Former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, on Thursday said countries
across the African continent are happy over the outcome of the
presidential election in Nigeria, which saw the defeat of incumbent
President Goodluck Jonathan.
Mr. Obasanjo said his checks in a number of African countries
suggested they were as happy over the result of the election as majority
of Nigerians are.
He referred to President Goodluck Jonathan as a moving train who was providentially stopped from collapsing Nigeria.
“I have visited six countries since the election, they are as happy
about the results as we are in Nigeria. It is good not only for Nigeria,
it is good for Africa and I believe it is good for the world.”
Mr. Obasanjo, who led the African Union Observation Mission to the
April 2015 General Election in Sudan, spoke on Thursday at a Washington
DC event.
The former president described Nigeria as a country that obsessively plays “a dangerous game of moving close to the precipice”.
He said the country came close to disintegration in the run-up to the
2015 elections but switched swiftly to the path of redemption after the
polls.
“I hope we will not fall over one of these days,” he said.
He said one month to the election, no one believed “we will have a peaceful election that is reasonably free and fair.”
Describing his role in the election as that of a person standing on
the track of a moving train, the former president said during the
countdown to the elections, he faced the option of “jumping off” the
tracks or “be crushed” if the train did not providentially get “derailed
and stop.”
He said he did not jump and was not crushed adding that “at every
stage, there must be leaders imbued with sufficient courage and will to
stand firm when you have to stand firm.”
He described the results of the elections as what Nigerians “deserve” though some Nigerians “did not want it”.
Mr. Obasanjo was the featured speaker at the United States Institute for
Peace (USIP) event titled What is Right with Africa: Reframing Africa’s
Leadership Challenges.
He made these remarks in response to a question by Princeton Lyman, a former ambassador to Nigeria.
Mr. Obasanjo observed that Nigeria’s tendency to flirt with
near-death experiences stretches back to colonial times when it almost
cost the country the chance of gaining political independence from
Britain.
Recalling colonial-era disagreements over self-rule, the former
President said at a stage, advocates of self-rule from the Eastern and
Western Regions decided to “let the North go” since their leaders were
reluctant to accept regional autonomy back then.
“But reason prevailed,” he said, “East and West got internal autonomy
in 1957, North got same in 1959 and the whole country got independence
in 1960.”
Listing the 1964 post-election violence in the south west and the
1966 coup d’etats which led to “pogrom and civil war” as other
self-destructive phases in the country’s history, the former president
remarked that Nigeria emerged from all of these as “one entity” in spite
of contrarian speculations.
“Not only did we survive the civil war but, within nine years,
somebody from the rebel side, as we called them, and somebody from the
vandal side, as they called us, became president and vice-president of
Nigeria. Not many countries achieve that,” he said.
President Obasanjo described the 2015 election as “almost in the same
category” as other near-death experiences in Nigeria’s history.
He said one month to the election, no one believed “we will have a peaceful election that is reasonably free and fair.”
“I think we are now building institutions that can withstand what we
may see as danger to good governance in Africa. The election has moved
Nigeria one very important step up in our democratic dispensation,
process and practice.
