Guy was Guy

 JACK ZIMBA

GUY Scott, who has died at the age of 82, was one of Zambia’s most well-known white politicians, who went to become the country’s Vice-President, serving under President Michael Sata from 2011.

Known for his unfiltered talk, Dr Scott also served as acting President when Mr Sata died, until the country elected its President in 2015.

But Guy Scott was more than an accomplished politician.

When other boys at school were dreaming of becoming teachers, scientists, lawyers or doctors, Guy Scott's dream was to become a solver of mysteries. And he spent most of his professional life doing just that.

The young Guy subjected himself to a long process of formal education, and he chose to study some of the most complex subjects imaginable, from mathematics to light. Light? Yes, he studied how light interacts with matter to form images.

“Me,” he once told me as we sat on the verandah of his house in State Lodge just after he was appointed Vice-President, “I like to understand the world. And I like to prove that I understand the world by changing it.

“I’m a problem-solver by temperament. I see myself as a problem-spotter first of all. I see problems where others don’t see a problem and having spotted the problem, I like to solve it to show that it was a problem,” he said, before taking another gulp from his glass of Putinka, a classy Russian vodka.

Even as a small boy at school in Marondera, Southern Rhodesia, Guy Scott wanted to understand the world and how it worked.
One of his good friends, Stewart Fisher who attended the same school and sat in the same class with Guy in 1957, described him as “the sort of boy you could not ignore.”

“He was very controversial with a very questioning mind and was quite clearly the brightest boy in the class – by a long way I would say.”

Born in 1944 in Livingstone, Guy probably acquired his liberal political views from his father, Alexander Scott, a medical doctor, who in Northern Rhodesia formed an anti-racial party opposed to the Central African Federation which had sought to frustrate African liberation. Scott Snr was also founder of the Central African Post in 1948, which paper briefly became the African Times and then ended up as the African Mail which eventually became the Zambia Daily Mail of today.

At Peterhouse school in Southern Rhodesia, Guy’s school companions were generally sons of right-wing white tobacco farmers, and the boy from Livingstone delighted in picking arguments with them and with his teachers.

During those years when computers were becoming indispensable work tools, Guy was not satisfied with just knowing how computers and robots worked, he wanted to understand how they ‘think’ and so he went to study artificial intelligence at Sussex University in the UK where he earned his doctorate in cognitive science/artificial intelligence.

Then he went to Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and economics, coming away with an honour’s degree.

But just as in his early school life, Guy was a rebellious and controversial student at Cambridge who would often defy school rules. For example, according to Dr Fisher, Guy kept a shotgun in his room that he had wanted to use for shooting pheasants – a favoured pastime for the English gentry, which was a strange ambition for Guy given his disdain for inherited privilege.

“They never found his shotgun, otherwise they were going to expel him,” said Dr Fisher, who also remembers Guy skinny-dipping (nude swimming) in the icy waters of the River Cam which runs through Cambridge and is well-known for students rowing on it, punting on it, and skinny dipping for the more adventurous.
Later on, Guy devoted his life to studying computers and worked at Oxford University where he tutored in artificial intelligence. Also at Oxford he took up croquet at which he excelled with a fierce competitiveness. But he was less than impressed with Oxford reactions to the way he dressed whilst playing – probably his normal scruffy casualness - and he has not forgotten the sniffy remarks to which he was subjected.

Always a bit bolshy, in the 1980s he got a job with an eminent professor of information engineering called Michael Brady to run a university robotics laboratory, but the two differed sharply and they soon fell out. “You’re not interested in true knowledge, you’re just interested in running a PhD factory,” Guy once yelled at Prof Brady.

Guy’s tertiary education had been made possible by a Federal scholarship. When independence came along, he would not have been able to afford to continue but the new Zambian Government maintained the support and Guy was able to continue his education.

Said Stewart Fisher: “I think Guy got tired of artificial intelligence and he decided it was going nowhere fast and it was at that point that he came back to Zambia and became interested in politics.”

Back home, Guy found the Kaunda government on the verge of collapse and in 1991 he joined the Movement for Multiparty Democracy.

