Bharrat Jagdeo
Bharrat Jagdeo was president of Guyana from August 1999 to December 2011, the Moscow-trained economist whom Janet Jagan handed the office to at thirty-five when her health failed. He won the elections of 2001 and 2006 and was term-limited out of the third. He has been, since the party came back to office in 2020, the vice-president and the man the country understands to be governing it, through the oil that was found off the coast four years after he left. The twelve years were the years before the oil. There were the debt relief that cut the foreign debt by two thirds, the growth of four per cent, and the sugar industry's Skeldon factory that never worked. There was the low-carbon development strategy of 2009 by which Norway paid the country two hundred and fifty million dollars to leave its forest standing, which made him the Amazon's spokesman at Copenhagen and a UN champion of the earth in 2010. There was the flood of January 2005 that put Georgetown under water for weeks. There was the crime. The jailbreak of February 2002 that began five years in which the escaped men and a drug lord's phantom squad killed each other and several hundred others. There were the Lusignan and Bartica massacres of 2008, and the accusation, never tried, that his government had let the drug lord's death squad do its work, which his American trial in 2009 heard about and the Guyanese courts did not. The race was the other thing. The party is Indian, the opposition African, the elections are a census. The twelve years were governed accordingly. He was born in Unity village on the East Coast, the son of rice farmers. He studied economics at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow and came home in 1990. He was Jagan's junior finance minister at twenty-nine and finance minister at thirty-one. He retired in 2011 with a pension and benefits the opposition called the largest in the hemisphere. He came back as opposition leader in 2015 when the party lost, and as vice-president in August 2020 after the five months in which the losers would not leave. The oil, which makes the country the fastest-growing economy on earth, is managed by his office. That is the answer to the question of who governs Guyana.
- Lived: 1964 CE – ?
- Nationality: Guyanese
- Roles: president, economist, politician
