Irfaan Ali
Irfaan Ali took office after a five-month count and governs the fastest-growing economy on earth. Guyana is a South American country that thinks of itself as Caribbean: English-speaking, a former British colony, its population descended mostly from enslaved Africans and from indentured Indian labourers brought after emancipation. Politics has run along that division since independence, with the two main parties drawing their votes almost entirely from one community each. The election of March 2020 was disputed for five months, with a regional recount and an attempt to declare fabricated results, before he was sworn in. What changed everything was found offshore in 2015. An ExxonMobil-led consortium hit a field in the Stabroek block holding upwards of eleven billion barrels, in a country of about eight hundred thousand people. Production began in 2019 and rose faster than almost any oil province in history; GDP grew by more than sixty per cent in a single year and Guyana went from one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere to one of the highest per-capita oil producers in the world. The terms of the contract are the argument. It was signed before production and gives the state a two per cent royalty and a share of profit oil that critics inside and outside the country consider far below what comparable finds command, and his government has declined to reopen it on the ground that a stable contract is worth more than a better one. Then Venezuela revived a claim to the Essequibo, two-thirds of Guyanese territory and the region the oil lies off, holding a referendum on annexing it in 2023. The dispute is before the International Court of Justice, and a small state with a very large deposit and a very small army has been careful about its friends.
- Lived: 1980 CE – ?
- Nationality: Guyanese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
