Former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo on Friday recalled his last days with late Major General Shehu Musa Ya’adua at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison, and how he turned down an offer by those he called “my international friends” to get him out of Yola Prison using commando style operation.
Obasanjo who spoke at the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the death of the late Yar’adua regretted that even though both of them strategized on how to move Nigeria forward while in prison, their strategy failed.
He added that his meeting with his former number two man at the Kirikiri prison could have been his greatest mistake.
Former Vice President and one of Yar’adua’s top political associate, Atiku Abubakar who is also the Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Shehu Yar’adua Foundation was conspicuously missing at the event, but his wife, Titi attended.
Speakers at the event included Sierra Leonian President, Ernest Bai Koroma who eulogised the late Tafidan Katsina for his selfless service to the country, while one of his course mates in the Army, Gen Paul Tarfa explained that the coup that toppled Yakubu Gowon was staged principally against the junta and not aimed at Gowon.
Obasanjo who said he shared a lot of good times with Yar’adua said “When Shehu died in prison, my international friends decided that they will use the commando plan to get me out of prison and they actually did make the plan, got the money and wanted to get an helicopter to get me out of Yola prison and take me to Cameroon.
“They sent a message to me and I told them, if you do, I will not get out of prison and that was when they dropped the idea of using commando effort to get me out of prison. That would have defeated what we stood for. We stood for Nigeria and we stood to face whatever consequences standing for Nigeria would cost us. It cost Shehu Yar’adua his life. Those of us who believe in what Shehu stood for that are still alive, the only thing that we can do is to allow the struggle to continue because we are not at the end of the struggle yet.
“If anything, we are at the beginning of the struggle. As Shehu said to his son, we want to bequeath to Nigerians, our children and our children’s children, a country that we can be proud of. We are not there yet. May God make us get there.”
The former President told the gathering that Shehu Yar’adua was the best deputy he could ever dream of saying “I could not have had a better deputy than Shehu Yar’adua.”
“When I was military Head of State, we had quite a number of exciting and serious times together that we shared. Let me give you a few of the times that are interesting and some that are also not very serious.
“One day I had cold and the doctor came to see me and I said to him, supposing this cold decided to take my life and I slump, what will you do. He said I will try first aid and I will do all I need to do to revive you. I said if you try that and it didn’t work, what will you do and he said, I will call the Chief of Staff.
“Just then, Shehu came in and I said Shehu, listen to what we were talking about and I relayed to him the discussion and told him, now that you have come in, I am here on the ground, what will you do. He said I have no problem with that, I will kick you with my military boot and say get up, this is your job.
“We had such an interesting time together. We also had difficult times together. We had to put our heads together and discuss on how we can handle the issue of transition and how to implement our own programmers and how to move Nigeria forward. We succeeded in doing what I believed was the right thing for the country at that time and putting in place a democratically eleted government.
“A few years after that, Shehu came to me in the farm and said he wanted to set up a grassroots party. He said from his study, he has discovered that Nigeria has never really had a truly grassroots party, not even NEPU.
“I asked him if there was anything he wanted us to do while in government that we did not do and he said no. I said I pray that this grassroots party that you want to build will succeed. I asked him, do you want to use this grassroots party to get into power?, he said not really, but if that turned out to be the case.
“Many members of that party have remained loyal to the group he set out to build. His ideals and what he stood for both when he was alive and when he departed.”
Obasanjo said Yar’adua lived a life of service, saying “those of us who know Shehu very well, know the type of man he was, the type of love he lived, his commitment to his family, to his religion, to his nation and his friends. When you asked the question, what is life, I think Shehu Yar’adua’s life typifies the answer to that question.”
“He lived his life and gave us eloquent answers about what life is and that is also evident from what we have seen here today. Twenty years after he passed on, we are here with his memory still green and fresh in all of us,” Obasanjo said.
