On September 29 in New York City, Namibian President Hage G. Geingob, Ph.D., will receive the Africa-America Institute’s 2015 Lifetime Achievement and Distinguished Alumnus award at the organization’s Future Leaders Legacy Fund Awards Gala. It is an acknowledgement of the president’s leadership in Namibia’s fight for independence and his pursuit of social and economic progress in that country, most notably in the sphere of education, during his decades-long engagement in politics and public service at home and at the United Nations.
“He is a true visionary, a model for African leaders,” AAI president and CEO Amini Kajunju said in a private exchange at South Africa’s National Heritage Day celebration in New York City last week.
Indeed, it is President Geingob whom African Business magazine chose for a one-on-one discussion of 21st Century Leadership with publisher and managing director Omar Yedder at its African Leadership Forum in New York City on September 24. As Africa enters globalization in the role of protagonist, the central question is leadership, the magazine posited in explaining the forum’s “Rethinking Leadership” theme. “Are African leaders facing the challenges and seizing the opportunities of globalization effectively?” it asked. “How do they build on Africa’s strengths and the benefits of globalization to ensure a sustainable improvement in the lives of African people?”
President Geingob, who served for 12 years as Namibia’s first prime minister and once as minister of trade and industry, contends that the prosperity of Namibia and wellbeing of its citizens takes precedence over all else. “I am building a Namibia house of different tribes, different ethnic groups. It can only work if there is a partnership in governance. You must be above tribalism,” he said at the Leadership Forum.
President Geingob holds a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University, New York; a master’s in international relations from The New School, New York; and a Ph.D. in politics from the University of Leeds, London. He likens nation building to building a house.
In building the Namibian house, he said in April in his first State of the Nation address as president, “we cleared the area with United Nations supervised elections. After which we drafted the constitution as our foundation. The bricks of our house are the different ethnic groups and the mortar is the various laws passed in Parliament to hold us together…We are determined to build a house that will be a place of peace and refuge for all its children and a house in which no Namibian will be left out.”
He has identified the nation-building priorities for Namibia as education, which he describes as “the greatest equalizer;” access to energy; food security; affordable housing; land and wealth distribution; protection of the environment; entrepreneurial activity, and job creation – not necessarily in that order. While he welcomes foreign investors and other partners in development, their engagement in Namibia must be on Namibia’s terms, he insists. One of those terms is the use of Namibian labor in investment projects.
“I am strongly against Chinese employees. We have high unemployment—27 percent. We are telling the Chinese they can bring any investor and management to control their money, but not ordinary workers. They responded positively,” he told a small invitation-only gathering during an investment mission to the United States in 2013, which he led in his capacity as prime minister. “In China, the Chinese say ‘whoever is here comes on our terms.’ That is what we don’t do in Africa. People just walk in on their own terms. So I told them you have to come to Namibia on our terms.”
At the same gathering, he explained the “willing-seller/willing-buyer” model he pursues to both redistribute to landless Namibians the 74 percent of the country’s best arable land held by 4,000 white farmers at the time of independence and address the nettlesome issues of rural flight and unchecked urbanization.
“We have taken a two-pronged approach to urbanization, training, and farm facilitation for those who want to go to the farms. Land, per se, is not the problem. It’s what you do with the land. You must live off the land not starve on the land,” he said.
Under the willing buyer/willing seller model, the government buys land from private farmers and settles people on it, notably poor people who own cattle. As of 2013, close to 7 million hectares of land were bought and settled in this way, Geingob said. He admits that the practice, which has been in effect since 1991, initially led to a drop in the value of farms because those who were settled lacked the necessary skills to maintain them. “If you settle people without skills they are not being helped. We made a mistake. We had to correct that mistake,” Geingob said.
The government now provides training for those who want to return to the land.
For a country that “used to be the dumping ground for South Africa,” where 100 percent of the meat and “even tomatoes came from South Africa,” food security is a primary concern, President Geingob says. If you don’t produce your own food you remain at the mercy of those who are feeding you, he argues.
The greatest challenge to nation building, however, has to do with changing the mindset of Namibians—bridging the “social gap,” he said at the African Business Leadership Forum.
It is a point he makes repeatedly. “Namibia is coming from apartheid. There is a social gap. The mentality has to change. You are trained so that you can be an employer and hire others, and not always to look for somebody to hire you. Our duty is to arm you—provide education and training, and then you must become a job creator,” he confessed to the gathering in 2013.
When President Geingob receives his AAI award on September 29, he will share the limelight with Zimbabwean technology entrepreneur and philanthrpist Strive Masiyiwa, founder and chairman of the global telecommunications group Econet Wireless and recipient of AAI’s 2015 Business Leader Award; and with IBM, winner of the 2015 Corporate Responsibility Award.
