The death of Chiedu Osakwe, an ambassador, Nigeria’s chief trade negotiator and director-general of the Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiations (NOTN) last week was shocking beyond belief! When I saw a tweet announcing his passing, aged 64, in Geneva, Switzerland, on 22 September, I tweeted: “What a terribly, terribly sad news”! Indeed, it was a terribly sad news.
Osakwe’s contributions to the world trading system, to Africa’s economic integration and to Nigeria’s trade diplomacy were so hugely significant that his death was bound to send shock waves across trade communities around the world.
For me, Osakwe’s death was also a personal blow. As I wrote last year, in a piece titled “Integrating Africa’s economies: The Osakwe factor” (Businessday, 30 April 2018), I first met him in 2005 when I joined the World Trade Organisation in Geneva as a research fellow and he was a director at the world body. I have fond memories of my interactions with him, and particularly the positive impressions I had of his depth of knowledge, sharp mind and passions for Nigeria and Africa. Even, years later, after I returned to the London School of Economics as an academic, he remained a sounding board on global trade issues.
Hardly has any other African, achieved anything close to what Osakwe did to develop international trade negotiations, including through support for policy reform and capacity building. In his 19 years’ spell at the WTO, from 1998 to 2017, Osakwe held, at the most senior level, all the major development-oriented roles. For example, he was: special coordinator for the least-developed countries (LDCs), heading the inter-agency working group for the integrated framework for LDCs; director of the Technical Cooperation Division; director of the Textile Division; director of the Doha Development Agenda, leading the DDA negotiation process; and director of the WTO Accession Division, helping several developing countries through the difficult accession process to become WTO members.
Osakwe oversaw the accession of several former communist countries, such as Estonia, to the WTO, actively supporting their domestic reform processes.
In 2005, Osakwe was on the verge of becoming a Deputy Director-General at the WTO but apparently paid a price for Nigeria’s negative image. The new Director-General, Pascal Lamy, was appointing his four Deputy Directors-General, one of which must be African. The WTO Secretariat was abuzz with speculations – who else was better qualified than Osakwe for the job? But, then, Nigeria had not paid its subscriptions to the WTO for nearly four years and hardly anyone had anything positive to say about the country. Thus, although eminently qualified, Osakwe didn’t get the job. Nigeria later became positively engaged in the institutional development of the WTO, and, in part, another able Nigerian, Yonov Fredrick Agah, has been a WTO DDG since 2013, reappointed for a second four-year term in 2017.
Osakwe resigned from the WTO in 2017, and immediately took up a role as Associate Professor of International Trade, Policy, Diplomacy and Negotiations at the International University, Geneva. It was from that position that he took a leave of absence to serve as trade adviser to Okechukwu Enelamah, the then minister of industry, trade and investment. He was later appointed as the first Director-General of the Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiations (NOTN), which he helped establish, and also became Nigeria’s chief trade negotiator.
Of course, given Osakwe’s pre-eminence as a quintessential trade policy expert, diplomat and negotiator, no Nigerian was more qualified than him to head the NOTN or to lead the country’s trade negotiations. But it was a tall order for him to transform Nigeria’s negative and defensive approach to trade policy and trade negotiations.
From an intellectual perspective and given his hands-on experience of the economic transformation of the former communist countries, Osakwe knew what a developing country must do to generate prosperity. As he once said, “Countries that are open to trade grow faster and generate more jobs than countries that are closed up”. He strongly believed that only rules-based economic and trade opening can lead to welfare-enhancing and job-creating opportunities, while protectionism would result in damaging deadweight costs. In one of his famous quotes, he said: “Blind protectionism does not protect. It is an economic dead-end that cages the emergence and performance of an economic tiger”.
Osakwe was a powerful, if lonely, voice in President Buhari’s government for economic and trade openness in Nigeria, a country steeped in what he called “blind protectionism”. It is, however, to his great credit that, while President Buhari has not embraced his message about the welfare-enhancing characteristics of trade opening and the deadwood costs of protectionism, the president acknowledged Osakwe’s “intellectual depth, fervour and sense of patriotism” as he said in his tribute to him.
So, Osakwe bestrode the world of trade and development, and tried to transformation, ideationally and institutionally, the trade policy and negotiation landscapes of Nigeria. But it is for his contribution to Africa’s economic integration that he will forever be remembered. In June 2017, two years after the negotiations on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) were launched but had effectively stalled, African leaders met at African Union summit in Niamey and appointed Osakwe as chairman of the AfCFTA negotiating forum.
Within a year, Osakwe steered the negotiations to a successful conclusion, leading to the launch of the AfCFTA and the signing of the agreement establishing it by 44 African countries in March 2018. As President Buhari said in his tribute, Osakwe played “the frontline and historic role” of successfully chairing the AfCFTA negotiations. In his own tribute, Albert Muchanga, African Union’s Commissioner for Trade and Industry, described Osakwe as “giant of AfCFTA”, adding: “He contributed immensely to what AfCFTA is and will be”.
But, in April 2018, I asked in the piece that I referred to earlier whether Osakwe was like Hannibal, who won battles but lost the war, given that Nigeria, his own country, refused to sign the AfCFTA treaty. Well, again to his eternal credit, Osakwe worked tirelessly to secure Nigeria’s signing of the agreement and did before he died! As Paul Okolo, a freelance journalist, tweeted: “Even as his health was failing, Osakwe soldiered on passionately, strenuously canvassing Nigeria’s position on AfCFTA”. He added: “One can safely say he finished well when he saw President Buhari sign the trade deal in July in Niamey”. Indeed, he finished well; the look on his face as Buhari signed the agreement said it all!
But how do you honour this great African? I tweeted that the African Union should honour Osakwe by naming the AfCFTA Secretariat building after him. And, of course, Nigeria must also honour Osakwe; similarly, by naming the NOTN building after him. These would be powerful symbolic gestures, recognising his role as a great champion for developing countries in the world trading system and as an architect of the emerging African free trade area. Of course, in addition to naming physical structures after Osakwe, African leaders must leaders must also him by making AfCFTA work; that’s his greatest legacy!
Osakwe was, unquestionably, a trade diplomat extraordinaire. He joined the Nigerian Foreign Service in 1979 after graduating from the University of Ibadan; he later studied at Oxford University and obtained a PhD from New York University. A prolific writer, he used his intellectual prowess to drive positive change in the world of trade. He did so for developing countries at large, for Africa and, indeed, for Nigeria. He will be sorely missed.
May his soul rest in eternal peace!
Olu Fasan
