* Obasanjo mourns last standing African nationalist
Zambia’s founding president and liberation hero, Kenneth Kaunda, has died at a military hospital in Lusaka where he was being treated for pneumonia, his son, Kambarage, said on Thursday. He was 97 years old.
Kaunda ruled Zambia from 1964, when the southern African nation won its independence from Britain, until 1991, and afterwards become one of Africa’s most committed activists against HIV/AIDS.
“I am sad to inform (members) we have lost Mzee. Let’s pray for him,” Kambarage said on the late president’s Facebook page.
The former president had been feeling unwell and had been admitted to the Maina Soko Medical Centre in Lusaka earlier in the week.
Although Zambia’s copper-based economy fared badly under his long stewardship, Kaunda will be remembered more for his role as an anti-colonial fighter who stood up to white minority-ruled South Africa.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, has said that Kenneth Kaunda’s death marks the end to the list of African freedom fighters.
Obasanjo described the late Kaunda as “one of the pioneers who led the struggles for the decolonisation of the African continent.”
Obasanjo appealed to all Africans and her friends to take solace in the fact that President Kaunda has gone home to what he described as a well-deserved rest.
He expressed confidence that the late Kaunda would “proudly take his place beside his fellow African brothers such as Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nelson Mandela of South Africa and others.”
Obasanjo added that “all of them, without exception, were nationalists who made sacrifices in diverse ways.”
He condoled with President Edgar Lungu, the government and the people of the Republic of Zambia.