Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah Elected First Female President Of Namibia

Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah made history on December 3, 2025, after being elected as the first female president in the history of Namibia.

Nandi-Ndaitwa, nicknamed NNN, recorded 57% of votes in the South African country’s election to beat her main rival, Panduleni Itula, who got 26% of votes cast, according to the country’s electoral commission.

Itula and his opposition party, the Independent Patriots for Change (IPC), have rejected the election results, describing it as “deeply flawed,” and vowed to challenge it in court.

Nandi-Ndaitwah, 72, has earned a reputation as a nationalist and being at the fore of movements aimed at making life better for Namibians.

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Born as the ninth of thirteen children to an Anglican clergyman in the northern village of Onamutai in 1952, she joined the ruling Swapo Party at just the age of 14, a time when Namibia was known as South West Africa and occupied by South Africa.

Swapo was a movement resisting apartheid rule in South Africa when she joined, and she was made the leader of the Youth League.

While in high school, Nandi-Ndaitwah was arrested and detained during a crackdown on Swapo activists, forcing her to flee the country and join the movement’s members in exile.

She was strongly interested in the independence of Namibia and continued with the resistance struggle while in Zambia and Tanzania before leaving for the United Kingdom to obtain a degree in International Relations.

In 1988, 14 years after she went into exile, Namibia was granted independence, and she returned to the country to join the post-independence government run by Swapo.

She has held a number of positions and ministerial roles in the country’s foreign affairs, tourism, child welfare, and information ministries.

Nandi-Ndaitwah earned a reputation as a women’s rights advocate in Namibia through reforms such as pushing for the Combating of Domestic Violence Act in the National Assembly in 2002 and criticizing her male colleagues for trying to ridicule the reform while reminding them that the Swapo constitution condemns sexism.

Prior to her election as president, Nandi-Ndaitwah, who is married to Namibia’s former chief of defence forces, Epaphras Denga Ndaitwah, became vice president of Namibia in February 2024, after the death of President Hage Geingob, whose vice president, Nangolo Mbumba, became president.

She has pledged to lead the economic transformation of Namibia.