Saint Obasanjo at 89: Flowers, thorns and the audacity of a full life
Let the people say amen or amin, because Nigeria’s most prolific moral authority, the Grand Preacher of Otta Farm, the self-appointed Conscience of the African Continent, the one and only
Let the people say amen or amin, because Nigeria's most prolific moral authority, the Grand Preacher of Otta Farm, the self-appointed Conscience of the African Continent, the one and only Chief Olusegun Mathew Okikiola Aremu Obasanjo, has clocked 89. Eighty-nine years! The ancestors clearly have a sense of humour, because they have kept alive the one man who has spent the better part of five decades alternating between saving Nigeria and tormenting it, sometimes doing both simultaneously in a day.
Let us give the man his flowers. He deserves them. Baba deserves a whole botanical garden, frankly. Here is a man of genuine historical stature, a military commander who won a civil war and then did something almost unheard of on a continent where soldiers tend to fall in love with power like teenagers with their first crush. In 1979, Olusegun Obasanjo handed power to a civilian government ,Shehu Shagari's making him only the second African military leader to do such a thing voluntarily. The continent applauded. The world applauded. Nigeria exhaled.
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Then, in the same breath, let us note that this same transition occurred after an electoral process so creatively managed that Obafemi Awolowo, one of Nigeria's finest minds, was mathematically kept from the presidency by a formula that would have baffled Pythagoras and Chike Obi. And Baba himself, in a moment of theatrical candour that historians have never quite forgiven, reportedly let it be known that the best man would not win. Not exactly the ringing endorsement of democratic sanctity one expects from the man conducting the handover. But then again, consistency was never the point, was it?
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The Obasanjo story is a paradox wrapped in a agbada with a protruding stomach, tied together with a military belt. He is, without question, a great Nigerian. He may even be the greatest Nigerian statesman of his generation. But he is also, without question, the man who presided over one of the most jarring human rights catastrophes of the post-independence era. On February 18, 1977, soldiers acting under his government descended on the Kalakuta Republic, the commune of the legendary Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. They burned it to the ground, beat residents, and threw Fela's 77-year-old mother, the irreplaceable Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, from a window. She died from her injuries. The government's response was a commission of inquiry that concluded, with astonishing creative licence, that the raid was carried out by "unknown soldiers." Unknown. Soldiers. In a country under military rule. Remarkable.
Then there were the Ali Must Go riots of 1978, when students protesting tuition hikes were met not with dialogue but with bullets. Young Nigerians, the future of the country Baba claimed to love, paid with their lives because they dared to speak. Let those names echo, even now.
But sarcasm demands we continue, because Obasanjo is not finished being interesting. After returning to civilian life and taking up residence at his Ota Farm, he became the country's most eloquent critic of every government that followed him. IBB's Structural Adjustment Programme? Obasanjo was appalled. The suffering of ordinary Nigerians? Unconscionable. He wrote. He lectured. He tutted. He was magnificent in his moral outrage.
Then 1999 happened, and Baba remembered he had left some things in Aso Rock.
Back he came, this time in a flowing agbada rather than military khaki, but the furniture arrangements were suspiciously familiar. The economic reforms of his second coming ,the privatisations, the policies, the programme that bore the fingerprints of the same Washington Consensus thinking he had denounced in IBB's era eroded Nigeria's middle class with an efficiency that would have made an IBB weep with professional admiration. Nigerians who had been comfortably managing found themselves managing considerably less comfortably. But we digress.
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One must also pause to appreciate Obasanjo's rich literary tradition of calling out hypocrisy in others. He famously lamented Nnamdi Azikiwe's fall from the Olympian heights of Zik of Africa to the more municipal designation of Owelle of Onitsha — a man, he implied, who had diminished himself by retreating into ethnic title-taking. This from the man who, upon completing his second term, accepted the chieftaincy title of Ebora of Owu with what one can only describe as serene irony.
And then there is the General Gowon matter. Obasanjo was famously acerbic about Gowon's brief civilian political ambitions, mocking what the Plateau-born general may have "forgotten in Aso Rock" — a residence, it bears noting, that Gowon never actually occupied, having governed from Dodan Barracks. The joke, therefore, was geographically imprecise and temporally awkward. Baba, undeterred, went ahead anyway. Then in 1999, he himself returned to Aso Rock, apparently having left considerably more items behind than anyone anticipated because it took two full terms to retrieve them all. And then he wanted a third term to look for more. It took the combined efforts of Ken Nnamani, the Senate, the Nigerian people, and what can only be described as a national intervention to inform him: Mba. Rara. Oti o.
Today, Saint Obasanjo is everywhere, preaching the gospel of democracy, lamenting the state of elections, calling leaders to account. His pen is on fire. His letters to sitting presidents are scripture. One listens with admiration until one's memory activates, and suddenly the 2003 elections materialise , that festival of creative result-writing. Then 2007 rises from the past like a bad jollof smell, elections so comprehensively rigged that even Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, the man who won them, stood before the nation and said, essentially, that he knew what had happened. Obasanjo's own defence at the time that even if Jesus Christ could not conduct clean elections in Nigeria remains one of the most audacious pieces of misdirection in the history of democratic theory.
The sponsored impeachments of Senate Presidents, Speakers, Governors , Chuba Okadigbo, Ladoja, Dariye, Fayose, Peter Obi are filed somewhere between "institutional consolidation" and "governance by political scorched earth." Today, remarkably, he sees these things differently.
But here is the truth underneath all the theatre: Obasanjo is genuinely great. Nigeria produced him and should acknowledge what that means that a man of this scale, this energy, this maddening contradictory brilliance, emerged from this soil. He could have been the greatest Nigerian statesman of all time without the asterisks. He chose, repeatedly, to be something more complicated.
At 89, he remains what he has always been: too large for simple praise, too consequential for simple condemnation.
Happy birthday, Saint Obasanjo.
May the remaining years be kinder to the rest of us.
