Abd al-Aziz Abd al-Ghani

c. late 1930s -

Yemeni economist and politician.

Abd al-Aziz Abd al-Ghani was born in the late 1930s into a modest household in the Hujariyya, the Shafiʿi south of North Yemen. In 1958 he began studies in the United States, eventually earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in economics. A modernist and technocrat, Abd al-Aziz served as prime minister of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) under three presidents in all but three years in the period between early 1975 and Yemeni unification in 1990. He continued in that office after surviving the assassinations of two of those presidents; from 1980 to 1983, the years in which he did not head the government, he was YAR vice president. From the late 1960s to 1975, he was minister of economics twice and the founding head of the Central Bank of Yemen, one of the earliest and most important modern institutions. After Yemeni unification in 1990, he was for four years a member of the five-member presidential council of the new Republic of Yemen (ROY). He became prime minister of the ROY in 1994, after the civil war, and served in that capacity until he was appointed chairman of the newly created Consultative (Shura) Council in early 1997. In this office, he has over the years become something of an elder statesman.

Bibliography

Burrowes, Robert D. Historical Dictionary of Yemen. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995.

Burrowes, Robert D. The Yemen Arab Republic: The Politics ofDevelopment, 1962 - 1986. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; London: Croom Helm, 1987.

— ROBERT D. BURROWES