Namibia's President Hage Geingob has died in a hospital in the early hours of Sunday at the age of 82, the presidency announced.
It did not reveal the exact cause of his death. But he had been diagnosed with cancer in recent weeks and had travelled to the United States for treatment before returning home at the end of January.
The government said he died in a hospital in the capital Windhoek, where he was receiving treatment.
His medical team made ''spirited efforts'' to save his life without success. ''At his side, was his dear wife Madame Monica Geingos and his children,'' the government said in a statement. Tributes have been pouring in.
Fighting apartheid
Born in Otjiwarongo in northern Namibia in 1941, Hage Gottfried Geingob was the southern African country's first president outside of the Ovambo ethnic group, which makes up more than half the country's population.
He took up activism against South Africa's white-minority apartheid regime, which at the time ruled over Namibia, from his early schooling years before being driven into exile.
He spent almost three decades in Botswana and the United States, leaving the former for the latter in 1964.
The tall, deep-voiced leader studied at Fordham University in New York, and much later in life received a PhD in the United Kingdom.
PM and UN job
While in the US, he remained a vocal advocate for Namibia's independence, representing the local liberation movement, SWAPO, now the ruling party, at the United Nations and across the Americas.
In the early 1970s he started a career working for the UN on governance issues.
He returned to Namibia in 1989, a year before the country's independence. He chaired the body that drafted Namibia's constitution.
When SWAPO won the first vote in 1990 after independence, Geingob was appointed prime minister – a position he held for 12 years before returning to it again in 2012 for a brief stint.
"I embraced the soil of Namibia after 27 years in exile. Looking back, the journey of building a new Namibia has been worthwhile," he said in a Twitter post in 2020 posting a photo of his younger self kissing the tarmac after landing back home.
Rise to presidency
In 2007, Geingob became vice president of the governing South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO), which he had joined as an agitator for independence when Namibia was still known as South West Africa.
SWAPO has remained 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.
Namibia is a mining hotspot with significant deposits of diamonds and the electric car battery ingredient lithium.
In 2014, as the party comfortably won yet another vote, riding on the legacy of its role in the liberation struggle, Geingob became president.
In between top jobs, the composed yet stern talking leader who sported wide-rimmed glasses and a tuft of grey hair on his chin, held various ministerial and internal party positions.
But his first term as president was tainted by a recession, high unemployment and corruption allegations which threatened his chances of a second term.
But he was reelected in 2019 with 56 percent of vote - lower than the 87 percent he secured in 2014 when he was first elected. Namibia has seen economic progress during his second term.
Hitting out at Germany
He is often described as a pan-African leader given his struggle against colonialism and apartheid. Even when he became president, Geingob continued to fight the way Namibia's wealth remained concentrated in the hands of its white minority.
In January 2024, the Namibian leader condemned Germany’s decision to support ''the genocidal intent of the racist Israeli state against innocent civilians in Gaza.''
He was reacting to Germany's criticism of the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Mr Geingob reminded Germany of its genocide in his country more than a century ago. Germany had colonised Namibia.
''On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions,'' the Namibian Presidency said in a statement.
Health issues and football love
He suffered a couple of health scares in his later years, having undergone brain surgery in 2013. In 2015 after he became president, he announced that he had survived prostate cancer
He also underwent a heart valve surgery in South Africa in June 2023 before being diagnosed with cancer again in January 2024.
An avid football fan, he played the sport as a young man, which earned him the nickname "Danger Point".
He was married three times, in 1967, 1993 and again in 2015 and had as many children. His last wife, Monica Geingos, is a lawyer and businesswoman.
Following the death of President Geingob, Vice President Nangolo Mbumba has taken the helm in Namibia until presidential and parliamentary elections already scheduled for the end of the year. The late president was not among candidates in the forthcoming election.
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