My encounter with General Olusegun Obasanjo was interesting and quite dramatic. When Dele Giwa was alive, I knew he was close to Obasanjo, whom we fondly called Baba. Anytime October 19, 1986 the day Giwa was killed got close, one of the thoughts that used to occupy my mind was how Giwa became so friendly with Baba. When Giwa was assassinated through a parcel bomb, Baba was one of the first senior citizens to show up at First Foundation Hospital, where Giwa died. Less than one hour when he heard the news, he was there. Dr Ime Ebong was also there. He was a member of the board of Newswatch. Obasanjo came and sat down there with us in the hospital that Sunday, almost throughout the day. He must have heard the news as he was driving back from the farm. He left later in the night.
One day, I was reading one of Giwa’s interviews and writings. I was just going through the pieces of papers he left in my custody when I came across a reporter’s notebook he used. He had handed over the notebook to me when it was full, since I was the custodian of all his articles his columns, news and interviews. I recall how he called me one day and said: ‘My brother, since you are an expert in documentation, everything I write, I will give you a copy, everything published by me, I will give you a copy. At the end of the day, you will have the full collection of my writings.
So, after his death, as I went through the collection, I came across this particular reporter’s notebook, where he said he wrote the interview he had with Obasanjo. I kept it. I knew that one day, these things would be useful.
One Saturday morning, I saw and read a certain story on the front page of the Daily Times newspaper. I can’t recall the exact date. But I think it was either in February or March 1988. I saw a report that General Obasanjo was setting up an institution called Africa Leadership Forum to train leaders in Africa. Then it struck me immediately that this man would need something I could offer. I didn’t know him closely.
Prior to that day, I had not had any physical interaction with him. But I had heard that he was a hard man an extremely no-nonsense person. I was convinced that if I were able to get across to him and explain a few things to him, except he had somebody else doing the same thing, he would listen.
The big question was: How do I get across to him to let him know that this kind of institution he was setting up would need a lot of documented, knowledge-based information and materials connected to training because you cannot do any training at the level he wanted to do without background information. The focus, from the little I could gather from the newspaper article, was to train people and develop in them qualities for good leadership and good governance.
Before then, based on my travels and interactions, I had discovered that it was only in Nigeria that we don’t groom children for leadership right from the family level, as it is done elsewhere. We do not train our children the way it is being done in other places. In royal families, children are groomed and nurtured to flow into the leadership end of it. What we do generally is to just send a child to school. But training people for leadership is beyond attending the best schools in the world. It is not just sufficient, for instance, to send a child to study medicine.
More important is the background and the character of the doctor you are going to produce. What are the inner qualities that he or she has that are fully explored things that would make him or her to become the best doctor in the world! We don’t explore those areas, even in our schools.
During my days in school, I did a few things which my lecturers were surprised at, because I was reading more materials outside than what they were giving us. That helped me a lot.
Back to Baba! What came to my mind was that in training African leaders, Obasanjo would need more than what I did for Newswatch in terms of information gathering. He called it Africa Leadership Forum. Then, I started wondering and asking myself: How do I get across to him.
Fortunately, I remembered that I had seen a reporter’s notebook which Giwa used when he went to interview him. Giwa had insisted when he was editor of Sunday Concord that no reporter should go for an interview without a notebook, because in most cases, they might come back from the assignment, turn on the gadget they used in recording the interviews and comments and nothing would be on it. He told me how he had gone to interview Obasanjo. The man was willing to talk, but didn’t want Giwa to use any recorder, nor to write down anything in the course of their discussion. So, what could have been an interview was turned into a mere conversation. Giwa sat down quietly and listened to Baba, interacted with him for about three hours.
They even had lunch. All they did was to sit there and discuss, with Baba doing most of the talking. Giwa said that as soon as he finally drove out of the farm in his Honda Prelude, he turned into the next street he could find on the right, parked the car and started writing. He recalled what the man said as much as he could remember using his exact words. That was how he produced an exclusive story on Baba. He told me that when the story was published, somebody mentioned to Baba that his story was on the front page of Sunday Concord. Baba read it line by line. When he finished, he was impressed. Then he called Giwa and said: “You can come and have your full interview.” Interestingly, inside that notebook, which Giwa left
with me for safekeeping, was the telephone number to Baba’s secretary.
