PO
Patience Okala
Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment of the Federal Republic of Nigeria
Special Adviser to the Hon. Minister
Description
Patience Okala is the Special Adviser on Legal, Trade and Investment Policy to Nigeria’s Honourable Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, where she supports the Minister on all Trade and Investment matters, including the coordinated alignment of Nigeria’s regulatory framework for investment and trade with the AfCFTA Agreement.
She supports the Honourable Minister in coordinating Nigeria’s AfCFTA Central Coordination Committee (CCC), the gazette of Nigeria’s provisional Schedule of Tariff Concessions for Trade in Goods under the AfCFTA, signalling Nigeria’s readiness to trade under the AfCFTA. She also provided instrumental support leading up to the designation of Nigeria as co-Champion of Digital Trade and the assessment of Nigeria’s 5- year AfCFTA Implementation. She further supported the Minister on matters related to negotiations under the World Trade Organization (WTO).
She spent over 2 decades of her professional life in Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC), where she rose to the rank of Director, Legal Services and was the Lead Negotiator of Nigeria’s inter-ministerial team on negotiation of international investment treaties.
She was the technical lead for the general reform of Nigeria’s International Investment Agreements regime to ensure the attraction of responsible, inclusive, balanced and sustainable (RIBS) investments. She also played a key role in the development of a reform-oriented model bilateral investment treaty (BIT) for Nigeria. The reform elements of the model treaty featured prominently in UNCTAD’s World Investment Report (WIR) as examples of a balanced “new generation” investment treaty.
Mrs Okala has led BIT negotiations between Nigeria and several countries as well as on a number of investment-related regional, continental and multilateral Agreements including the AFCFTA Protocol on Investment, the ICSID Rules Amendment process and UNCITRAL Working Group III on the reform of investor-state dispute settlement.
Mrs Patience Okala was also the technical lead for the development of the first-ever Nigeria Investment Policy document signed off by the Federal Government of Nigeria in 2023. She also served as the Acting National Coordinator of the Nigeria AfCFTA Coordination Office where she ensured stability and continued efforts towards the domestication and operationalization of the AfCFTA Agreement in Nigeria.
Over the past few years, she served as Expert Investment Advisor to the AfCFTA Secretariat in Accra Ghana where she undertook a situational analysis of the investment regulatory framework of the 55 African countries. She also prepared knowledge pieces highlighting simplified explication of the AfCFTA architecture and produced an infographic investment facilitation tool for the Secretariat, this is in addition to her key technical role in negotiating relevant annexes to the AfCFTA Agreement. Furthermore, she was actively involved in coordination of African negotiators at UNCITRAL Working Group III for alignment with the continental investment framework.
She is a prominent speaker and thought leader in the field of investment in Africa and has served as resource person, panelist and moderator at several national and international conferences and workshops on investment-related issues prominent among which are several AfCFTA Secretariat events, World Investment Forum meetings by UNCTAD, Annual Investment Meeting (AIM), Intra-Africa Trade Fair (IATF), Investment Policy Forums by IISD, ICCA, meetings by the World Bank, Bar Associations and AWYEG, among several others.
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