JOHANNESBURG: Namibian President Hage Geingob, 82, died early Sunday in hospital, the presidency said, weeks after being diagnosed with cancer.
Geingob has been in charge of the sparsely populated and mostly arid southern African country since 2015, the year he announced he had survived prostate cancer.
Pakistan expresses its condolences on the death of President Geingob. In a statement, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said President Geingob was a leading icon of Namibia’s liberation struggle and the main architect of Namibia’s constitution.
Vice President Nangolo Mbumba will take the helm in Namibia – a mining hotspot with significant deposits of diamonds and ingredients for electric car batteries – until presidential and parliamentary elections at the end of the year.
The president’s post on social media platform X did not state the cause of death, but late last month the presidency said he had traveled to the United States for “a two-day new cancer cell treatment” after being diagnosed with regular medical care. control.
Born in 1941, Geingob has been a prominent politician since Namibia’s independence from white minority-dominated South Africa in 1990.
He chaired the body that drafted Namibia’s constitution and then became its first Prime Minister at independence on 21 March that year, a position he held until 2002.
“CHAINS OF INJUSTICE”
In 2007, Geingob became vice-president of the ruling South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), which he joined as an independence campaigner when Namibia was still known as South West Africa.
SWAPO has remained in power in Namibia without issue since independence. The former German colony is technically an upper-middle-income country, but with huge disparities in wealth.
“There were no textbooks to prepare us for 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 injustice of the past would be broken.”
Geingob served as Minister of Trade and Industry before becoming Prime Minister again in 2012.
He won the 2014 election with 87% of the vote, but narrowly avoided a run-off with just over half the vote in a follow-up poll in November 2019.
The election followed a government bribery scandal in which officials were said to have allocated kranase quotas to Iceland’s largest fishing firm, Samherji, in exchange for kickbacks, according to local media reports. The resulting outcry led to the resignation of two ministers.
The following year, Geingob complained that Namibia’s wealth still remained concentrated in the hands of its white minority.
“Distribution is a problem, but how do we do it?” Geingob said in a virtual session at an event hosted by Horasis International.
“We have a racial problem here, a historical racial divide. Now you’re saying we have to take the whites and give it to the blacks, that’s not going to work,” he said.
His comments came after the government withdrew as unworkable a policy that would have required white-owned businesses to sell a 25% stake to black Namibians.
Geingob died at the Lady Pohamba Hospital in Windhoek where he was being treated by his medical team, the bureau said.
