The First Elected Vice President
Under the new constitution created the constitutional assembly and ratified by President Gayoom on 7 August 2008, the post of Vice President was once again created with the duties described above.
Under the new constitution, Dr. Mohammed Waheed Hassan of the Gaumee Itthihaad Party became the first elected Vice President of Maldives and was sworn into office on November 11, 2008. Mohamed Nasheed was elected into office as the President of the Maldives and together they effectively ended the 30 year rule of then Asia's longest serving ruler President Gayoom.
Dr. Waheed was the senior most Maldivian in the United Nations when he retired from it in June 2008, in order to return to the Maldives and become politically active. While in the UN, Dr. Waheed was the head of UNICEF for South Asia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Turkmenistan. Dr. Waheed was the Third Maldivian to receive a PhD having done so from the prestigious Stanford University, having specialized in International Development.
He has been involved in politics in Maldives since 1989 when we won a Parliamentary seat with the highest number of votes recorded up to that point. However, he was forced out of the country after having pursued a bill on human rights that was not looked favored upon by the administration at the time. Dr. Waheed then spent 16 years working for UNICEF.
Dr. Waheed is currently married to Ilham Hussain and has three children. Their eldest daughter Widhadh (32) is an architect and owns an IT firm in California. Their second daughter Fidha (29)is a PhD student in East West psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and their son Salim Waheed (23) is in his final year at Stanford University, studying Political Science.
Read more about this topic: Vice President Of The Maldives
Famous quotes containing the words vice president, elected, vice and/or president:
“Consider the vice president, George Bush, a man so bedeviled by bladder problems that he managed, for the last eight years, to be in the men’s room whenever an important illegal decision was made.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media’s diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the vice of religion, is one with that of the private life.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“[The reason a man has] so much trouble with the Senate is that there isn’t a man in the Senate who doesn’t think he is better suited to be President than the President, and thinks he might have been President except for luck.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)