Historic Moment: Namibia swears in first female president

Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah has officially taken office as Namibia’s first female president, marking a historic milestone as the nation’s fifth head of state.

The inauguration took place on Friday during Namibia’s 35th Independence Day celebration at the State House, where Chief Justice Peter Shivute administered the oath of office.

She will be facing it all with the additional burden of being only Africa’s second-ever directly elected female president and Namibia’s first female president.

“If things go well then it will be seen as a good example,” Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah told BBC’s Africa Daily podcast. “But if anything then happens, like it can happen in any administration under men, there are also those who would rather say: ‘Look at women!'”

The 72-year-old won November’s election with a 58% share of the vote.

Nandi-Ndaitwah has been a long-term loyalist of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) – which has been in power since the country gained independence in 1990 after a long struggle against apartheid South Africa.

She joined Swapo, then a liberation movement resisting South Africa’s white-minority rule, when she was only 14.

While the party has made changes and improved the lives of the black majority, the legacy of apartheid can still be seen in patterns of wealth and land ownership.

“Truly, land is a serious problem in this country,” she told the BBC ahead of the inauguration.

“We still have some white citizens and more particularly the absent land owners who are occupying the land.”

She adds that she is committed to the “willing-buyer, willing-seller” principle, which means no one is forced to sell up.

Namibia is a geographically large country with a small population of three million.

Government statistics show that white farmers own about 70% of the country’s farmland. A total of 53,773 Namibians identified as white in the 2023 census, representing 1.8% of the country’s population.

Namibia is one of the world’s most unequal countries, with a Gini coefficient of 59.1 in 2015, according to the World Bank, which projects poverty is expected to remain high at 17.2% in 2024.

The unemployment rate rose to 36.9% in 2023 from 33.4% in 2018, according to the country’s statistics agency.

Nandi-Ndaitwah said the economy, which partly relies on mineral exports, should work more on adding value to what the country extracts from the ground rather than exporting raw materials.

She also wants Namibia to focus more on creative industries and get the education sector to adjust to new economic realities.

Nandi-Ndaitwah is only the second African woman to be directly elected as president, after Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

The continent’s only other female president at the moment is Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan, who took up the role after her predecessor died in office in 2021.

Nandi-Ndaitwah wants to be judged on her merits, but she said that it was a “good thing that we as countries are realising that just as men [can do], women can also hold the position of authority”.

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