is the current Queen Mother. Source: The Guardian Nigeria. Source: The Guardian Nigeria. Designer: Tobi Yinka

He was a senior lecturer who hung his academic gown and put on military khaki to be part of the war as a Brigadier in the Biafran Army and Head of the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters. After the war, he was promoted to Professor of Economics at the University of Nigeria in 1971 and held the position until 1974 when he began working for the United Nations.

He became king of Ogwashi Uku in 2007 and ruled for 12 years before his death in 2019.

Early Life

Growing up as a teenager during the Nigerian civil war was tough, especially as her father was actively involved.

“We had one meal a day. We sometimes had to sleep on the floor, in a bunker, in different places. One really saw what it meant to suffer hardship. I saw children dying around me,”

she recounted in an interview with BBC in 2012. Her contributions to the war as a teenager was to cook for Biafran soldiers on the front lines.

When her three-year-old sister became chronically ill with malaria, her father was at the war front and her mother was ill. Okonjo-Iweala said she carried the child on her back trekking three miles to see the doctor. When she finally reached her destination, another daunting task she had to face to save her sister’s life was pushing through a crowd of 600 people waiting to see the doctor.

“I knew if she didn’t get the help she’d die,”

Okonjo-Iweala said in a 2006 interview with The Guardian UK. She was able to save her sister’s life through her unrelenting effort, focus and determination, the same way she has been helping African countries to save their economies.

Just as those traits have earned her commendations since she stepped into public service, they have also earned her death threats. During the civil war, Okonjo-Iweala believes she may have been long gone. Against her mother’s instruction, she left the military camp where her family camped to travel three miles to visit family. When she arrived at her cousin’s house, there was an air raid that could have robbed the world of a great economist about five decades ago.

“They didn’t have a bunker so we ran outside and threw ourselves down on the ground. A young man threw himself next to me and got a bullet. He didn’t die, but I think if he hadn’t been next to me, I would’ve gotten it,”

she revealed.

At the end of the war, life returned to normal. After completing her primary and secondary education at Queen’s School, Enugu, St. Anne’s School, Molete, Ibadan, and the International School Ibadan, 18-year-old Ngozi proceeded to Harvard and graduated in 1977 with honours in economics.

Her journey at the World Bank began as an intern. After bagging her Ph.D. in regional economics and development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she returned to the bank as a development economist. In 25 years, she rose to the position of vice president.

Family Life

In 1971. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala married her childhood sweetheart, Dr Ikemba Iweala, a neurosurgeon from Abia state in southeast Nigeria.

Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and her husband, Dr Ikemba Iweala. Source: Twitter. Designer: Tobi Yinka

He got his medical degree from the University of Ibadan and completed his training in General Surgery/Trauma and Neurosurgery at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, UK. After completing his training, he practised briefly at the University College Hospital, Ibadan.

After their marriage in 1979, the Iwealas were first based in the UK before moving to the United States 11 months after the birth of their first child Onyinye. In the U.S they had three more children.

Dr Ikemba Iweala and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala raised their four children, Onyinye, Uzodinma, Okechukwu and Uchechi (r-l) in the United States of America. Source: Uzodinma Iweala’s Instagram. Designer: Tobi Yinka

Her first child, Dr Onyinye Iweala is an assistant professor of medicine in the division of rheumatology, allergy and immunology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. The 39-year-old is married to Dr Andrew Robert Spector.

Uzodinma Iweala, Okonjo-Iweala’s second child and the most famous of her children is an award-winning author and medical doctor. He has published three books, ‘Beasts of No Nation’, a novel released in 2005 to critical acclaim and adapted into a movie of the same name, ‘Our Kind of People’ and ‘Speak No Evil’.

Uzodinma is also the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Ventures Africa Magazine, a publication that covers the evolving business, policy, culture, and innovation spaces in Africa. He is also a co-founder of Txtlite Nigeria Ltd., a company that provides pay-as-you-go solar solutions across Nigeria; and the founding CEO of the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria, an organisation that promotes private sector investment in health services and health innovation in Nigeria.

36-year-old Okechukwu Iweala is a graduate of Social Studies from his mother’s alma mater – Harvard University, while 33-year-old Uchechi Iweala is an Orthopaedic surgeon and spine surgery specialist.

Speaking about the part of Okonjo-Iweala’s life not visible to the public – motherhood, Uzodinma said

“my parents were strict, and at the time I didn’t agree with everything they did.”

Living with his mother when she was first appointed Nigeria’s finance minister in 2005 made him become appalled at her “insane schedule”.

“I’ve never been in a more stressful house. My mum is off to work at 6 am, then she’s not back until after 11pm. And when she comes home she’s got nobody to help her unwind or people like me, who will stress her out in a different way, which is what she needs. Even on a Sunday the phones start ringing at 7am. You think, ‘What’s so urgent on Sunday?’”

Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has spent more than three decades building a global career as a development economist and as one of the world’s most prominent and influential women.

It is not surprising that in 2014, Time magazine recognised her as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. The Fortune magazine named her as one of the 50 greatest world leaders in 2015. And for five consecutive years, Forbes named her as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world.

In an interview with Time Magazine in 2021, she says

“The world needs the WTO, and the WTO needs extensive and serious reform.” “If the WTO did not exist,” she says, “you would have to invent it.”

With this new role, the world and especially Africa is banking on Okonjo-Iweala to bring her experience to table to lift the lives of the people and deliver development through the WTO.