Zambia Donates Five Million Liters of Fuel to Malawi

Zambian President Sata meets Malawian President Mutharika
Zambian President Sata meets Malawian President Mutharika in South Africa. Picture courtesy of ZodiakOnline

Years of diplomatic incidents between Malawi and Zambia culminated recently in Zambia’s donation of five million liters of fuel to Malawi. The gift was ostensibly for the funeral of the country’s late President Bingu wa Mutharika, who died on 5 April 2012, after a heart attack. The political wrangling that has led up to this gesture, however, has a complicated backstory.

In 2007, Michael Sata – then the Zambian opposition leader – travelled to Malawi for a private visit, but was deported on arrival at Chileka Airport and driven 400 kilometers back to Zambia. Four years later, Sata was elected Zambia’s president.

At the time of his deportation from Malawi, Sata reportedly joked that Bingu had given him a fully fueled Lexus GX with a private chauffer (i.e., the immigration officer) for the journey, which was far more than Levy Mwanawasa, then the President of Zambia and Sata’s political opponent, had ever done.

Occupy Descends On Chicago

Chicago Nato Protester
Chicago Nato Protester. Photo: Michael Kappel/flickr.

Very little of the American public saw the grand summitry on display at the NATO Summit in Chicago; rather, much of the public perception came from a CNN news reel showing Chicago police surrounding a few protestors and beating them repeatedly with batons. Despite the implicit violence shown in the repeating images, the protests were largely peaceful, if perhaps ineffective in advancing Occupy’s cause.

The protestors had originally planned to gather in Chicago to demonstrate against both the G8 meeting and the NATO Summit, scheduled consecutively. After the G8 was moved to Camp David for security reasons, the hackitivst collective Anonymous called for 50,000 people to descend upon the Windy City, to defy and overwhelm the “police state” while advocating for anti-capitalist beliefs.