”I did my best,” Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said in an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP) as he looked back on eight years in office and rejected foreign and domestic criticism of the country’s flawed polls last weekend.
”The day I meet God I’ll tell him: not everything was perfect, but I did my best,” the president said in his office late on Wednesday, summing up his achievements at the helm of Africa’s biggest oil producer.
The outgoing president, who last year tried unsuccessfully to change the Constitution to get a third term in office, assured AFP he would leave on May 29 as planned, after two four-year terms.
”I will go back to my farm. After all I did it in 1979,” he said, referring to the time when, as Nigeria’s military leader, he handed power over to a civilian administration.
Obasanjo, who owns a large chicken farm in south-east Nigeria, will hand over this time to his protégé, Umaru Yar’Adua, who won a resounding 70% of votes cast in an April 21 poll widely criticised as rigged.
Amid mounting opposition calls for the election result to be annulled, Obasanjo said he had no problem with planned protests, provided they were peaceful.
”If you want to demonstrate, demonstration is part of democracy, provided it does not lead to disorderliness,” he said, dressed in a traditional Yoruba outfit — a royal blue embroidered cap and flowing gown.
‘Prejudices’
A broad opposition coalition and civil society groups have planned mass action next week to demand a re-run of the polls, which foreign monitors from the European Union, the United States and other rights groups said were marred by massive fraud and violence.
Obasanjo, who admitted a few days earlier in a national address that the elections were far from perfect, waved aside the criticism.
”Some of them came with their own prejudices,” he said of the bevy of foreign condemnations of state, parliamentary and presidential polls held April 14 and 21.
Instead, he said, delays in getting ballots to Nigeria’s 65-million voters on time for the poll were beyond the government’s control.
”The outcome of the election, to me, is a true reflection of the situation,” he said. ”This country is united from the north to the south.”
The 70-year-old head of state is a born-again southern Christian in a country where the reins of power have been traditionally held by northern Muslims.
Obasanjo said his greatest achievement in the past eight years is having ”given hope back to Nigerians” and having got some of his compatriots living in exile since the seventies to return home after refusing to come back under military leaders Sani Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida.
His greatest regret, he said, is not having tackled Nigeria’s chronic electricity shortage problem.
”If I have another opportunity and I know what I know now, I would handle electricity generation much earlier than I did,” he said.
Because of recurrent and worsening power cuts, Nigerians who can afford it use generators, and the national electricity utility Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) is better known as ”Please Hold a Candle Now”.
Obasanjo is a man of contradictions: he has been both military dictator and democratic leader and is both an anti-corruption campaigner and an ultra-rich businessman.
Even back on his poultry farm, Obasanjo is expected to continue to wield some degree of political influence, at least if one judges the tenacity he showed in getting Yar’Adua elected president.
Doubtless with the aim of doing just, he became ”life patron” last December of the ruling People’s Democratic party. — Sapa-AFP