Michael Sata, the new Zambian president, has appealed to the visiting Archbishop of Canterbury to send “more missionaries” to cleanse his country.
The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday:
Mr Sata, a former British Rail worker who was elected a fortnight ago, campaigned on an anti-corruption ticket and previously told one British interviewer he wanted to “sweep my country even cleaner than I swept your stations”.
Dr Wiliams, visiting Zambia on the last leg of a tour which included Malawi and Zimbabwe, received a warm welcome from Mr Sata, 74, who kissed his hand as he arrived at Lusaka’s Georgian, red-brick State House.
The first Catholic president of a majority Christian nation, he has pledged to base his government on the principles of the Ten Commandments.
“I am very grateful for your coming to Zambia,” he told Dr Williams when the two men met on Tuesday morning. “We need lots of religious cleansing – give us missionaries.
“What we get on Sunday is not adequate to sustain the Church. We have several good outpost missions without trained or ordained priests.
“You have one parish where there are 15 people – what do you need all those people for? Give us seven, and you keep eight.”
Mr Sata defeated the incumbent president Rupiah Banda whose Movement for Multiparty Democracy had been in power for 20 years in elections in September.
The Patriotic Front leader, nicknamed King Cobra for his sharp tongue, is understood to be keen to rekindle relations with Zambia’s former colonial power in a bid to balance the heavy Chinese influence in the copper-rich country.
In the run-up to the poll, he visited the UK and spoke at Oxford University and one of his first acts as president was to meet British High Commissioner Thomas Carter.
“When I first met the British I apologised that for the last 20 years we drifted away from the west, lots of things have not gone right,” Mr Sata told Dr Williams.
“Dr (Kenneth) Kaunda (Zambia’s liberation leader), although he was running a one-party state, was very close to the West and that is why he achieved as much as he did. But we drifted away from the west to look for new friends.”
At present, Britain donates £55m a year to Zambia – compared to £93m to neighbouring Malawi.
Dr Williams, who on Wednesday visited Zambia’s copper belt region and preached at a service in Kitwe, returns to the UK today Thursday 13th.