After poring over one of the popular newspapers in the ambience of his coppice in the remote village of Ibule, near Akure in Ondo State, this nonagenarian adjusted his spectacle, sipped his palm-wine and giggled. “Ah, this Obasanjo is a phenomenon; his middle name should be, Atanda Eniyan (a special being).” He said this to the delight of his other five buddies, gathered under a mango tree in the locality, the fateful evening, recently.
To be dubbed a special being comes with varied impressions but the philosophy behind the moniker is that such a personality cannot be ignored anywhere. That, perhaps, is the summary of the life of Olusegun Matthew Okikiola Aremu Obasanjo, retired Army General, former military Head of State, and former Civilian President of Nigeria.
Born on March 5, 1937 in Owu of the Egba ethnic stock of Abeokuta in the present-day Ogun State, Obasanjo took up a career in the military, and made waves with it. He joined the Nigerian Army in 1958 and got trained in the elitist Mons Cadet School, Aldershot, England; Royal College of Military Engineers, Chatham, England; School of Survey, Newbury, England; Indian Army School of Engineering, Poona; and the Royal College of Defence Studies, London.
As a lieutenant in 1960, Obasanjo was a leading member of the Nigerian contingent to Congo (then Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of Congo), before he became the unit commander of the then only engineering unit of the Nigerian Army.
Though he took up quite a good number of responsibilities in the military, and outside it, there were some appointments or deployments that marked Obasanjo out as either a man of unusual destiny or a playmaker of no mean repute.
For instance, while the civil war raged with virulence for a longish three years, with the Biafran side battling hard to sustain the fight, Obasanjo was in the trenches, as would any soldier in the call of duty, on the Nigerian side. While a name like Benjamin Adekunle ‘Scorpion’ took up the air waves as a gangling hero of war, killing so, so number, and finishing off the camps of “the enemies”, the name Obasanjo, merely featured as that of one of the senior officers in the ranks of the combatants.
But in the end, when the war crawled to an end, thrusting a pitiable specter of mass casualty on the Biafran side on the world’s psyche, Obasanjo was the man to whom the fighters submitted their arms in surrender. That particular role in history, however fortuitous, marked him out as a man of destiny.
Under the General Yakubu Gowon’s military administration, Obasanjo in 1975 bagged a critical appointment as federal commissioner for works and housing, at a time of the oil boom. His performance in the building of fanciful social infrastructure, and housing provision, helped shore up the popularity rating of the Gowon administration at the period, though there was a groundswell of opposition that Gowon was about transmuting himself to a sit-tight ruler.
That was on performance. A year after, however, circumstances of fate threw up OBJ, as the former president is fondly called, when a rapacious band of coup plotters, led by Lt-Col Buka Suka Dimka, waylaid the then Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed, and gunned him down, along with a few aides in what has remained one of the bloodiest military coups in the history of Nigeria. Obasanjo was actually one of the targets of the traducers but he was fortunate not to have crossed their path. However, the coup failed, as OBJ and the then Chief of Army Staff, General T.Y Danjuma, who could not be eliminated, took over communications and rallied soldiers to foil the putsch.
Following the killing of Murtala, Obasanjo who was his deputy, was appointed the Head of State. While in charge, he stuck to the promise made by Murtala that the military would hand over power to civilians in 1979; and pronto, the military, on October 1 of that year, marched back to the barracks. While as Head of State, OBJ regaled the nation with the Operation Feed the Nation programme, in which the government sought to re-awaken Nigerians’ waning interest in agriculture. It was the chummy era of the
oil boom.
After leaving power, Obasanjo did not just go to sleep. He became active in playing the role of a watchdog to those in power, not sparing them his candid views often being absorbed as scathing criticisms. When administrations of President Shehu Shagari, General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha were seen to have foundered, respectively, Obasanjo was on hand to pick his pen and write them letters. Open letters. Sometimes, he did same through verbal critique.
But OBJ met a grotesque reaction to his fatherly, excoriating role in Abacha’s peculiar persona. The military dictator did not waste time in arresting him and fetching him a ready-made crime in what has till date been known as the phantom coup episode. He was brought before a military tribunal, summarily tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. Following public outcries and allied global knocks, the capital sentence was commuted to 30 years imprisonment.
Save for the eventual death of Abacha in 1998, which fell as denouement to the wholly tragic trajectory of the annulled June 12 1993 election, the fate of Obasanjo would have tasked sundry imagination. That world’s best acclaimed poll, won by Chief M.K.O Abiola, was annulled by Babangida, before being smoked out of the stage for the interim administration of Ernest Shonekan. Abacha, hanging on in that contraption, soon egregiously snatched power from Shonekan, only 82 days after the latter was given power by
Babangida.
Set free by General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who succeeded Abacha, Obasanjo was soon drafted into the presidential race. He won and was president for eight years, having won a second tenure. In his eight-year stint, however, Obasanjo could be credited with various achievements. For instance, the General System for Mobile communication, GSM, was introduced to Nigeria during his tenure, while the touted war-against-corruption was given bite by his administration through the creation of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, and the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, ICPC. The need to ensure due process in the award of contracts, which must pass through the tender’s board was also on song. This is besides requisite infrastructural upgrades in different parts of the country.
Nonetheless, Obasanjo’s eight years in the saddle was not without its spars of public condemnations. For instance, the government came under attacks over its annihilating military responses to local insurrection in Odi and Zaki Biam communities of Bayelsa and Benue states, respectively.
Meanwhile, OBJ outside power, in the aftermath of his eight-year rule, remains defiant in writing open letters to oppose government’s policies he perceives as wrong. He wrote a letter to President Goodluck Jonathan while in office, and also last year, wrote to President Muhammadu Buhari. But in the meantime,
OBJ is being buffeted with a cocktail of derision from those who panther to the powers-that-be, wondering why he should hit the Buhari government where
it hurts.
But OBJ, the old fighter, author of five books detailing his memoirs and convictions, in turning 82 this week, seems boisterous with the hue that he remains his old self: unbowed, ‘uncowed’.
