Namibian President Hage Geingob dies after cancer diagnosis

Namibia’s President Hage Geingob, 82, died in hospital early on Sunday, the presidency said, weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer.

Geingob led his country since 2015, the year he announced he had survived prostate cancer.

Vice-president Nangolo Mbumba takes the helm in Namibia — a mining hotspot with deposits of diamonds and the electric car battery ingredient lithium — until presidential and parliamentary elections at the end of the year.

A presidency post on social media platform X did not give a cause of death, but late last month the presidency said he had travelled to the US for “a two-day novel treatment for cancerous cells”, after being diagnosed after a regular medical check-up.

Born in 1941, Geingob was a prominent politician before Namibia achieved independence from white minority-ruled SA in 1990. He chaired the body that drafted Namibia’s constitution, then became its first prime minister at independence on March 21 of that year, a position he held until 2002.

In 2007, Geingob became vice-president of the governing South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo), which he joined as a campaigner  for independence when Namibia was called South West Africa.

Swapo has been in power in Namibia unchallenged since independence. The former German colony is technically an upper middle-income country but one with huge disparities in wealth.

“There were no textbooks to prepare us for accomplishing the task of development and shared prosperity after independence,” he said in a speech to mark the day in 2018. “We needed to build a Namibia in which the chains of the injustices of the past would be broken.”

Geingob was trade and industry minister before becoming prime minister again in 2012. He won the 2014 election with 87% of the vote but only  narrowly avoided a runoff with a little more than half the votes in a subsequent poll in November 2019.

That election was after a government bribery scandal, in which officials  allegedly awarded horse mackerel quotas to Iceland’s biggest fishing firm, Samherji, in exchange for kickbacks, local media reported. The resultant outcry led to the resignation of two ministers.

The next year, Geingob lamented that Namibia’s wealth remained concentrated in the hands of its white minority.

“Distribution is an issue, but how do we do it?” Geingob said in a virtual session at an event organised by international organisation Horasis. “We have a racial issue here, a historical racial divide. Now you say we must grab from the whites and give it to the blacks, it’s not going to work,” he said.

His comments came after the government rescinded as unworkable a policy that would have made it mandatory for white-owned businesses to sell 25% stake to black Namibians.

Geingob died at Lady Pohamba Hospital in Windhoek, where his medical team was treating him, said the presidency said.

Update: February 4 2024
This story has been updated with more information. 

Reuters