(Bloomberg) -- Namibia’s President Hage Geingob, who served as the country’s first post-independence prime minister, has died. He was 82.

He passed away early Sunday in a hospital in Windhoek, where he was receiving medical treatment, the presidential office said in a statement on social media platform X. His wife and children were at his side.

Geingob had been treated for cancer in the US in late January, and he returned to Namibia on Jan. 31, the office said previously.

Geingob spent 27 years in exile lobbying against apartheid South Africa’s rule of his country, then known as South West Africa, returning home in 1989 as it transitioned to democracy. A top leader of the South West Africa People’s Organization, which won United Nations-supervised elections in November of that year, he joined calls for reconciliation after a protracted war between the nation’s colonizers and those who fought for its liberation.

Swapo secured 57% of the landmark vote, short of the two-thirds it needed to draft a new constitution on its own. Geingob was named chairman of the Constituent Assembly that saw the ruling party and opposition jointly craft an accord that became widely lauded for enshrining a universal franchise, independent judiciary and other human rights.

Political Comeback

Sam Nujoma, Swapo’s founding father, was sworn in as Namibia’s first president in March 1990, with Geingob as his prime minister. That partnership lasted 12 years until the relationship soured and Geingob quit the government. He reentered mainstream politics in 2004 and was elected president in 2014.

Born on Aug. 3, 1941, in the small northern town of Otjiwarongo, Geingob became politically active in the 1960s while studying teaching at college. He was expelled for protesting against the inferior education offered to black students by South Africa’s apartheid regime but was later readmitted, finished his course and taught at a primary school in central Namibia.

He soon became disillusioned with the system and went to Botswana where he served as Swapo’s assistant representative. In 1964, he moved to the US, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Fordham University and a Master’s Degree in International Relations from the New School for Social Research in New York.

He became a fierce critic of South Africa’s illegal occupation of Namibia and was instrumental in getting the UN General Assembly to recognize Swapo as the sole and authentic representative of the country’s people in 1976.

Campaign Leader

Geingob led Swapo’s 1989 election campaign and as prime minister set about modernizing the government, restructuring a fragmented administrative system into a unified national civil service and setting performance targets for government offices, ministries and agencies.

After his 2002 fall-out with Nujoma, Geingob turned down the role of local government minister and became executive secretary of the Global Coalition for Africa, a forum that examines social and development issues on the continent. He also obtained a doctorate from the University of Leeds in 2004 for his thesis on state formation in Namibia.

Geingob won a parliamentary seat in 2004 elections and began reascending through Swapo’s ranks. He served as trade and industry minister for four years before being reappointed prime minister in 2012. Swapo named him its presidential candidate for the 2014 elections and he beat eight rivals by a landslide to secure the post, replacing Hifikepunye Pohamba, who stepped down after serving a maximum two terms. Geingob took office the following year.

Geingob’s pledge to implement a development plan aimed at turning Namibia into an industrialized country by 2030 and reduce unemployment to less than 5%, from 29.6% in 2013, was set back by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and remains a work in progress. 

Funding Scandal

A report published in 2019 by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, WikiLeaks and the Icelandic public broadcaster RUV alleged that Geingob’s 2014 election campaign was funded by profits from the country’s fishing resources. He denied the allegations.

In 2021, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and The Namibian newspaper reported that Geingob allegedly instructed associates to divert funds from a state-run fishing company to bribe attendees of the Swapo electoral congress to vote for him in 2017. He again denied wrongdoing and brushed off calls to resign. 

Despite the scandals and one of the worst droughts in almost a century, Geingob won a second term in 2019, securing 56% of the vote.

Geingob married his wife Monica in 2015. He had three children from two previous marriages.

--With assistance from Kaula Nhongo.

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