It was during the election campaign that Guy met his wife-to-be, Charlotte Harland, in Mpika where she was working on a donor-funded programme. The two were introduced to each other by an up-and-coming politician called Michael Sata. They married in 1994.

Guy became Minister of Agriculture in the first Chiluba government, and became known as “Mr Yellow Maize” when he imported yellow maize from the US to feed people in the drastic drought of 1991-92.

Then, Chiluba sacked him, almost before he had had a chance to work himself into the portfolio. The first Guy knew of it was when, returning from a visit to Zimbabwe, he was greeted by a border official who said, “Ah, so sorry Honourable…”
Chiluba’s letter of dismissal was framed and hang in a toilet room at the Scott’s house.

Charlotte spoke highly of Guy’s extraordinary intellectual capability.

“He has a lot of gigabytes up there,” she said of him.

Dr Scott also had a love for literature and poetry and was known to recite long passages from renowned poets. In the right mood he would quote liberally from speeches in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, from Macbeth, from the Song of Solomon in the Bible or from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Guy also liked composing songs as a hobby and, although he has long played the guitar, he never quite mastered the instrument.  “He can play, but he’s pretty rubbish,” said Charlotte.

He also worked briefly a journalist when he wrote for Business Review, a monthly supplement put out by the Times of Zambia.

So what did he make of being Vice-President?

“It’s a very difficult position because always if you try to do too much people accuse you of barging in on their territory; if you don’t do anything then everybody accuses you of loafing. That is the standard challenge of vice-anything.

Dr Scott was also known for the image he posed.

“He doesn’t worry about the image he is cutting,” is how Dr Fisher described him.

“He’s not a man who spends any time in shops if he can help it,” said Charlotte. “If he goes somewhere and comes back, then he probably does no shopping. He has to be forced to do it. He doesn’t like shopping at all. If he went to Johannesburg or London by himself I couldn’t expect any shopping when he came back,” she said.

Guy almost gloried in his anti-materialism: “Me, as long I have this garden and a nice house, even though it’s not a posh house, it’s a very comfortable house…and a verandah on that house and a bottle of whisky to occasionally sample; and children and grandchildren and a car which is reliable: I don’t care whether it’s a Hummer or Jaguar as long it’s reliable and can get me to where I’m going. Then that’s it, I’m happy,” he said.

“How can you be a materialist in a country where 80 percent of the people live on less than two dollars a day?” he asked.

According to Dr Fisher, after graduating from Cambridge, Guy Scott threw a party at his place where he promised to give away all his possessions.

However, even as he took up the position of Vice-President, Guy knew the question of race would come up.

“People don’t know how to handle these racial things, they think it’s embarrassing; are we supposed not to notice he is white…? And I don’t help them,” he said.

In Malawi, at the recent COMESA heads of state summit, it was President Robert Mugabe who broke the ice by referring to Guy Scott’s skin colour and calling him ‘one of us’.

“He knew how to handle it, but the rest of them pretended they hadn’t noticed that I was white,” he said. 

“I had a choice of becoming a Zambian citizen or British citizen under the constitution in 1964, and I chose to become a Zambian citizen,” said Guy.

He also spoke strongly about Western hegemony as though he had no roots there.

He expressed a deep desire to see Zambia develop. “I will be very sorry to spend another ten years of my life trying to make Zambia work and failing, and ending up with another corrupt society,” he said.

And although he was – according Charlotte - “absolutely bowled over” when he was appointed Vice-President, he was still bothered by the presence of aides and security personnel around him.

“It can be very frustrating to not be able to get in your car to go and see your friends or go and see a movie,” he said.

“I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried driving myself. I’ve tried driving without motorbikes, only with escort vehicles. But it’s not possible because you get caught up in traffic and somebody recognises you and the crowds start mobbing you, then you realise what the motorbikes are for,” he said.

So, what sort of man was Guy Scott?

Stewart Fisher described him in one word - acerbic.

“He doesn’t like blunt things. He likes excitement and controversy. He likes unusual people. And he likes getting himself into trouble and getting himself out of trouble. Guy is Guy,” he added.