Namibia was already scheduled to carry presidential and legislative elections this yr, with Geingob asserting final yr that his political social gathering, South West Africa Individuals’s Group (SWAPO), would put ahead Deputy Prime Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah as its presidential candidate. In a put up on X, previously Twitter, Nandi-Ndaitwah described Geingob as “a real democratic and a transformational chief who touched many lives.”
Geingob, who had served as president since 2015, performed a center-stage function on Namibia’s political scene because it grew to become the final nation on the continent to decolonize in 1990, following a virtually quarter century of armed battle with apartheid South Africa.
In an announcement Sunday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa described Geingob as “a towering veteran of Namibia’s liberation from colonialism and apartheid. He was additionally significantly influential within the solidarity that the individuals of Namibia prolonged to the individuals of South Africa in order that we could possibly be free at this time.”
Between 1990 and 2002, Geingob served because the nation’s first prime minister after chairing the committee that formulated Namibia’s first structure.
The Namibian individuals, he mentioned on the time of the nation’s constitutional conference in 1989, “have given us a mandate to hammer out and undertake in a spirit of compromise, a spirit of give and take, a structure that may launch our nation and folks into nationhood.”
In 2017, Geingob, who was educated in the US, attended a U.N. Common Meeting occasion in New York Metropolis throughout which President Donald Trump made two references to “Nambia.” Geingob didn’t react publicly to the error, which was corrected in a White Home transcript of Trump’s feedback.
Final month, Geingob denounced Germany for defending Israel from accusations of genocide in Gaza, referring to a genocide dedicated in opposition to Namibia’s inhabitants by its former German colonizer that killed at the least 75,000 individuals.
“On Namibian soil, #Germany dedicated the primary genocide of the twentieth century in 1904-1908, during which tens of hundreds of harmless Namibians died in essentially the most inhumane and brutal circumstances,” Geingob mentioned in a assertion.
With a territory bigger than Texas and a inhabitants of underneath 2.8 million, Namibia is among the world’s least densely populated international locations. “We don’t must struggle over land as a result of there is sufficient to go round,” Geingob mentioned in 1993.
In response to the CIA World Factbook, the nation is wealthy in pure assets however has had a falling GDP per capita lately. Namibia ranks as one of many world’s most unequal international locations, the World Financial institution mentioned, and a U.N. report final yr discovered that about 40 p.c of the inhabitants lives in poverty.
Namibia was colonized by Germany and later administered by a white-minority authorities managed by South Africa. SWAPO, Geingob’s social gathering that has ruled the nation since its independence, launched a guerrilla warfare in 1966 that culminated in a U.S.-brokered peace plan and elections in 1989.