Namibia was already scheduled to carry presidential and legislative elections this 12 months, with Geingob saying final 12 months that his political celebration, 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 position 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 a press release 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 folks of Namibia prolonged to the folks of South Africa in order that we might be free right this moment.”
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 folks, 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 can launch our nation and folks into nationhood.”
In 2017, Geingob, who was educated in america, attended a U.N. Normal 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 a minimum of 75,000 folks.
“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 probably the most inhumane and brutal situations,” 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 nations. “We don’t need to battle over land as a result of there is sufficient to go round,” Geingob mentioned in 1993.
In keeping with the CIA World Factbook, the nation is wealthy in pure sources however has had a falling GDP per capita lately. Namibia ranks as one of many world’s most unequal nations, the World Financial institution mentioned, and a U.N. report final 12 months discovered that about 40 % 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 celebration that has ruled the nation since its independence, launched a guerrilla conflict in 1966 that culminated in a U.S.-brokered peace plan and elections in 1989.
