The retired general, two time Head of State – a third unconstitutional attempt failed spectacularly at the senate of the federal republic – should be humble enough to pray to God to remove conceit far away from him rather than continue to pull others down, even posthumously.
Like him or hate him, the man, Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo, two-time Nigerian Head of State, is the ‘numero uno’ Nigerian statesman alive.
Although he is as loved as he is hated, those who like him do so with a passion. Witness, for instance, this panegyric of a contribution by a forum member on 9 December, 2013 : “As far as Nigeria’s presidents, past and present are concerned, none could be called into OBJ’s peerage. Reading OBJ from a distance, as I do not know him personally, I believe he is head and shoulders above all of them, civilian as well as military. He is intellectually sound and has a high capacity for understanding complex socio-political and economic issues. It doesn’t take him long to understand what the experts are explaining to him and can break it down into ordinary people’s language, and, in fact, go ahead to weave local proverbs around them. Being an engineer, he is easily at home with technical issues.
He is a prudent, and wise man by all measures. He has grown into the class of sages. We should celebrate him and his accomplishments while still alive and not wait to write funeral dirges about our own courageous, fearless and accomplished Chief Matthew Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo GCFR, former military head of state, two-term democratically elected president, retired army General, civil war hero, international diplomat, accomplished writer and author, committed Pan –Africanist; a leading light of the Yoruba race and traditional chief of the Owu kingdom. I will leave writing about his excesses, foibles and faults to his close friends and detractors alike. I admire his tough guy persona.”
There is little, if any at all, to dispute in the above, but it is somewhat disingenuous that the author preferred to inflict on Obasanjo’s friends, and foes alike, any mention of the man’s many stunts and excesses, not to talk of his outright dubiety. Although General Obasanjo’s name has become very popular, given his reported exploits during the Nigerian civil war, 6 July 1967 – 15 January 1970 – the reader is advised to read General Alabi-Isama’s: ‘The Tragedy of Victory: On-the-spot Account of the Nigeria-Biafra War in the Atlantic Theatre’, for a more nuanced account of that – I came to know the general, close up, a little later through a senior colleague, and Estate Manager, of the University of Ibadan in the mid-70s whose views of Obasanjo unambiguously mirrored Mama Iyabo’s about her husband. From that point on, I came to pay more attention to news concerning General Obasanjo, either as military or civilian Head of state, as a distinguished diplomat with his views on African juju, whether in Abacha’s gulag, or visiting Ekiti dancing ‘omo o le jo baba’ during Ayo Fayose’s first coming, and, seriously, up until his PDP membership card was torn to pieces for him by proxy.
As I write this, I have not stopped watching him, coyly scheming to play the baby feeder to President Buhari, albeit, from behind the shadows. Through all these, Chief Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo comes up, indisputably, as an enigma.
He showed his hands again this past week on a matter so weighty my life teacher – my teacher in the secondary school, at the university and ever since – a solid, gracefully aging intellectual, a Nigerian senior citizen whose sole concern now is aggressively canvassing ways out of Nigeria’s unfortunate circumstances – had to devote his entire column in The Nation of Thursday, 20 August, 2015, to the latest of Obasanjo’s gaffes ; his ever ready predilection to shoot down anything that does not revolve around him or present him as the hero.
Writing in an article he titled “Message to Obasanjo”, Gbogun Gboro began as follows: “I make it a point of duty to be respectful of President Olusegun Obasanjo, whether I happen to mention his name in public or in private. I am sure that is part of my respect for my country. For me, it is not a small thing that a person has once been
head of the country of my birth.” Obviously, this intro would have been non sequitor, if his subject was ever willing to extend the same measure of courtesies to others. Unfortunately, it would appear that Obasanjo considers extending respect to others as taking something away from his assumed self-importance. The columnist then went on:
“In the past few days, President Obasanjo has been widely reported to have made some thought-provoking statements about the issue of leadership in the Yoruba nation. I see no need to probe into his motives for making these statements – and I will not so probe, out of respect. Whether he is out to shoot barbs at some person or persons among the Yoruba people is not unimportant, but I choose not to step into such considerations. It is quite possible to look into the statements themselves on purely objective basis, and that is what I would rather do.”
Unfortunately, the Yoruba say, if you do not tell an evil doer that he is wicked, he would most probably consider himself the best person ever. I therefore make bold to say that Obasanjo, by that statement, was aiming at none other than the Avatar; the man believed by most, Nigerians as well as foreigners, and with utmost justification, to be Nigeria’s greatest political visionary ever, the man Awo. Nor would that be Obasanjo’s first time of taking a dig at Awo. In one of his books, written about the time he became quite close to the likes of Professor Billy Dudley of the University of Ibadan, he had written that what Awo longed for, futilely all his life – the Nigerian presidency, that is – was handed to him on a platter. Obasanjo did not stop there. When, as President, he went after Afenifere, the highly regarded Pan-Yoruba organisation, and shredded it beyond recognition, putting in its place a formless Yoruba Council of Elders, it was intended to rubbish a man whose place in history is far beyond diminution. When through all manner of subterfuge and dubiety, he literally killed off the Alliance for Democracy, with only the LagosState governor, Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, being the sole surviving governor out of six, in a thoroughly rigged election, it was for no other reason than to submerge an imperishable name with the hope of emerging primus inter pares, amongst Yoruba political leaders, even though he should come far below in the pecking order.
What then drives a man so truly blessed of God but who is forever looking for something? What exactly, like forever, puts him in a seeming competition with non-existent rivals? It is that elusive thing that pushed him to inflict on Nigerians, a decent, but obviously sick Yar Adua and, subsequently, Goodluck Jonathan, a man, the consequences of whose incompetence, as we are getting to see daily, President Buhari is almost guaranteed to spend his entire first four years in office cleaning up. For things to be otherwise, it would mean that Saraki and his friends in the National Assembly, support the president by effecting appropriate amendments to our extant weak anti-corruption laws; which weaknesses lawyers take undue advantage of to make cases seemingly unending.
Obasanjo makes so much of his belief in God that you would think he should have abandoned all these bush fires which can only end up diminishing him in the estimation of a citizenry which should, ordinarily, have nothing but the greatest respect and admiration for his services to Nigeria, warts and all. I have heard many attribute not less than 70 percent of Nigeria’s current woes to him which is why it is befuddling reading him present, as he did in his recent interview with Mojeed, to be the best thing to have happened to Nigeria, ever.
The retired general, two time Head of State – a third unconstitutional attempt failed spectacularly at the senate of the federal republic – should be humble enough to pray to God to remove conceit far away from him rather than continue to pull others down, even posthumously.
