Michael Chilufya Sata became President of the Republic of Zambia following the September 2011 General Elections in which the Patriotic Front (PF) defeated Rupiah Banda’s Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD), which had been in government for 20 years.

With that, he became the fifth President of Zambia since the country gained independence from Britain in 1964.

Before that, he had spent 10 years inopposition, building the PF from scratch into one of the most formidable political parties in the country. By 2011, the PF was branded as a down-to-earthno-nonsense political establishment, straightening out itself from the elitist or snobby MMD and other opposition political parties.

Renowned for his open, honest, and sometimes forceful expression of true feelings and opinions, Michael Sata firstcontested the republican presidency in 2001, after campaigning for only 59 days, having resigned from the MMD where he was National Secretary. He still managed to win one Parliamentary seat and 12 council seats.

Michael Sata was elected on the MMD ticket as Member of Parliament for Kabwata constituency, the third time he was serving the area having been first elected in 1983.

Otherwise, he joined full-time politics in 1980 when he was elected as councillor for one of the wards in Lusaka before being elected Kabwata MP three years later, a constituency in the country’s capital city.

Two years later, he was appointed District Governor, Lusaka Urban District

Council where he made his mark as a man of action with a hands-on approach, cleaning-up the streets, patchingroadways and building bridges around the fast growing capital city.

In 1988, then President Dr Kenneth Kaunda appointed him Minister of State for Decentralisation in the Ministry of Local Government but resigned two years later, both from his ministerial appointment and also as a member of the ruling United National Independence Party (UNIP) to join the newly formed MMD, after the country returned to multi-party politics in 1990.

In 1991, he was again elected Kabwata MP, and in 1992, President Frederick Titus Jacob Chiluba appointed him Minister of Local Government and Housing for two years before moving him to the Ministry of Labour and Social Services for eight months.

Thereafter, he was appointed Minister of Health, where his reforms brought sanity to the health system. From there, he was appointed Minister without Portfolio where he developed the National Gender Policy. In the 1996 general elections, he moved from Kabwata to stand as MP in his birthplace Mpika.

His resignation from the MMD, as MP for Mpika and Minister without Portfolio and subsequent formation of the PF followed President Chiluba’s high-handedselection of Levy Mwanawasa as the party’s presidential candidate in the 2001 elections, a choice Michael Satafearlessly rejected. Although, the PF did not fair well in the general elections, Michael Sata continued to campaign, championing the causes of the poor in the face of Levy Mwanawasa’s economic reforms.

Following Levy Mwanawasa’s death in office in August 2008, a presidential by-election was called. Michael Sata was unanimously chosen as the PF'scandidate in the election by the party’s Central Committee on August 30, 2008.

Accepting the nomination, he expressed the need "to scrub this country and wash it.” In the vote count, Michael Sata held the lead over MMD’s Rupiah Banda in early vote counting, reflecting his strong support in urban areas.

However, his lead grew smaller as votes from rural areas were counted. In the end, Rupiah Banda overtook Sata, and final results showed Banda with 40 percent of the vote against 38 percent for him. The results were however believed to be highly fraudulent. In the 2011 general elections, he beat Rupiah Banda in the presidential election with a plurality of the vote.

However, from 2001 Michael Sata faced persecution from the State. OnDecember 27, 2001, PresidentMwanawasa ordered police to arrest him on a trumped-up charge of theft by motor vehicle, then a non-bailable offence. On April 17, 2002, he was charged with theft of a motor vehicle, and remained in prison for 25 days before he wasacquitted.

On 23 July, 2005, President Mwanawasa announced that he had directed police to arrest him. In the early hours of July 24, police picked him at his house and detained him for three days. He was charged with sedition, but later changed to espionage, which offence isunbailable. He remained in custody for 15 days but on July 29, he applied for constitutional bail in the High Court, which was granted on August 8.

Further, on February 24, he was arrested on a charge of forgery, which was later substituted with defamation of thePresident while on December 5, 2006, he was arrested and charged with making a false declaration of assets and liabilities to the Chief Justice during the filing in of presidential nomination papers. But the charge was quashed in court. If convicted, he would not have been eligible to hold public office.Also on March 15, 2007, he was deported from Malawi, where he had gone to meet the business community with the Malawian government offering no explanation. Michael Sata, who before joining politics was the principal shareholder of Avondale Housing Project Ltd, which developed close to 780 Medium and High Cost Housing Units in the Capital city, before the government nationalised the company, was born on July 6, 1937 in the Northern part of the country where he also did most of his schooling. He obtained a General Certificate ofEducation in 1963, and worked as a police officer, railway man and trade unionist during colonial rule.

He also worked in London working on the railways including that of a porter at Victoria railway station. His education qualifications include Political Economy and Strategies (Lomosonov StateUniversity), Political Economic Planning (London School of Economics), (London School of Journalism), Writing for Children (Manchester Press Syndicate), Bachelor of Arts (Belford University).

Michael Sata, a proud father andgrandfather is happily married to Dr Christine Mwelwa Kaseba, a medical consultant in Obstetrics andGynaecology.

2012 SADC SUMMIT

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Profile of His Exellency Mr. Michael Chilufya Sata,President of the Republic of Zambia

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