Tag: Guy Scott

Zambia gets a white president, a first in Africa

Zambian Vice-President Guy Scott has been named acting head of state following the death of President Michael Sata, making him Africa’s first white leader since South Africa’s FW de Klerk.

“Dr Scott will act as president of the Republic of Zambia until the country goes for a presidential by-election,” said Defence and Justice Minister Edgar Lungu on Wednesday. This is likely to take place within 90 days.

The announcement averts a possible constitutional crisis that could have seen Lungu and Scott vie for power.

The battle for Zambia’s top job was under way before long-ailing Sata died on Tuesday, but looked to become messier and more intense in the wake of his death.

When Sata left the country for medical treatment in Britain last week, he named Lungu –- a powerful figure in the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) – as acting president.

Scott and Lungu belong to rival factions within the ruling party. But Scott (70) is not eligible to become president because of foreign parentage rules in Zambia’s 1996 Constitution; his parents are from Scotland.

“The government remains intact and so does the Patriotic Front as a party. We shall update on each decision made in this regard,” said Lungu.

The PF secretary general was among the favourites to take over as leader of the major copper-producing country of 15-million people.

Lungu leads one of two main camps that formed this year within the PF leadership when it became clear that Sata was in poor health, although this was denied regularly by the government.

Lungu was likely to enjoy the backing of a majority Bemba-speaking group as the presidential candidate, despite it not being his ethnic language.

Other candidates included Finance Minister Alexander Chikwanda, former defence minister Geoffrey Mwamba and Sata’s son, Mulenga, who is the mayor of Lusaka and PF chairperson for Lusaka province.

Chikwanda, a veteran finance minister, was given presidential powers at times when Sata was out of the country.

Zambia’s ethnic worries

Great Scott, it's a white face!
Great Scott, it’s a white face! Guy Scott with President Sata (left)

Zambia recently woke up to a story in state-owned media that a group calling itself Tongas Under Oath had killed two people belonging to President Michael Sata’s ethnic group, and was now in the process of removing settlers from the ethnically Tonga Southern Province. However, the story did not wash with the citizens who simply viewed it as an attempt by the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) government to clamp down on the opposition United Party for National Development (UPND).

Zambia’s third largest opposition party is led by Hakainde Hichilema, a Tonga who has been very critical of the Sata government. And as is often the case in Zambian politics, Hichilema is the latest in a line of fearless opposition leaders whose increasing popular support is likely to result in electoral success.

Prior to the release of the letter allegedly written by the Tongas Under Oath group, Hichilema was arrested and charged after he claimed that the PF government was planning to send youths to Sudan to train as militias. A few days later, the opposition’s headquarters in the capital, Lusaka, were searched by the police looking for seditious materials.

They did not find any but a few days later a far more sinister letter about an assasination plot was sent to President Sata with a date stamp from Mazabuka, a town in Southern Province.

No one was ever arrested in the Tongas Under Oath terror plot however, since President Sata himself admitted that the supposedly incriminating letter was not authored in the Southern Province, but in Lusaka.

Despite Zambia’s obvious ethnic struggles, the white British Zambian Vice-President Guy Scott said recently in an unusually frank interview: “The South Africans are very backward in terms of historical development. I hate South Africans… actually they’ve been the cause of so much trouble in this part of the world.”

The comments ruffled feathers on social media and appeared to threaten relations between the former liberation struggle allies.

During the interview in Lusaka, Scott mocked South Africa’s membership of the Brics developing economies, compared President Jacob Zuma with FW de Klerk and opined: “I have a suspicion the blacks model themselves on the whites now that they’re in power. ‘Don’t you know who we are, man?'”

He also defended the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, and spoke out against Zuma’s attempts to mediate in that country on behalf of the Southern African Development Community.

Recalling a meeting between Mugabe and the Zambian president, Michael Sata, Scott said, without irony: “Michael the other day was saying, ‘You have to get this thing sorted out among yourself, you don’t want to go to SADC – it’s a new kind of colonialism’.”

The Daily Maverick’s Simon Allison quickly came to Scott’s rescue and tried to defend his strange comments. – ISN/ The Guardian