How I Stopped Coups in Nigeria – Obasanjo

Ronke Kehinde/

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has given an insight into how he managed to permanently halt the vicious cycle of military coups in Nigeria.

Obasanjo, who holds the moral distinction of having never planned or participated in any coup, made the revelation at the launch a book titled, “Making Africa Work”.

The book, which he co-authored with Brenthurst Foundation director Greg Mills, US Africanist Jeff Herbst and retired British army general, Dickie Davis, was launched in South Africa, during the week.

Obasanjo said after he returned to power as civilian president in 1999, his first priority was how to stop the destructive cycle of coups which had bedeviled Nigeria since independence from Britain in 1966.

He said he first concluded that explicitly barring coups in the constitution was not the answer.

“A coup is treasonable punishable by death only if it fails. And yet it puts the plotter in the State House if it succeeds,” he notes in the book.

So Obasanjo chose instead the path of guile. He asked the military authorities to submit a list of all officers who had either participated in coups in the past or benefited from them by being appointed as governors or ministers.

“I told the military authorities we might need them,” he said with a sly grin. Instead, he immediately retired the full list of 93 military officers, giving them six hours notice to leave their posts, on a Friday.

They were ordered not to spend that Friday night in uniform or in barracks.

“As a battle-tested and war-victorious general I knew that an officer out of uniform and out of barracks is like a fish out of water and their power and influence would be greatly diminished.

“If I had given them wind of what I planned to do, they would have retired me instead,” he quipped.

Obasanjo did not otherwise punish the fired officers or bar them from re-entering the civil services as civilians, as many did. He claims his action ended Nigeria’s cycle of coups and its certainly true there haven’t been any since.

The former president also warned of the growing number of unemployed youth in African countries, saying it is a ticking bomb about to explode.

Obasanjo said the African continent was facing a disaster with a skyrocketing unemployment especially among the youth.

According him, the population in the continent is growing at a pace that will not match future growth.

Obasanjo predicted that in 40 years from now the population in the continent would have reached two billion.

“My greatest fear is youth, on employment; their frustration will lead to anger. It will know no political boundary, no regional boundary, no regional boundary, no religious boundary, it will be an explosion,” he noted.

The book’s cover says it’s a “handbook for economic success” and a co-author, Mills, stressed at the launch that it was intended to be a practical manual for Africa’s leaders “which doesn’t deal with past choices that are no longer available.”

Quoting John F. Kennedy, Mills said the aim was not to fix the blame for the past but to seek solutions for the future.

He added that the book had grown out of 12 years of the Brenthurst Foundation’s work in advising African and other leaders and governments on how to solve their countries’ most intractable problems.

Mills said in those 12 years he had read many national development plans that contained endless lists of worthy “priorities.” The trick though, was to choose just a few real priorities from among all these.

Obasanjo agreed, recalling how Lee Kuan Yew, the founding president of Singapore – and architect of its astonishing economic boom – had once advised him and several other African leaders at a retreat to “do a few things right and keep doing them right.”

“I told my fellow-leaders that’s the takeaway. Go home and discover what you’re doing right and continue doing it. “

He himself discovered that Nigeria had been doing basic education and health care right but had stopped doing them right and so that’s what he started doing again.

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