Geingob: A friend of Botswana
Mbongeni Mguni | Monday February 12, 2024 06:00
Geingob passed away last week and is profoundly mourned beyond his home-soil, no more so than in Botswana, a country he had a particularly close relationship with, stemming back decades to the days of the struggle against apartheid. In 2016, on his first State visit to Botswana after becoming Namibian president the previous year, Geingob regaled local legislators with an account of how he and a few of his compatriots, walked, ran and hitchhiked their way out of apartheid Namibia, across the border and all the way to Francistown. The plan was for Geingob to travel from Francistown to the regional freedom fighters’ hub of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on a flight chartered by South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC). However, as detailed by local historian and former presidential spokesperson, Jeff Ramsay, last week, apartheid agents bombed Geingob’s plane at the Francistown Airport.
“He was scheduled to join other ANC and SWAPO members on a flight to Dar es Salaam,” Ramsay wrote on his social media, in a short profile on the late leader. “Early in the morning of August 29, 1963, the very day of the plane’s scheduled take off for Tanganyika, there was a massive explosion at the Francistown Airport.
“The chartered freedom plane, an East Africa Airways Dakota VPKJT, was complete destroyed.” According to Ramsay, Geingob ended up spending several more months in Francistown, helping other refugees as the assistant SWAPO representative before leaving Botswana in 1964 to take up a scholarship in New York. From that scholarship, Geingob would further his studies, gain promotion within SWAPO, strengthen his political muscles and in 1990, 28 years after hitchhiking to safety in Botswana, he would be sworn in as Namibia’s first prime minister. Before Parliament in 2016, Geingob gave a much briefer, but more colourful synopsis of the role Botswana played in his political career. On that bright, but chilly day in July, Geingob was welcomed to the National Assembly by the then Vice President and Leader of the House, Mokgweetsi Masisi, a close friendship that has endured and only gotten tighter over the years. I never personally, one-on-one, had the opportunity to talk to President Geingob. But as a long-form journalist covering the economy and other local and regional issues, it was inevitable that I would report on him quite a bit. Such was his presence in regional affairs that it was near impossible to not encounter him while writing anything to do with bilateral or regional affairs. His close relationship with Botswana also meant more opportunities for engagements where he featured. Through these engagements, it was equally impossible not to notice his way with words, a forthright, bold approach journalists often refer to as “shooting from the hip”. This approach was most frequently on show when he spoke about issues close to his heart, such as pan-Africanism and the fight against neo-imperialism in all its manifestations. His eloquence, passion and forthrightness in defence of Africans was on display in May 2019 at the Elephant Summit in Kasane called by President Masisi to map out a regional solution to the overpopulation of elephants. “I listened this morning to all the experts lecturing us and I wanted to ask where they come from. If they are from Europe or US, I wanted to ask them how they destroyed all their elephants, but come to lecture us. “We have a problem because we have managed to protect ours. Our success is now our problem. “We should actually be going to Europe and telling them how to manage elephants.” Even as more conservations experts at the Summit stood up to offer their insights on elephants, Geingob stuck to his guns.
“The UK has the British Lions as their national rugby team, but they have no lions. They must come and learn how to manage wildlife here. “Europeans come to Namibia and we roll out the red carpet to them with no visas, but for us when we go there, we are harassed. “This issue of harassing fellow Africans and giving the red carpet to Europeans must stop.” In this particular aspect of his personality, Geingob’s approach echoed his close ally, Masisi’s own steadfastness when engaging on certain cardinal issues. As he fought an international backlash to the reintroduction of hunting in Botswana, Masisi was similarly plainspoken. “Why are you afraid to call it what it is,” he asked local journalists when he returned from an international trip where the hunting issue had once again been brought up. “It’s a racist onslaught. It’s racism. “They talk as if we are the grass the elephants eat. “It startles me when people sit in the comfort of where they are and lecture us about the management of species they don’t have.”
Geingob and Masisi’s close friendship extended far beyond one issue. The two leaders’ relationship was clearly based on shared economic, cultural and historical interests. As Ramsay explains, all three post-Independence Namibian presidents were at some point in exile in Botswana and understood the rich economic, cultural and social ties the countries share. “Geingob recognised that very much,” Ramsay said yesterday. For Masisi, Namibia is a key ally in areas such as wildlife management, logistics, water resources, seaport access and more broadly, trade. In fact, just a month ago, the late leader revealed that he was counting on Botswana as a partner to resolve grievances the smaller Southern African Customs Union (SACU) nations have against South Africa. In December, Geingob told his last press conference that he and Masisi, the biggest of the smaller nations in SACU, were strategising on how to get their concerns addressed in the organisation. “SACU involves five countries and two are completely together,” Geingob told the media early in December at a Windhoek briefing monitored by Mmegi.
“We and Botswana have the same views and it’s a question of Lesotho as you know they have a very difficult situation dependent totally on South Africa, and Eswatini is also similar. “So two of us are talking and we are not happy and if you are not happy and you are planning, you cannot come to the public and say ‘I’m going to do this and this’.” “It’s like what Americans do when they are trying to attack people and they say ‘on such and such a day we will come from the left direction and hit you’.” “We are not like that.” The characteristic forthrightness, eloquence and colour was again on display. A month before his health took a turn for the worse, Geingob was still fighting for the two countries’ shared interests, a true friend of Botswana.