Patrick Manning
Patrick Manning was prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1991 to 1995 and from 2001 to 2010, thirteen years. He was the People's National Movement's leader for twenty-four, the oil geologist who took the party of Eric Williams back to office five years after its first defeat and governed the gas boom. The first government was the structural adjustment finished, the state companies sold, and the dollar floated in 1993. The election was called a year early in 1995, which produced a tie of seventeen seats each and put Panday in with Tobago's two. The second was the boom. There were the Atlantic LNG trains that made the country the largest supplier of liquefied natural gas to the United States, the growth of eight per cent, and the Waterfront towers and the performing arts academy in Port of Spain. There was the Vision 2020 plan to be a developed country by then. There were the summit of the Americas hosted in April 2009 with Obama and the Commonwealth heads of government hosted seven months later. There was the murder rate that quadrupled to five hundred a year as the cocaine came through. There were the Piarco airport corruption trials of the Panday years, the private jet and the residence, and the smelter at La Brea that the villages would not have. He called the election of May 2010 two and a half years early, for reasons nobody understood. He lost it to Persad-Bissessar's coalition by twenty-nine seats to twelve. The party removed him. He sat as a backbencher, had a stroke in 2012, and left parliament in 2015. He was born in San Fernando, read geology at the University of the West Indies, worked for Texaco, and entered parliament in 1971 at twenty-four. He was a junior minister under Williams and Chambers. He took the party in 1987 when it had three seats out of thirty-six. He died of leukaemia in July 2016 and was given a state funeral. He was the last prime minister of the Williams tradition, in a country where the tradition had become a machine.
- Lived: 1946 CE – 2016 CE
- Nationality: Trinidadian
- Roles: prime minister, geologist, politician
