Obituary: Frederick Chiluba, politician

Former Zambian president who was a hero of African democracy before fall from grace

Frederick Chiluba, politician.

Born: 30 April, 1943, in Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Died: 18 June, 2011, in Lusaka, Zambia, aged 68.

FORMER Zambian president Frederick Chiluba, who has died at the age of 68, was once a hero of African democracy. His electoral trouncing of founding Zambia leader Kenneth Kaunda sent shockwaves across Africa, but his reputation was left in ruins by his life of luxury and bizarre behaviour once in office.

When he ended Kaunda's 27-year presidency in 1991, in the central African state's first multi-party election in a quarter of a century, Chiluba was hailed for saving the country from one-party rule and for offering an alternative to Kaunda's ruinous economic policies which had left a fiscal mess and seen a crumbling of Zambia's entire infrastructure.

But after unsuccessfully trying to stay in power beyond his scheduled ten-year term and as evidence of his personal excesses mounted, Chiluba was derided as a little more than a common thief and was convicted by a court in London of pocketing 36 million of state funds. "Kaunda's men were pickpockets, but Chiluba's lot are thieves," commented one Zambian journalist.

Suffering from acute heart and kidney complications, Chiluba was a virtual prisoner in his final years, confined to his residence after authorities confiscated his passport to prevent him from evading justice.

His final reputation represented a spectacular fall from grace for a man who had attracted the adulation and hopes of the overwhelming majority of Zambians when he dared to challenge Kaunda, who had ruled since independence from Britain in 1964, crushing and outlawing all rivals.

In a shortlived wave of widespread African democratic renewal, Kaunda decided to allow a multi-party election in the deluded belief that he would win anyway. Chiluba's victory shocked Kaunda.

It also shocked Chiluba himself. When I met Chiluba during his 1991 election campaign in remote Northern Province near the Congo border, he did not believe he and his Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) were winning.

I had travelled widely through Zambia and told him that from everything I had seen that he and the MMD were a shoo-in. He won with 76 per cent of the vote, and in a stunning series of events Chiluba offered me a personal request on his first day in office.

I told him I believed Kaunda had imprisoned without charge or trial the key "missing witness" from Winnie Mandela's trial in South Africa for the kidnap and assault of the murdered 14-year-old child activist Stompie Moeketsi.Within a few hours the new Zambian head of state had found the missing witness, Katiza Cebekhulu, near death in the notorious Kamwala Prison, and ordered his release.

With United Nations help, we got the missing witness to Britain, where I debriefed him in detail for a critical biography of Winnie Mandela that led to her indictment before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the excesses of her personal vigilante group, the Mandela United Football Club.

Chiluba, whatever his failings in office, can certainly take credit for the trail of events that led to Mandela facing justice in Johannesburg.

Chiluba was an enigma in many ways and much of his background remained in dispute.

He is believed to have been born just across the border from Zambia in the Democratic Republic of Congo to miner Jacob Titus Chiluba Nkonde and Diana Kaimba.

His parents died while he was young and he was raised by his grandmother in Kitwe, on Zambia's Copperbelt.

In his teenage years he worked as a sisal cutter in Tanzania and then as a bus conductor on the Copperbelt before working his way up to become chairman of the powerful Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, virtually the only source of opposition to Kaunda, where he was at the helm for 17 years.

He is not known to have had any formal education.

The diminutive Chiluba - he was just under five feet tall - became president of the MMD, a coalition of unions, civic and church groups, and former Kaunda loyalists who had grown disillusioned with his autocratic style.

Chiluba's emergence as head of state was initially welcomed by the West which had struggled to understand Kaunda's bizarre policies, which included setting the procurement price of maize, the staple food, below the costs of production, leading incredibly to the need for international food aid in a country with rich soils and a benign climate that permitted the growing of three crops per year.

Chiluba won praise for his emphasis on democracy, human rights and governmental transparency and oversaw the sale of more than 250 failed state companies to private firms. But while the sell-offs were perceived as part of a programme of reforms, much of the sale income went unaccounted for while hundreds of thousands were left out of work. Meanwhile, Chiluba spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of public funds on hundreds of tailor-made exotic suits, high-heeled shoes and monogrammed shirts while the majority of his people lived on less than 60p a day.

A Swiss manufacturer made more than 100 size 6 pairs of shoes for him with two-inch monogrammed heels.A column in the brave independent Zambia Post lampooned him as "a vain, cross-dressing, high-heel wearing, adulterous, dwarf thief".

The atmosphere of elation and euphoria that surrounded his election victory evaporated, and soon he displayed the kind of authoritarian tendencies he had derided in Kaunda; sacking colleagues, jailing outspoken journalists, buying off opponents and rounding up rivals.

In 1997 he survived a military coup and then used the incident to detain several opponents, including Kaunda.

After serving the constitutionally allowed two terms in office, Chiluba attempted to amend the constitution to run for a third term, but he met vigorous resistance, with tens of thousands protesting in the streets in what had been a famously laid-back society.

Sensing humiliating defeat, he drew up a hasty exit strategy which saw him hurriedly pluck a successor, Levy Mwanawasa, from political obscurity.

Mwanawasa, a former mild-mannered vice-president, turned against his mentor and stripped him of immunity so he could be prosecuted for grand graft.

Despite the conviction in London, Zambian prosecutors failed to convict him of corruption in Zambian courts, or even to convince the judiciary to apply the British judgment locally so his assets could be seized.

Chiluba, who became a fervent born-again Christian, was for 33 years married to Vera Tembo, with whom he had nine children before they divorced in 2000 and he married Regina Mwanza, a former women's leader in the MMD. From a first marriage, before Tembo, he had another two children.

Current Zambian president Rupiah Banda, an old friend of Chiluba, granted him a state funeral and hailed him "as a damned good president who brought political freedom to Zambia".