Moses Nagamootoo


Moses Veerasammy Nagamootoo is a Guyanese politician and writer who has been Prime Minister of Guyana since 2015.

Life and career

Nagamootoo was born in the village of Whim, Berbice, British Guiana, in the present-day region of East Berbice-Corentyne, in present-day Guyana. He is of Tamil Indian descent. Nagamootoo worked as a teacher and journalist, and later became a lawyer.
In a recent article, Prime Minister Nagamootoo gave extensive bibliographic information about his upbringings. Notable is that after high school, he co-founded the De Edwards/Rosignal High School in the late 1960s. There he taught mainly economics and British Constitution with great passion and enthusiasm, which were new subjects to the aspiring students in the West Coast Berbice, Guyana area. One of his students went on to major as a PhD in economics and now teaches that subject at the University of California, Berkeley Extension, California, US.
He was elected to Parliament in 1992 as a People's Progressive Party MP and subsequently served as Minister of Information and Minister of Local Government. He remained in Cabinet under the presidencies of Cheddi Jagan, Samuel Hinds, Janet Jagan and Bharrat Jagdeo. He resigned as Minister in 2000 but remained an MP until 2011, when he resigned from the PPP, having first joined in 1964.
As a leader of the PPP, Nagamootoo received the fifth-highest number of votes in the election to the PPP Central Committee at its 29th Congress on August 2, 2008.
Nagamootoo was rumoured to be a potential PPP candidate for president in 2011; however, he resigned from the party on October 24, 2011, citing the need for "more ideas and a new conversation about Guyana's economic and foreign policy future". He joined the opposition Alliance For Change in October 2011 and was re-elected to Parliament.
Following the opposition's victory in the May 2015 general election, Nagamootoo was sworn in as prime minister and first vice-president on 20 May 2015. Nagamootoo briefly took charge of presidential duties on 12 June 2015 while President David A. Granger was visiting the United States.

As a writer

Moses Nagamootoo is the author of the novel Hendree's Cure, which describes a world of Tamil fishermen who inhabited the Corentyne village of Whim in the 1950s and 1960s.