This is him
On Tuesday, Guy Scott was the vice president of Zambia. Now, he’s being hailed by many in the international press as the first white leader of a sub-Saharan African country since the fall of apartheid two decades ago (that's not quite accurate).
Scott, 70, became president Wednesday after the death of his ally, President Michael Sata, in a London hospital. It’s an interim position; fresh elections are expected in 90 days. Scott says he is ineligible to contest because his parents, Scottish colonial settlers, were born outside the country.
Sata, a firebrand politician whose sharp tongue earned him the sobriquet “King Cobra,” picked Scott as his deputy in 2011. The appointment came after a hard-fought election campaign between Sata and then incumbent President Rupiah Bandah, a contest that was deeply divisive.
"Michael knows about political symbolism," Scott told the Spectator magazine, a center-right British publication, in an interview in 2012. "It’s one in the eye for his critics who say he’s a tribalist. Obviously, he’s not."
The pair's closeness has now vaulted the Cambridge-educated Scott into an unusual perch. His political life began, in part, as a result of his father, who supported Zambian independence and became a member of parliament. The younger Scott served a stint as agriculture minister in the early 1990s and was credited with navigating Zambia out of a drought-spawned food crisis.
Scott described his appointment as president as a "bit of a shock to the system," according to the Daily Telegraph, and labeled himself the first white democratic leader in Africa since "maybe the Venetians in the days when they ran the world" -- a cheeky comment that's a sign more of his irreverent banter than historical acumen.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wor ... teresting/
