Olusegun Obasanjo: The Good but unknown Values
By Reno Omokri
In terms of transparency, there is no past Head of State or former President as clean as former President Olusegun Obasanjo. This is a man I have studied as if he were a PhD dissertation of which I was a candidate.
It hurts me to see such a man, who sacrificed much for Nigeria in peacetime and war, to be so maligned by persons who may not know the extent to which he has suffered to see the betterment of Nigeria.
With regard to self-enrichment, it is evident that President Obasanjo did not engage in such acts. In proof, I offer the fact that it is documented that on Friday, May 7, 1982, General Obasanjo was suffering from heavy indebtedness to some banks, including the United Bank for Africa, and had reached a state of almost insolvency that he wrote to his former colleague, Chief Samuel Ogbemudia (this was before Ogbemudia was elected Governor of Bendel), seeking a loan of ₦80,000 to rescue him from his dire financial straits.
It is a desperate letter, which still exists.
To the best of my knowledge, Chief Obasanjo is the only former Nigerian leader at the national level who, upon leaving office, wrote to the government requesting that auditors be sent to audit him. It is not mandated. It is not in the service rules or guidelines. It is a burden that he voluntarily placed on himself.
Believe it or not, Mr Obasanjo wrote letters to the government he headed rejecting allowances that were paid to him on the basis that he was not entitled to them—letters which still exist.
And upon leaving office on May 29, 2007, I am aware that former President Obasanjo owed substantial sums to Nigerian banks that had financed his agricultural projects with loans.
He has a face which belies his intelligence. But if you ever have the fortune of reading his penmanship, you would realise that he has an intellect that is so well curated that you could fall in love with it, whatever your gender.
It fills me with such pride that the Nigerian Army could produce a man like Olusegun Obasanjo.
I was personally handed some of his handwritten letters by Stephen Akiga of blessed memory in 1999. They are in my house in California. I have scarcely read anything as profound as those letters.
And if you have read, as I have, some of the letters exchanged between Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu and Mr Obasanjo, you may wish to fast and pray to have a friend in need as decent and reliable as Obasanjo.
Obasanjo did not refer to Nzeogwu’s father as Mr Nzeogwu. He referred to him as his own father. He called him ‘Dad’. And from his meagre salary as a Major, he looked after Nzeogwu’s parents and siblings throughout their lives.
When he was released from prison by General Abdulsalami Abubakar in June 1998 after a mystical incarceration lasting exactly three years, three months and three weeks, one of his first ports of call was to visit Nzeogwu’s mother at Okpanam, an Igbo-speaking town in Delta State.
If you were to choose between having a flesh-and-blood brother from the same parents and having a friend like Chief Obasanjo, it would be in your own best interest to choose the latter, because he is the type of man of whom the author of the Book of Proverbs wrote when he said:
“One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” – Proverbs 18:24.
Lastly, I have another reason for being fond of Chief Obasanjo. As far back as the late seventies, while he was military Head of State, he inspired my late mother to start dressing me up in Aso Ofi (Aso Oke), a passion that I have retained to date.
