Namibian President Hage Geingob, 82, died early Sunday in hospital, weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer, the president said.
Geingob has been in charge of the sparsely populated and largely arid southern African country since 2015, the same year he announced he had survived prostate cancer.
Vice President Nangolo Mbumba is at the helm of Namibia, a mining hotspot with vast deposits of diamonds and lithium, the raw material for electric car batteries, until presidential and parliamentary elections at the end of the year.
The president’s post on social media platform Clean up.
Geingob, born in 1941, has been a prominent politician since Namibia gained independence from white-minority South Africa in 1990.
He served as chairman of the body that drafted Namibia’s constitution and became Namibia’s first prime minister after independence on March 21 of that year, a position he held until 2002.
“Chains of injustice”
In 2007, Geingob became deputy chairman of the ruling South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), which he joined as an independence agitator when Namibia was still known as South West Africa.
The Namibian People’s Organization has been in power unchallenged since Namibia’s independence. The former German colony is technically an upper-middle-income country, but there is a huge gap between rich and poor.
“No textbook can help us accomplish the task of post-independence development and shared prosperity. We need to build a Namibia that removes the shackles of past injustice,” he said in a 2018 Remembrance Day speech that will be broken. “
Geingob served as trade and industry minister before becoming prime minister again in 2012.
He won the 2014 election with 87% of the vote, but narrowly avoided a runoff with just over half the vote in a follow-up poll in November 2019.
The election comes in the wake of a government bribery scandal in which officials allegedly awarded horse mackerel quotas to Iceland’s largest fishing company, Samherji, in exchange for kickbacks, local media reported. The resulting outcry led to the resignation of two ministers.
The following year Geingob lamented that Namibia’s wealth was still concentrated in the hands of a small number of white people.
“Distribution is a problem, but how do we do it?” Geingob told a virtual conference organized by international organization Horasis.
“We have a racial problem here, a historical racial divide. Now you say we have to take it from white people and give it to black people, that’s not going to work,” he said.
His comments came after the government scrapped an unworkable policy that required white businesses to sell 25% of their shares to black Namibians.
The Presidency said Geingob died at Lady Pohamba Hospital in Windhoek, where he was being treated by a medical team.
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