Over the past several years, especially during presidential election seasons, a war of words usually breaks out between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar, his vice-president. Obasanjo always fires the first salvo, presenting Atiku as the devil incarnate. But Atiku never shies away from responding in kind. The self-indulgent, long-running feud is frustratingly irritating because its genesis is clouded by a fog of deception. I take no sides, but, if truth be told, Obasanjo has a greater record of dissembling!
To be sure, Obasanjo’s place in Nigerian history is well established and settled, but utterly mixed. As a war commander, he played a critical role during the civil war, and as a military head of state, he kept a promise to hand power to a civilian government in 1979. Decades later, as a civilian president, Obasanjo was an outstanding public administrator who ran a truly effective government by leading some of Nigeria’s best and brightest technocrats to drive through and deliver real change: securing pivotal international debt relief, implementing major economic reforms and creating critical anti-graft agencies, such as the EFCC and the ICPC, although he sowed the seeds of their future failure by politicising them. So Obasanjo deserves credit for his roles in ending the civil war, in returning Nigeria to civil rule and, later as president, in sound economic management and institution building.
