Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has disclosed how a pre-dawn tour of villages around Ibadan, undertaken on the advice of elder statesman Chief Adebo, helped defuse a planned protest by the Agbekoya movement against the Land Use Decree of 1978.
He said the new decree survived stiff opposition from both the North and South to become one of the enduring pillars of Nigeria’s constitutional framework.
Obasanjo made the disclosure on Saturday at the public presentation of three books in honour of the former Head of State, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar (retd.), held at the Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, to mark Abubakar’s 84th birthday.
Recalling the climate of resistance that greeted the decree when it was promulgated during his military administration, Obasanjo said both the north and south opposed the idea immediately.
“When the Land Use Act was promulgated as a decree, a colleague came to me and said nobody liked it. The North didn’t like it, the South didn’t like it,” he recalled.
