Zambia’s government on Wednesday announced that President Michael Sata, 77, has died in London, where he was receiving medical treatment, hours after the country’ media did same.
“It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing on of our beloved president,” government cabinet secretary Roland Msiska said.
Msiska said Sata died in London’s King Edward VII hospital, and called for Zambians to remain calm.
Sata has long been rumoured to be seriously ill and had not been seen in public since returning from the UN General Assembly last month, where he failed to make a scheduled speech.
He flew to London just over a week ago for treatment.
Sata made a rare public appearance on September 19 to tell parliament: “I am not dead.”
When he left Zambia for London, Sata appointed Minister of Defence and Justice Edgar Lungu as acting president.
Despite repeated denials that the president was ill, analysts had said a power struggle was already under way behind the scenes for Zambia’s top job.
Supporters who voted Sata into office in 2011 saw him as a no-nonsense man of action, while for critics, the former policeman, trade unionist and taxidermist was an authoritarian populist.
What is undisputed is that he seemed to revel in scorched earth politics.
Detractors, political foes, the media and even allies frequently came under attack from a man who earned the sobriquet “King Cobra”.
He once publicly upbraided his whole cabinet, threatening to collapse his government if they did not do a better job.
He had recently cracked down on political opponents and critical journalists who reported on his long-suspected illness and frequent “working trips” abroad, apparently for medical treatment.
In January 2014, an opposition politician was charged with defamation for calling him a potato, while in June the authorities charged three opposition activists for claiming that he was dying.
Sata’s surprise election victory, at the fourth time of asking, and a calm power transfer raised hopes things were looking up for his copper-rich but dirt-poor southern African nation.
He vowed to be a champion of the poor, unveiling a plan to transform the country within 90 days by tackling corruption, lowering taxes, creating jobs and scoring a better deal with what he once called Chinese “infestors”.
But it quickly became clear that the targets of his corruption fight were more often than not his political adversaries, including his predecessor Rupiah Banda, who was slapped with various graft charges and blocked from leaving the country.
On the election trail Sata promised to free the media from government interference, but once in office he sacked critical journalists and heads of the state television and newspapers.
– ‘A showman’ –
Born on July 6, 1937 in the Mpika district in the north of the then-British colony of Northern Rhodesia, Michael Chilufya Sata had little formal education.
After basic schooling he joined a seminary, with a view to joining the priesthood, according to Zambian historian Field Ruwe. But it was not to be, and he instead entered the police force.
Sata was later arrested. The reason is subject to some controversy — Sata claimed he was jailed for his involvement in the independence fight, while adversaries claim it was for a criminal offence.
On his release he became involved in politics via the trade union movement. After a period in Britain — where he at one stage cleaned railway stations — and some time spent in business as a board member of a taxidermy firm, he became more firmly involved with the United National Independence Party.
Years as a party apparatchik earned the Catholic father of eight the governorship of the capital, Lusaka, under Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda.
He later served in several ministerial portfolios, but tensions with Kaunda saw him jump ship to the Movement for Multiparty Democracy, which he in turn left to form the breakaway Patriotic Front in 2001.
Ever the showman, in his 2011 presidential campaign he paraded through the streets in a speedboat pulled on a trailer.
Jump on board and be saved from poverty, was the message of his political Noah’s Ark.
He was catapulted to the presidency amid public anger at corruption and frustration among those yet to benefit from a copper mining boom.
But he leaves behind a country buckling under the weight of unemployment that remains around 60 percent