Northern Rhodesia the election with the Federal party that their voters would vote for the other's candidates in some "national" constituencies, Nkumbula agreed to work in a coalition which had Kaunda as Prime Minister, and the two and their parties worked in reasonable harmony until a pre-independence election on 1964 where, with a much wider franchise, the United National Independence Party gained 55 of the 75 parliamentary seats. The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was formally dissolved on 31 December 1963, and the country became the independent Republic of Zambia on 24 October 1964, with Kaunda as President. Source: Whitaker's Almanack The
Northern Rhodesia to justify the capital cost of building a railway to the coast, but expeditions between 1899 and 1901 proved their value. Copper deposits found in Northern Rhodesia before the First World War proved uneconomic to develop. In 1906 Union Minière du Haut Katanga was formed to exploit the Katanga mines. King Leopold wanted a railway entirely in Congolese territory, linked to the Congo River, but in 1908, he agreed with the British South Africa Company to continue the Rhodesian railway to Elizabethville and the mines. Between 1912, when full-scale copper production began, until 1928 when a Congolese line was completed,