Former Zambian President Edgar Lungu died on Thursday at the age of 68, six months after an attempted return to politics was thwarted by a court ruling that he could not run for office again.

Lungu was the sixth president of the Southern African nation and held office from 2015 to 2021, when he lost an election to long-time opposition leader and current President Hakainde Hichilema.

He was praised during his tenure for a massive road-building programme, but also ran Zambia’s finances deeply into the red. The country defaulted on its international debt in 2020, precipitating his election loss.

Lungu died on Thursday morning at a medical centre in South Africa’s capital Pretoria, where he had been receiving specialised treatment, his political party, the Patriotic Front, said in a statement on social media.

The party also posted a video on social media of Lungu’s daughter Tasila Lungu, a member of Zambia’s parliament, announcing his death.

“My father… had been under medical supervision in recent weeks. This condition was managed with dignity and privacy,” she said.

Lungu suffered from a rare disorder that caused a narrowing of the food pipe, for which he had been treated in South Africa before. Shortly after he took office in 2015 he fell ill and underwent a procedure in South Africa, which the presidency said at the time was not available in Zambia.

Lungu was born on November 11, 1956, in the city of Ndola, in the Zambian copperbelt. A lawyer by training, he served as justice and defence minister under former president Michael Sata before taking over the presidency when Sata died in 2015.

After taking office Lungu quickly embarked on legislative reforms, which were seen as progressive, including amending the constitution to reduce the power of the president. He won a presidential election in 2016 that gave him a five-year term in office. But just before it ended he tried and failed to reverse the constitutional changes he had made.

“The legacy of Edgar Lungu is a checkered legacy,” said political analyst Lee Habasonda at the University of Zambia.

“He will be remembered for tolerating thuggery by his supporters although he also represented a brand of politicians who interacted across class.”

Under Lungu’s tenure and especially towards the end of his presidency his supporters became unruly, and his failure to rein them in was widely viewed as an endorsement of their actions.

Habasonda said he was someone who “allowed the poorest of Zambians to get close to the corridors of power.”

Lungu had an acrimonious relationship with key Western donors like the United States, whose ambassador he asked to be withdrawn in 2020. Relations with the International Monetary Fund also became strained during his tenure, prompting the lender to withdraw its resident representative.

Amid economic turmoil, Zambia became one of the first countries to default on its international debt after Covid-19 devastated the world’s economies in the early 2020s.

After his 2021 election defeat Lungu went into retirement, then made a political comeback in 2023, eventually being accepted as the leader and presidential candidate for the alliance including the Patriotic Front.

But in December last year, Zambia’s constitutional court ruled that he was ineligible to run for another term in office.

• A Reuters report