By Anyang’ Nyong’o
When General Olusegun Obasanjo agreed to come to Nairobi to launch Raila Amolo Odinga’s autobiography, Raila Odinga: The Flames of Freedom, few thought he would make it to Nairobi specifically for this purpose. But he did. Breaking his travels around the globe to fulfill this obligation is actually quite typical of the General who is comfortable and relaxed in any company: young, old, professional, political, diplomatic you name it.
I first knew the General at a personal level in the late eighties while I was the head of programmes at the African Academy of Sciences. He was a good friend and colleague of the Academy’s president, the late Prof T. R. Odhiambo. The academy, and Obasanjo’s Africa Leadership Forum, was engaged in a dialogue on how to end hunger in Africa. Having founded the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), Prof Odhiambo, or T.R. as he was fondly known, gathered together several African thinkers, policy makers and researchers to think through this problem and provide a road map for African governments.
The General, and Sierra Leonean scholar, Godfrey Lardner, were among those who thought through “the African Crisis” of the late eighties. The book that T.R. and I edited, Hope Born Out of Despair, was the synthesis of these discourses. Noting that Nigeria had wrongly pursued dependence on oil revenues to feed itself, Obasanjo warned the rest of the African countries, with or without oil deposits, to avoid “the curse of oil”. He had become a farmer in his own village in Abeokuta, Ogun State, South West Nigeria, after voluntarily handing over power to civilian rule in 1979, so as to show Nigerians that another Nigeria that could feed herself was possible by revitalising domestic agriculture.
No wonder that in 1990 Obasanjo was awarded the Africa Prize for Leadership for the Sustainable End of Hunger. In a recent state banquet in the city of Jos, Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, showered the General with remarkable praise for his contribution to democratisation in Nigeria.
But when the General ran for the Nigerian presidency in 1999, he was actually caught off guard for a comment he had made earlier when Yakubu Gowon attempted a dash for the presidency for a second time in 1993. At that point in time Obasanjo had chastised Gowon, asking him “what did you forget to take from the State House that you have to go back there?” Five years later, when he himself was now attempting to do exactly what he had criticised Gowon for, he had this to say: “I have not forgotten anything. I do not regret leaving power. What I left behind and should have been taken care of has all been destroyed.”
His mission, he argued, was “to bring Nigeria out of the mess it had been put into by a succession of corrupt army dictators”. All through his professional and political career, Obasanjo has never let go his intellectual contribution to political, social, economic and diplomatic affairs.
“My Command,” his own account of the civil war in Nigeria and his contribution to maintaining Nigeria’s unity, still stands out as an important contribution to scholarship and the study of Nigerian politics since it was published in 1980.
Having spent some time at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Ibadan in the 1980s, he developed the passion for putting his thoughts on paper, thereby publishing numerous books and articles, quite often appearing in such international journals as “Foreign Affairs,” “Foreign Policy”, “Review of International Affairs”, and “New Perspectives Quarterly.”
As head of the Africa Leadership Forum, Obasanjo led a group of 15 African leaders in 1994 to Singapore to participate in what was dabbed “the Singapore-Africa Encounter”. I had the rare opportunity, as a young legislator in the Kenyan National Assembly to be part of the African team.
Lee Kwan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore, took us through a two-hour speech without notes, recounting how Africa had missed several opportunities, which Singapore had seized.
Obasanjo engaged the doyen of Singaporean politics in an amazing discussion on issues of leadership and what Africa could put in place however late we were to start compared to Singapore. He was later to try some of these under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and Africa Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) with his colleague presidents Wade of Senegal, Mbeki of South Africa and Bouteflika of Algeria. But his time was over before the “flames of development” could be fully lit in Africa through the Nepad theses and the APRM.
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