Kamla Persad-Bissessar
Kamla Persad-Bissessar has been prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago twice, from 2010 to 2015 and since April 2025, the first woman in the office. She is the lawyer who took the United National Congress from Panday in January 2010, beat Manning four months later at the head of a five-party People's Partnership by twenty-nine seats to twelve. She came back ten years after losing it, at seventy-three, to beat Rowley's successor by twenty-six to fifteen. The first government was the laptops for every secondary school entrant, the pension raised, and the children's hospital. There was the highway to Point Fortin whose contract became the scandal. There was the state of emergency of August 2011 against the gangs, which the courts unpicked. There was the section 34 affair of 2012, in which a clause slipped into a law would have freed the accused in the Piarco airport case, Panday's friends among them, and was repealed in a day when it was noticed. There was the partnership shedding its parties one by one, and the fall in the gas price that emptied the treasury in her last year. She lost the election of September 2015 to Rowley by twenty-three seats to eighteen, lost again in 2020 by one seat more. She stayed leader through both, which the party's rivals could not stop. The second government began with the cost of living, the murder rate that had passed six hundred a year, the state of emergency her predecessor had declared, and the reopening of the questions of the first, which the Rowley years had put to the courts. She was born in Siparia, in the sugar belt, the daughter of Indian labourers' descendants. She studied at the University of the West Indies and in Norwich, and taught in Jamaica. She was called to the bar and entered parliament in 1995 for Siparia. She was Panday's education minister and, in 1999, the first woman attorney-general. The first Hindu, the first woman and the first of Indian descent to be a Commonwealth head of government from the Caribbean is a great deal of firsts for a politician the country argues about.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Trinidadian
- Roles: prime minister, lawyer, politician
