Frederick Chiluba, former Zambia president

LUSAKA, Zambia -- Frederick Chiluba, Zambia's first democratically elected president who became increasingly autocratic during his decade in office, died Saturday. He was 68.

Chiluba, president from November 1991 to January 2002, suffered from heart problems.

The son of a copper miner and former trade union leader, Chiluba took office after 27 years of one-party rule by Kenneth Kaunda. Hailed as "the black Moses" and "the liberator" by his supporters, he vowed to introduce political freedoms and replace Kaunda's debt-ridden, centrally planned economy with a free market.

At first, Chiluba expanded civil and political rights and Zambia was seen as a model of democracy on a troubled continent. But eventually he slipped into Kaunda's methods of suppressing opposition and he was dogged by corruption allegations into his retirement.

He declared a state of emergency in 1997 after a failed coup and subsequently detained Kaunda -- whom he accused of being behind the plot -- under house arrest. Chiluba was unapologetic after Kaunda was shot and wounded by government forces during demonstrations the same year and escaped an assassination attempt in 1999.

Chiluba's antipathy toward Zambia's founding father stemmed from being imprisoned without charges in 1981 for allegedly organizing strikes to weaken the government.

Chiluba barred the charismatic Kaunda from running again for president in 1996 by saying that his Malawian origins disqualified him. He left office only reluctantly. After repeated promises to retire when his term ended, he flirted with changing the constitution to enable a run for a third five-year term. The move angered many Zambians who cherished their relatively new democracy and he was forced to back down.

In his bid to free up copper-rich Zambia's economy, Chiluba slashed import duties and abolished currency controls. He sold state-owned enterprises to private buyers, many of them from Europe or South Africa.

But the measures failed to improve the lot of the vast majority of Zambia's 13-million people, who remained mired in abject poverty.

The extent of the corruption became apparent after Chiluba left office and handed it over to his hand-picked successor Levy Mwanawasa.

In 2009, a magistrate acquitted Chiluba of corruption charges after a six-year trial. Chiluba had been accused of diverting nearly $500,000 of state money for his own use. The judge ruled that the funds could not be traced to government coffers.