Zambia's Guy Scott Becomes Africa's First White Leader Since End of Apartheid

Africa has its first white Head of State since apartheid after the death of the charismatic Zambian president Michael Sata nicknamed King Cobra.

Vice president Guy Scott was named the country's acting leader today ahead of a presidential election in three months to formally replace Michael Sata, who died last night aged 77.

The CNN reports that Scott became vice president three years ago. It's unclear, however, whether he can run for president in the elections. The nation's constitution says a candidate's parents must have been born in Zambia; his were not.

Scott was born in 1944 in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, which later became Zambia after independence from Britain.

Shortly after his graduation from Cambridge University and University of Sussex with a degree in economics and a doctorate in cognitive science, he returned home and worked for the finance ministry.

He later took a break from the ministry and ventured into wheat and strawberry farming. But politics wooed him back in in 1990, when he was elected to chair the nation's agriculture committee.

His father was a member of parliament for the capital of Lusaka before independence.

Before joining Sata's opposition party, which became the ruling party three years ago, he briefly left politics to focus on his agricultural business.

The last white leader on the African continent was South Africa's last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, before Nelson Mandela famously won the country's first true democratic elections in 1994.

Zambia is mourning the death of Sata, a charismatic, chain-smoking father of eight who rose from being a British railway porter through decades of hard politics to become the country's president.

He had been in office for just three years and died at a private London hospital last night more than a month after he was last seen in public.

The late president gained his nickname King Cobra for his 'scorched-earth' politics and venomous barbs against opponents, one of whom was charged with defamation for calling him a potato.

Source: CNN