A few weeks back, the founding president of Nigeria’s post-military Fourth Republic, retired general Olusegun Obasanjo, celebrated his eighty seventh birthday amidst pomp and pageantry. The encomiums and plaudits were rousing and heartfelt in most cases.
One must have missed the one from the presidency. Nevertheless, the birthday boy excitedly soaked it all up. Obasanjo does not do things in half measure. Still full of energy and spunk although obviously losing volume capacity to advanced years, the birthday boy took to the floor capering, cantering and gamboling to the ecstatic delight of swooning admirers.
Many of our ardent readers have been urging us to write about General Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo arguably the most successful soldier-politician thrown up by the turbulent milieu of Nigeria’s post-Independence politics while not actively taking part in any coup except by passive connivance. That happened on the night General Gowon was deposed when by his own admission the then Colonel Abdulahi Mohammed informed him that Gowon was a goner.
When the columnist declined citing such interventions as strategically unhelpful and a needless foray into political controversies, the more vehement insist that not doing so is a willful abdication of national responsibility. One of the readers, probably too young or too obsessed with social media trivia, put the reluctance to rank cowardice or the “parapo” politics of the Yoruba people.
One can now reveal publicly for the first time that some while ago, one had been approached by a publisher and journalist, one of the finest in the land, to review an autobiographical expose written by Obasanjo’s estranged first wife, Madam Oluremi Obasanjo nee Akinlawon.
Hell indeed hath no fury than a woman full of righteous indignation. The book was so filled with incandescent rage and brimming with such insalubrious and salacious details that one had to decline reviewing .There must always be a limit to stirring up public obloquy.
Given the circumstances which threw him up as an arms bearer of the colonial oligarchy and a postcolonial military institution that owed its originating summons to plunder and rapine of the local populace, Obasanjo has led a charmed life. Napoleon Bonaparte once noted that he valued luck above competence when it came to rating his generals. Obasanjo has been a very lucky man indeed.
The colonial progenitor of that protocol of violence, the redoubtable Colonel Fredrick Lugard, pacified everything that could be pacified among the natives in Nigeria until he met his match in the Lagos coastal elite who fought him toe to toe until he was recalled after succumbing to a nervous breakdown which had its origins in an earlier disastrous tour of duty in India. He had fallen in love with a married woman.
There are some exceptional figures of history, extraordinary personages whose personal conduct does not fit the prism of conventional ethical framework or mundane moralism. Obasanjo may well be one of these. Charles De Gaulle, the great French wartime leader, military genius, philosopher, muse of history and extraordinary prose stylist, called them “sacred monsters” obviously including himself.
But De Gaulle was an abstemious moralist, a prude, and a stirring ethicist whose personal conduct in politics remains unimpeachable. During one of those long nights of intense contemplation with Andre Malraux, his beloved Minister of Culture and intellectual confidante, De Gaulle advanced the thesis that in France’s darkest hour of need circumstances always combine to throw up the right leader to lead the French people. As proof, he cited the example of Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Napoleon and himself by honourable extension.
We are talking of organic nations whose nationhood has been refined and processed through test, tribulations and triumphs across age and time and not artificial nations clumsily and inexpertly cobbled and glued together by colonial meddlers whose sole motivation appears to be overseas profit. Inorganic nations are only lucky to get it right once in a while by trial and often egregious error.
The circumstances could not have been more disheartening in military-dominated postcolonial societies particularly in Africa. With their residual discipline, superior psychological stamina and reputation as professional managers of the instruments of violence and coercion on which the state relies, it was very easy for the early military conquerors of Nigeria to impose their will and whimsies on a demoralized, disorganized and disoriented political class.
Watching the military consolidate their political annihilation of the Nigerian political class with the ascendancy of General Ibrahim Babangida was like watching some cruel blood sports whose outcome had been known beforehand. It was said that when some of Chief Awolowo’s surviving disciples approached him that something queasy and unsettling was unfolding the old sage from Ikenne simply told them that they would have problems with the young man. The titan promptly took his terminal exit.
Thereafter, Babangida proceeded to banning , unbanning and debarring them from political participation in a war of attrition, exhaustion and intimidation which left them in complete disarray even as the now retired Brigadier Shehu Yar’Adua, a genius of feeding logistics and complex transportation, steamrolled them in their own electoral backyard.
Meanwhile, the wily Owu general who would later profit most from the rout of the ancient political class was already lurking with intent closely monitoring the outcome of the struggle and the disposition of troops. Occasionally as the blood flowed, he would issue a note of caution and dismay even while being secretly thrilled by the comeuppance of the ancient Yoruba political class with their progressive claptrap and discomfiting self-regard.
