Zambia's opposition Patriotic Front president, Michael Chilufya Sata has emerged winner of the September 20 ten-man presidential race in the southern African country, the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) made an official announcement Friday early morning.

According to ECZ announcement, Sata amassed a total of 1,150, 045 votes, representing 43 percent against incumbent Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) President Rupiah Bwezani Banda, who polled 961,796 votes, representing 36.1 percent.

The result accounts for 143 constituencies out of the 150 when Sata leads his closest contender Banda by over 188,000 which is more than the total possible votes from the remaining 7 constituencies.

Therefore the Chief Justice, returning officer, Ernest Sakala, declared Michael Chilufya Sata duly elected as the President of the Republic of Zambia.

MMD has been the ruling party of the southern African country for the last 20 years and this is Sata's 4th presidential election.

The 74-year-old veteran politician is due to inaugurate at the Parliament building in Lusaka Friday morning.

Michael Sata, popularly known as King Cobra, was born in 1937 in Zambia's Northern Province city namely Mpika.

A one-time police officer, railway man and later trade unionist, Sata started active politics as early as 1963.

He sailed through political ranks of ward chairman during the era of Kenneth Kaunda and later made it to the governor of Lusaka in 1985.

In the late 1980s, he made it to legislative office, winning a parliamentary seat for Kabwata constituency in the capital city of Lusaka.

In 1990 Sata welcomed the winds of change that blew across Zambia and joined Fredrick Chiluba's Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), a political force that threw Kenneth Kaunda's Unity for National Independence Party (UNIP) out of power and ushered in multiparty democracy.

Between 1991 and 1996 under President Chiluba, Sata sailed through ministerial positions as minister for local government of labor and health.

King Cobra was known for reforms he made in the health sector when he was heading the ministry and this earned him an accolade of Action Man.

Sata's defining moment in his political career came in 1995 when he was appointed MMD's Executive Secretary.

But squabbles within the MMD led the Action Man to change course two months before the 2001 presidential election and formed his own party, Patriotic Front (PF), to challenge Patrick Levy Mwanawasa who was to lead MMD after Chiluba.

Although Sata lost miserably in the 2001 election, with only one parliamentary seat and a total of 4 percent votes as a presidential candidate, he had set himself on an ambitious trail to the hot seat.

During the 2006 general elections Sata lost to Mwanawasa, but he managed to scoop 29 percent of the total votes cast and his party PF managed to accumulate 43 seats in the national assembly.

In early December in 2006 he was arrested by the Zambian government on charges of false declaration of assets when applying for presidency but he was later released on bail.

The charges were however dropped on December 14 in the same year on the grounds that the declaration was not made under an oath and the PF leader was freed.

But steel bangles of law must have found the Action Man's wrist quite attractive. Sata was arrested on March 15 2007 at Malawi's Chileka International Airport when he came into the country "to visit business associates" as he later told the police.