Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, a gruff, combative ex-general, has just come out of his toughest year in politics but as polling day looms he is confident of re-election.
As election year dawned the thick-set, straight-talking leader of Africa’s most populous country still looked deceptively vulnerable to the attacks of his growing band of enemies within Nigeria’s ruling elite.
But behind the public rows and impeachment threats within his own party, his coalition of self-interested power politicians was clicking into place. He now looks set to win comfortably April 19’s election.
The 65-year-old campaigner, a former military dictator and veteran of the Biafran war, hopes the vote will confirm his hoped-for status in history as the man who brought democracy back to Nigeria.
Obasanjo was born on March 5, 1937, in Abeokuta, a market town in southwest Nigeria, homeland of his people, the Yoruba. He passed directly from school into military training, including a spell in Britain, and thence into a military career.
He was a Christian and a southerner in an army led by the northern Muslim elite, but again and again he turned out to be in the right place at the right time, and rose almost effortlessly to the top.
He came to national prominence at the end of the 1967-1970 civil war when he was the commander on hand to accept the battlefield surrender of the separatist Biafran forces.
After the war he in 1975 became chief of army staff to then military ruler Murtala Muhammad. Barely a year later his mentor was killed in a failed coup, and Obasanjo was standing by to take over.
As Nigeria’s ruler between 1976 and 1979, Obasanjo seemed set in the same brutal mould as his country’s other dictators before and since, and he stands accused of many rights abuses.
Most infamously, his troops invaded the Lagos home of the popular singer Fela Kuti, the world famous pioneer of Afrobeat, and threw his mother from a first floor window, leaving her fatally injured.
But in 1979, in a first for Africa, Obasanjo handed over power voluntarily to an elected civilian government. He retired to run the extensive farms he had acquired in office, taking with him several wives married under various Nigerian rites and a large group of children.
He polished his memoirs and took up posts on prestigious international commissions, until in 1993 he ventured back into the political battlefield with public criticism of the military dictorship of Sani Abacha.
He was accused of plotting a coup, jailed in 1995 and held until 1998, when Abacha died. It was Obasanjo’s unique status as a military strongman with a history of supporting democracy that raised such high hopes in 1999 when his election ushered in what Nigerians still call their ”democratic experiment”.
He began with a flourish, sacking 100 high-ranking military and civilian profiteers, promising an anti-graft crusade and setting about restoring Nigeria’s battered image around the world.
As the world’s most travelled head of state in office, he criss-crossed the planet seeking to rehabilitate Nigeria as a leader on its continent and a friend to the international community.
His reward was to see Nigeria’s stock rising and to see himself hailed in international fora as a leader of homegrown development initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. But at home, the problems of an impoverished and divided nation of 120 million people were proving more intractable.
According to the World Bank the return of civil rule did nothing to stem Nigeria’s descent into poverty, and more than two-thirds of the people in Africa’s largest oil exporter now live on less than a dollar per day.
At the same time, Obasanjo’s much heralded anti-corruption battle has made no headway. His anti-graft panel has won no high-profile convictions and foreign observers still regard his country as deeply corrupt.
Since his election, regional and ethnic strife has exploded and more than 10 000 people have been killed in mob violence. Last year Obasanjo’s ruling party lawmakers rebelled over his imperious refusal to accept parliament’s budget, threatening to impeach him.
The old campaigner’s blunt style had exacerbated the row, but he toughed it out, gambling that his enemies would prefer to be attached to a winning ticket in 2003 than be exposed alone to the dangers of democracy. Few would bet against him now. – Sapa-AFP