THE chairwoman of the Electoral Commission of Zambia says that challenger Michael Sata has defeated the incumbent in presidential elections.
Irene Mambilima announced early Friday that with tallies completed from nearly all the country's 150 constituencies, Sata had won with 1,150,045 votes, or 43 percent of the total.
President Rupiah Banda had 961,796 votes, or 36.1 percent. Eight other candidates shared the remainder.
Banda's party, of which Sata had been a member until a 2001 leadership dispute, had been in power for two decades.
Late Thursday, as Sata's supporters celebrated his lead, electoral officials stopped issuing vote tallies.
A promised 10PM briefing from the Electoral Commission did not happen. Hours passed, and officials said they were still completing tallies until finally just after midnight Sata was declared winner.
Hundreds of Sata supporters danced and lit celebratory tire bonfires in the streets of the capital. The mood was joyous.
Sata's supporters have rioted after previous losses, and violence has followed recent elections elsewhere in Africa.
Sata, a former provincial governor and Cabinet minister known for his populist, anti-China rhetoric and sharp tongue, left Banda's Movement for Multi-Party Democracy to form his own party in 2001, after he was passed over to lead the MMD in elections.
He lost elections that year and in 2006 to the MMD's Levy Mwanawasa. In 2008, after Mwanawasa died of a stroke, he narrowly lost a special election to Banda, who had been Mwanawasa's vice president. The MMD has led Zambia since 1991.
Friends and foes call Sata, born in 1936, "ba mudala ba Sata," which means "Old man Mr. Sata."
The chain-smoking, gravelly-voiced politician, who is married to a doctor and has eight children, has also been nicknamed King Cobra for his sharp tongue.
"I haven't bloody lost so don't waste my time," he barked at a BBC reporter as results revealed that Banda had 35,000 votes over him in the 2008 elections.
Other objects of his ire have included Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, whom Sata denounced as a Western puppet "financed to cause trouble in Zimbabwe".
His views on President Robert Mugabe and his policy of seizing white-owned land were unequivocal.
"It’s the imperialists, the capitalist-roaders who say he is a villain," he said. "The people of Zimbabwe are not suffering. They are much happier."
According to former president Kenneth Kaunda, who appointed Sata to his cabinet, he cannot be trusted.
"I know him very well, he cannot do well as president because he is not presidential material at all," Kaunda has been quoted as saying.
But the same qualities that make him unattractive in some quarters mean he consistently draws the biggest crowds at rallies.
Political commentators say he "speaks what people want to hear", mixing off-colour jokes with pledges to put "more money in your pockets".
Sata has campaigned as a pro-poor candidate in a country whose rich copper deposits have brought major foreign investment but few benefits for two thirds of the population, which lives on less than two dollars a day.
A former porter who worked for the now defunct British Rail at London’s Victoria train station, he told one interviewer: "I never got any complaints about my work. I want to sweep my country even cleaner than I swept your stations."
It is a statement typical of the populist 74-year-old. In a profile on the website of his Patriotic Front party, he also claims not to drink bottled water and adds that he will not do so "until all Zambians have equal access to clean water."
He has won popularity among the urban poor by pledging to reinstate a mining windfall tax scrapped by Banda, the investors' favourite, and tackle corruption.
Since the last election, one million more people had pushed the total registered to vote to a record 5.2m – just under half the population.