Guy Lindsay Scott (1 June 1944 to 15 July 2026) was a Zambian farmer, economist, computer vision scientist and politician who served as the 12th vice president of Zambia from 2011 to 2014 and as acting president of Zambia from 29 October 2014 to 25 January 2015. When President Michael Sata died in office, Scott was placed in charge of the country for an interim period, making him Zambia's first white head of state since independence and the first white head of state in mainland Africa since F. W. de Klerk left office in South Africa in 1994.
Scott was born in Livingstone, in what was then Northern Rhodesia. His father, Alec Scott, was a Glasgow-born doctor who also became a lawyer, newspaper publisher and independent federal MP for Lusaka who supported African political advancement. His mother, Grace, was an English nurse and writer whose 1966 book The Fading Colour Bar, written as Grace Keith, examined racial segregation in late-colonial central Africa. Scott later said his own entry into politics was inspired by his father, an ally of the Zambian nationalists.
He was educated at Springvale School and Peterhouse Boys' School in what was then Southern Rhodesia, then read mathematics and economics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating in 1965. He came home to newly independent Zambia, renounced his right to British citizenship, took a Zambian passport and joined the government planning office. In 1970 he co-founded Walkover Estates with Malcolm Christie in the Leopards Hill area of Lusaka, growing irrigated wheat, strawberries and off-season vegetables. Walkover's strawberries were sold in Sainsbury's supermarkets in Britain, and Scott handled the technical side, selecting crop varieties and designing spraying equipment. In the 1970s he was also the first project manager of the Mpongwe Development Project, a pilot scheme for large-scale irrigated wheat.
Disillusioned with Zambia's political and economic situation, Scott left with his young family in 1981, spent a year in Kenya and settled in England in 1982. There he reinvented himself as a scientist. At the University of Sussex he studied cognitive science and artificial intelligence, earning a master's degree in 1983 and a doctorate in 1986 with a thesis on computer vision titled Local and Global Interpretation of Moving Images, later published as a monograph. He went on to the Robotics Research Group at Oxford University and became a fellow of Somerville College. His 1991 paper with Christopher Longuet-Higgins introduced what is now known as the Scott and Longuet-Higgins algorithm for matching features between two images, a widely cited reference in computer vision.
In 1990 Scott returned to Zambia and joined the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). He won the Mpika Central seat in the 1991 election that ended Kenneth Kaunda's 27 years in power and became Minister of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries. He managed the response to the severe southern African drought of 1992, arranging emergency maize imports over strained rail and road networks, and oversaw the recovery harvest that followed. President Frederick Chiluba dismissed him in April 1993. In 1996 he left the MMD and co-founded the Lima Party with farmers' leader Ben Kapita.
In 2001 Scott joined Michael Sata's Patriotic Front (PF). The Cambridge-educated economist and the populist known as "King Cobra" made an improbable partnership, travelling the country for a decade to build the PF from a marginal opposition party into a winning movement. Scott returned to parliament as MP for Lusaka Central in 2006 and served as Sata's chief strategist. After the PF won the September 2011 election, Sata named him vice president, the first white Zambian to hold the post. He gained a reputation as a capable technocrat with a sharp, provocative sense of humour, and his blunt remarks about South Africa in 2013 caused a diplomatic stir.
Sata died on 28 October 2014, and Scott became acting president the next day. Because the constitution then required both of a presidential candidate's parents to be Zambian by birth or descent, he could not stand in the by-election. He presided over a fractious succession inside the PF, briefly dismissing Edgar Lungu as party secretary general before reinstating him a day later, and resisted calls from some ministers to resign. He oversaw the January 2015 presidential by-election and handed power to Lungu on 25 January 2015.
Scott left the PF before the 2016 election. In 2019 he published Adventures in Zambian Politics: A Story in Black and White, a memoir and history of the country. In March 2021 he joined the United Party for National Development, and Hakainde Hichilema appointed him chief consultant and a member of the party's national management committee.
Scott was married to Manja Crnkovic from 1966 until their divorce in 1988, and they had three sons, Sasha, Hugo and Sebastian. In 1994 he married the development specialist Charlotte Harland at the Lusaka Civic Centre, and they had a daughter, Thandi. He died at his farm in the Leopards Hill area of Lusaka on 15 July 2026, aged 82, after an illness; he had been living with Parkinson's disease and dementia. President Hichilema called him "a true patriot", declared five days of national mourning and accorded him a state funeral. After a service at the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Cross, he was buried with a 17-gun salute at Leopards Hill Memorial Park in Lusaka on 20 July 2026.
From social media
6Posts by Guy, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.