Frederick Chiluba
Frederick Chiluba was president of Zambia from 1991 to 2002, the trade-union leader five feet tall who beat Kenneth Kaunda by three to one in the first multi-party election of the new African wave, the first sitting president on the continent to be voted out, and who then privatised the copper mines and everything else, declared Zambia a Christian nation in the constitution, tried to have Kaunda deported as a Malawian, tried to change the constitution for a third term and was stopped by his own party and the churches, and was prosecuted for years after leaving office for the theft of some forty million dollars, of which a London court found him liable for most and a Lusaka court acquitted him. He died before the appeal. He was born in 1943 in the Copperbelt, worked as a bus conductor and a credit clerk, and rose through the mineworkers' union to chair the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions from 1974, the one organisation in Kaunda's one-party state that could say no. He was detained in 1981 and released by the courts. The food riots of 1990, the pressure of the donors and the example of Eastern Europe made Kaunda concede multi-party elections, and the Movement for Multiparty Democracy, formed in July 1990 with Chiluba as its chairman, won the election of 31 October 1991 with seventy-six per cent of the presidential vote and 125 of 150 seats. Kaunda handed over the next day. The government sold the parastatals, floated the currency, and under the World Bank's eye sold the copper mines at the bottom of the market in 2000 to Anglo American, which walked away two years later. Its politics hardened: the constitution of 1996, amended to require presidential candidates to have Zambian-born parents, was written to exclude Kaunda, whose parents were from Nyasaland, and Kaunda's party boycotted the election. Kaunda was shot and wounded at a rally in 1997 and detained after an attempted coup that year. The third-term bid of 2001 failed in the party's own convention in May, and he picked Levy Mwanawasa, who won narrowly in December and then had parliament lift Chiluba's immunity in 2002 for the corruption prosecutions. He was ill with heart disease through the trials and died in Lusaka in June 2011.
- Lived: 1943 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Zambian
- Roles: president, trade unionist, politician
