Namibia’s President Hage Geingob, 82, died in hospital early Sunday morning, weeks after being diagnosed with cancer, the presidential palace announced.
Geingob had been in charge of the sparsely populated and largely arid southern African country since 2015, when he announced he had overcome prostate cancer.
Vice President Nangolo Mbumba will rule in Namibia, a mining hotspot with large deposits of diamonds and lithium, an ingredient in electric car batteries, until presidential and parliamentary elections at the end of the year.
presidential post Social media platform Although the cause of death has not been disclosed, the presidential office announced that he was diagnosed with a routine medical checkup late last month and traveled to the United States for “a new two-day treatment for cancer cells.”
Born in 1941, Geingob was a prominent politician even before Namibia achieved independence from white minority-ruled South Africa in 1990.
He chaired Namibia’s constitutional drafting body and became the country’s first prime minister upon independence on March 21, 2002, serving in that capacity until 2002.
“Chain of injustice”
In 2007, Geingob became vice-chairman of the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), which he had been a part of as an independence agitator when Namibia was still known as South West Africa.
SWAPO has remained in power unshakably since Namibia’s independence. Although the former German colony is technically an upper-middle-income country, there are wide disparities in wealth.
In a speech commemorating this day in 2018, he said, “No textbook has prepared us to meet the challenges of post-independence development and shared prosperity. We needed to build Namibia.” It will be broken. ”
Geingob served as Minister of Trade and Industry before becoming Prime Minister again in 2012.
In the 2014 election, he won with 87% of the vote, but in a subsequent opinion poll in November 2019, he narrowly avoided a run-off with just over half of the votes cast.
The election followed a government bribery scandal in which authorities allegedly gave a quota of horse mackerel to Iceland’s largest fishing company, Samherji, in exchange for kickbacks, according to local media reports.
The resulting protests led to the resignation of two ministers.
The following year, Geingob lamented that Namibia’s wealth remained concentrated in the hands of the white minority.
“Distribution is a challenge, but what should we do?” Geingob said during a virtual session at an event organized by the international organization Horasis.
“There’s a racial issue here, a historic racial disparity. Now you’re saying you have to take from white people and give to black people, and that doesn’t work,” he said.
His comments came after the government reversed a policy requiring white-owned companies to sell 25% of their shares to black Namibians, calling it unworkable.
Geingob died at Lady Pohamba Hospital in Windhoek, where he was being treated by a medical team, the presidential palace said.
