Keith Rowley
Keith Rowley was prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from September 2015 to March 2025, the volcanologist from Tobago. He took the People's National Movement after Manning's defeat and led it for fourteen years, won two elections, and resigned the office six months before the third, which his successor Young lost. The ten years were the gas running down. The fields were depleting, the Atlantic LNG trains idle. There was the Dragon field in Venezuelan waters that Washington's sanctions let him develop and then did not. The Petrotrin refinery was at Pointe-à-Pierre closed in 2018 after a century with five thousand jobs. The currency was rationed, the property tax fought over for a decade. The growth did not come back. There was the pandemic, in which he closed the borders for fifteen months and the country's nationals with them. There was the murder rate, which passed six hundred in 2022 and six hundred and twenty in 2024, the highest in the country's history, for which he declared the state of emergency of December 2024 that he left to his successor. There was the Paria diving tragedy of February 2022, in which four divers died in a pipeline over three days while the state company would not let the rescuers in, and the commission that blamed it. He was born in Mason Hall, Tobago, read geology at the University of the West Indies. He took his doctorate at it on the Soufrière volcano and ran the seismic research unit. He entered the Senate in 1987 and the House in 1991 for Diego Martin West. He was agriculture, planning and housing minister under Manning. Manning sacked him from the cabinet in 2008 for questioning the contracts of the urban development company. That was the quarrel that made him leader when Manning fell. He left the office in March 2025 to Stuart Young with a heart condition. The election of April was lost by fifteen seats to twenty-six. That was the verdict on the decade.
- Lived: 1949 CE – ?
- Nationality: Trinidadian
- Roles: prime minister, geologist, politician
