Do we like them?

Do we like Hage Geingob?

Our score: 6 out of 10. A liberation-era statesman with a mixed record on LGBTQ+ rights and a corruption cloud he always denied, so a middling score.

Geingob grew up under South African rule of what was then South West Africa. He pushed back against apartheid from his school days and was forced into exile for almost three decades, mostly in Botswana and the United States. He studied at Fordham and later earned a PhD in the UK. He also represented the SWAPO liberation movement at the United Nations.

He came home in 1989, a year before independence, and became Namibia's first prime minister after SWAPO won the 1990 election. He served 12 years, returned to the job in 2012, and became president after SWAPO won in 2014. The Namibian describes him as a centrist, reassuring figure, though his first term was marked by recession, high unemployment and graft allegations.

The big stain is Fishrot. In 2019 leaked documents suggested officials took bribes from an Icelandic fishing firm for access to Namibian waters, and his vote share dropped from 87% to 56% at that year's election. In 2021 a joint OCCRP and The Namibian investigation reported a lawyer's claim that he told associates to divert money from the state fishing company Fishcor to buy votes at a party congress. Al Jazeera reported that he strenuously denied any implication, and the reports it cites show no court finding against him.

The other contested one is how he handled Germany's genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples. In a 2023 Paris lecture he said Namibia and Germany had reconciled substantially. He said apartheid was worse than the genocide, and he argued governments, not affected communities, should do the negotiating. Where you land depends on whether you read that as hard-headed statecraft or as brushing off descendants of the victims.

Nothing new has turned up on him lately beyond tributes. In February 2026 his widow said his legacy belongs to the whole nation, two years after his death.

The real good here is a life spent fighting for Namibia's freedom from exile and then running the country for decades. He also kept steady, centrist leadership through a long stretch of post-independence politics. That is real, but it isn't the charity-and-kindness story that earns a 10.