President

Institutional context

The President of Mauritius is the largely ceremonial head of state, elected by the National Assembly to a five-year term under the 1992 republican constitution. From 1992 through June 2015 every holder was male.

Career path

Ameenah Gurib-Fakim (born 1959) is a biodiversity scientist with a PhD in chemistry from the University of Exeter. She served as Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Mauritius and has published extensively on the medicinal flora of the Indian Ocean. She is among the dataset's few first-woman heads of state with a primary career outside politics or law.

Appointment

The National Assembly elected her President on 5 June 2015. She is the first woman President of Mauritius.

Tenure

Two years and nine months. She resigned on 23 March 2018 amid a controversy over personal expenditure on a credit card supplied by an international NGO with which she had had professional dealings. She was succeeded by Vice President Paramasivum Pillay Vyapoory in an acting capacity.

Cluster context

Gurib-Fakim's 2015 appointment is the fourth African first-woman head of state in the dataset. Her resignation pattern — leaving office before term-end amid controversy — recurs in the dataset's recent record alongside Park, Yingluck, Rousseff, and Truss. The pattern is data, not interpretation; the underlying causes vary substantially.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Ameenah Gurib-Fakim
• Wikipedia — President of Mauritius