Guy Scott, former vice president and now interim president of Zambia, has taken office after Michael Sata passed away in a hospital located in London at age 77.
“Elections for the office of president will take within 90 days. In the interim I am acting as president,” Scott said. “The period of national mourning will start today. We will miss our beloved president and comrade.”
“We are a strong constitutional democracy, and we expect to have a presidential election before January 28, 2015,” said Vernon Mwaanga, a political commentator in Zambia, told Christian Science Monitor. “We did that in 2008, and I have great confidence that … the integrity of the constitution will be respected.”
A portion of the Zambian constitution requires that if the current president passes away during his office term, a new president must be elected within 90 days. Reports say that when another president passed away in office in 2008, transitions were made peacefully, and the transition is likewise expected to be peaceful this time around as well.
Though Scott is the first white president of an African country since Nelson Mandela’s victory in 1994, which ended the apartheid in Africa, the Star Online says that he was ‘welcomed’ as the interim president.
“He is a black man in a white man’s skin,” Nathan Phiri, a bus driver, told Star. “The very fact we accepted him as vice-president shows that we consider him as one of us.”
Despite the fact that many in Zambia welcome him as the interim president, he is unable to be elected into the presidential position because his parents, who are Scottish, were not born in Zambia.
Though the reason for Sata’s death has not been made public, reports say that news of his ill health started in June, and was taken to the London hospital earlier this month.
Sata was the fifth Zambian president since Zambia received independence from Britain in 1964.
