Presidents Ruto and Samia Suluhu in Namibia for Hage Geingob’s funeral

President William Ruto arrived in Namibia on Saturday for the funeral of President Hage Geingob. Geingob died at Lady Pohamba Hospital in capital Windhoek on February 4.

The service was at the Independence stadium. Geingob will be buried at the Heroes’ Acre on Sunday. The body lay in state at Parliament Gardens from Friday till Saturday.

Other leaders from East Africa who attended the ceremony were Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan and Evariste Ndayishimiye of Burundi. Suluhu was accompanied by former president Jakaya Kikwete and ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party vice-chairman Abdulrahman Kinana.

Twenty-seven countries sent delegations to the funeral. The US was represented by Secretary of Interior, Deb Haaland and Ambassador Randy Berry.

Special Envoy and Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Jiang Zuojun was in Windhoek too while the Algerian delegation was led by People’s National Assembly President Brahim Boughali.

Nigeria’s Senate President Godswill Akpabio led a presidential delegation to the funeral.

In a statement, Eseme Eyiboh, special adviser on media to Akpabio, said President Bola Tinubu appointed the Senate president as special envoy and leader of the Nigerian delegation to the event.

Eyiboh said the trip is aimed at demonstrating Nigeria’s solidarity with Namibia’s government and its people.

Other members of the delegation are Zephaniah Jisalo, Minister of Special Duties and Inter- Governmental Affairs, and Ya’u Shehu Darazo, Special Adviser to the President on Political Affairs.

Finnish President Sauli Niinistö also attended the funeral. The President’s programme included a lunch hosted by Nangolo Mbumba, the President of Namibia.

The two are expected to hold bilateral talks.

President Niinistö and President Geingob met for the last time during the funeral of Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari in Helsinki in November 2023.

Niinistö had made a state visit to Namibia in April of the same year.

Geingob had been in charge of the Southern African Development Community and Comesa at the time of his death.

He died weeks after being diagnosed with cancer.

Geingob led the sparsely populated and mostly arid southern African country since 2015, the year he announced he had survived prostate cancer.

Mbumba was sworn in hours after Geingob’s death was announced. Presidential and parliamentary elections will be held towards the end of this year.

A presidency post on X did not give the cause of death, but late last month the office said Geingob had flown to the US for “a two-day novel treatment for cancerous cells” following a check-up.

Born in 1941, Geingob was a prominent politician even before Namibia achieved independence from White minority-ruled South Africa in 1990.

He chaired the organisation that drafted Namibia’s constitution, then became its first prime minister at independence on March 21 of that year, a position he retained until 2002.

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 since independence. The former German colony is technically an upper middle-income country but one with huge disparities in wealth.

 “There were no textbooks to prepare us for accomplishing the task of development and shared prosperity after independence,” Geingob said in a speech to mark the day in 2018.

 “We needed to build a Namibia in which the chains of the injustices of the past are broken.”

Geingob served as Trade and Industry Minister before becoming PM again in 2012.

He won the 2014 election with 87 per cent of the vote but only narrowly avoided a runoff in November 2019.

That election followed a government bribery scandal, in which officials were said to have awarded horse mackerel quotas to Iceland’s biggest fishing firm, Samherji, in exchange for kickbacks.

The following year, Geingob lamented that Namibia’s wealth still remained concentrated in the hands of Whites.

 “Distribution is an issue, but how do we do it?” Geingob asked in a virtual session at an event organised by international organisation Horasis.

 “There is a racial issue here, a historical racial divide. Now you say we must grab from the Whites and give it to the Blacks? It is not going to work.”

His comments came after the government rescinded as unworkable a policy that would have made it mandatory for White-owned businesses to sell a 25 per cent stake to Black Namibians.