Cavorting and carousing with a man with such overawing credentials without taking the necessary precautions is like going to battle armed with a gold fountain pen. The pen will be used in drafting the obituary. Obasanjo is a man with formidable cunning and extraordinary native intelligence whose sleepy stare must not be misconstrued for loss of appetite for psychological profiling. Given to bucolic banters when truly in his elements, the earthy ribaldry can also be a staging post for deep psychic sieges. Even a casual meal is an opportunity for a psych-op.
If you rub Obasanjo the right way or if he takes a personal liking to you on the basis of antecedents, he can be such a wondrous and entertaining host. Meeting up with such a larger than life behemoth, a fascinating and intriguing personality can be a moveable feast of outlandish humour and rare historical vignettes.
Our first meeting took place on a bright early October morning in some inner lobby of his vast farming estate otherwise known as Temperance Farm. One had arrived quite early for a meeting of Obasanjo’s baby, the Africa Leadership Forum, not knowing that the meeting had been rescheduled. The cancellation turned out to be fortuitous, affording one an excellent opportunity for a close up with the redoubtable master of political intrigues. In his rugged farmers’ outfit, the former military head of state cut the figure of bucolic peace and rustic contentment.
“Ha, welcome, please have a seat. You know when you write, you remind me of people like Stanley Macebuh, Dele Cole and, and, and that other one they letter-bombed”, he opened with a deadpan expression which was truly chilling in its remarkable sangfroid.
Ha? Alarm bells started ringing immediately. His oblique reference to Dele Giwa, the master journalist and exquisite prose craftsman, was even more destabilizing. Dele Giwa in his usual boyish enthusiasm and excitability had told this columnist of sleeping on the same bed with the general any time they went up to the farm to spend time with him. If barely five years after his assassination he was now being casually added to the grim statistics of state elimination, then God help us in this new venture. One chose to ride the bump.
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As the conversation wore on with entertaining diversions from his farmhands including one of Ghanaian extraction who had been accused of filching a couple of eggs, one noticed a slight discomfiture. Apparently, the old general occasionally enjoyed taking his breakfast on the bare floor but did not want to be marked down for uncouth and uncivilized conduct by his new friend who from all appearances and name must be an urban sophisticate from the bowels of Victorian Lagos. The general decided to take the siege to his visitor.
“By the way doctor, where exactly are you from?” he suddenly demanded.
“My place is somewhere between Ibadan and Ile-Ife”, one answered casually and offhandedly. The general felt relieved as the burden of expectation evaporated.
“Is that so? Oh my God!! Please bring my food o jare!!! I thought it was all this Savage, Fernandez, Macgregor, Vera-Cruz, Bucknor and and Eric Moore,” the general exploded in bucolic mirth. But his mood darkened immediately as he remembered one big man from one’s town who had maltreated his niece in the course of a turbulent marriage which broke up eventually.
“Amoo, iyekan re se mi”(I have been offended by one of your kinsmen) the general rumbled in his deep Owu accent. “ One hands over one’s niece in marriage only for her to be treated so shabbily, so badly”. Luckily it was time to go on an expedition of the permanent site of Bells’ University.
On a different occasion at the Gateway Hotel after a particularly bruising exchange between this columnist and Professor Akin Mabogunje about the usefulness of SAP and its allied belligerent regimen as well as the value of academic collaboration with an authoritarian military regime bent on presenting the nation with a democratic debacle, the general, our host, snatched the microphone.
Clearing his throat rather lustily, he began: “ I thank those of you who are in government. I also thank those of you who have been in government”. Then shooting a wink in one’s direction, he delivered the hefty punch line. “And I also thank those of you who will never be in government!!”. When one later walked up to him and demanded clarification, he erupted in boyish self-amusement. “Your views are too radical”.
Almost thirty five years later, it is no longer a question of who is right but who is left after the piecemeal devastation and despoliation of the nation on the economic, spiritual and political front. The general himself has been to prison and had emerged triumphant as a two-term president of post-military Nigeria. But you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam.
Obasanjo’s last three attempts to bend the nation to his procrustean will have ended in political disasters. First was his bid to alter the constitution to gift himself a third term which was an epic fiasco. Second were his two attempts to galvanize the nation in a political direction dictated by himself. They unraveled catastrophically. A nation is not a military garrison. That is history talking back to him without embellishment or recourse to self-help.
It has been an epic slog to military and political stardom. The Owu-born general is definitely a titan of modern Nigerian history, but a severely flawed one at that. Now that all passion is spent, the old man owes the nation that has given him so much a parting gift. He should embark on a reconciliation drive with all known and unknown adversaries, which is the prerequisite for the elite cohesion Nigeria needs for open heart surgery. That is the path of honour and higher statesmanship. Many happy returns, sir.