Of course, it was not a mobile telephone line. I decided to try something. My intention was to find out if I could have an appointment with the former Head of State so that I could discuss my ideas with him. I had already decided to tell him that if he was embarking on such a project, he would need a databank of relevant and refined information; and that I was in a position to create that for him.I took a deep breath and dialled the numbers. It was a Saturday afternoon. It rang just once and somebody picked it.
What I heard was a voice that was quite unexpected. It was a hoarse and rough-sounding, confident voice: ‘Yes, who is this. My name is Olusegun Obasanjo. What can I do you for? I was instantly startled. I wasn’t ready to speak with him; not just yet. I needed an appointment. I wasn’t expecting him to pick the call. I wanted to be added to the list of those seeking to see him.
I was even doubtful whether anybody would pick the call since it was a Saturday. For a moment, I did not know how to respond. Then, I kept calm. He almost shouted: ‘Are you still there? I said: Yes, Sir.’ He ordered: ‘Then talk. ‘I started stammering: ‘Eeem, Sir, eeem’.
It was a big shock to me. I was trying to organise myself to make sense to him. He responded: ‘This man, you say eeemm aaaahh, I don’t have much time’. I said something like: ‘Do you have Daily Times there? He answered: ‘And so what? I said: ‘I read something about Africa Leadership Forum’.
He replied: ‘All right. Are you interested in it? I said: ‘No, but I believe that for you to be able to set up a good centre to train leaders for Africa, you need a data bank’. He asked: ‘What is that? I replied, ‘It is a bank that you gather data or information and store, and then use the data anytime you need them’.
He said, ‘That sounds interesting. But I am on my way out. This phone belongs to my secretary. I was on my way down to get into my car when the phone rang and I picked it. I have a lecture at NIIA, you know NIIA? I said, ‘Yes Sir, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. It’s on Victoria Island, Kofo Abayomi Street, Lagos’.
He continued: ‘This idea that you’re proposing, can we talk about it on Monday? Can you come to the farm? Where are you? I replied, ‘I’m in Lagos, Newswatch Office’. He said, okay, fine. Then can we discuss it on Monday at lunch? What time do you normally have lunch? I said about 2pm. He replied: ‘No, because Obasanjo is diabetic, and hypertensive, he eats his lunch at about 12 noon to be able to take his drugs and other things like that, I don’t know whether that will be okay for you’. My response was: ‘That’s okay by me, Sir. I will be there.” That was it; just a phone call. I didn’t make two attempts. Now, when I look back, all I see is how the Holy Spirit has worked in my life.
Remember, I was going to Calabar to work in the university library. God connected me with Uncle Ray. Through him, I got connected to Giwa. Through both of them, I went to work at Newswatch. Then Giwa gave me his reporter’s notebooks for safekeeping, and because of that, I saw a phone number that linked me with General Obasanjo. I believe this is not ordinary.
It couldn’t be. It must be God Himself creating the links. Meeting any of these people was not organised by me. It was not also an accident. The Holy Spirit organised meetings for me with some big names in different professions all over the world. So, I met with General Obasanjo on Monday for lunch. Prior to that, on Sunday, I went to the office, and arranged all the files that concerned him, about 20 of them. Every document we had at Newswatch that had something to do with him was in those 20 folders.
I arranged them properly—chronologically. It covered the era when he was Head of State till when he left office and retired from the military, to when he became an international statesman as Co-Chairman of the Eminent Persons Group on South Africa. We also had reports of his various meetings with Mandela in prison on Robben Island. All the reports were well classified—a process of putting similar items or reports in the same file for easy references.
In the end, I got about 20 bulky folders or files, packed them into my Beetle car and drove to the farm. Just before noon, he was already standing outside, waiting for me. Then I drove in. He showed me where to park my car near his office. We just walked straight into the canteen for lunch. He had a special seat in the canteen—at the extreme end. Everybody ate there; all his workers, including the farmers, those who did the weeding and those who cut the meat. Everybody ate in that restaurant. He sat there with them to eat.As soon as we got seated, he said I should place my order for food. I told him I needed to know what was available.
He replied that anything I needed would be prepared for me. But I chose to eat what he ate. I can’t remember what it was; it must have been pounded yam. We spent about an hour there eating and discussing generally. He asked questions about my person and my background. He admitted that he had read a few comments about me in Newswatch because he followed Newswatch every Monday.
He wanted to know how I did my work, all the places I had visited and how thorough I could be. From the restaurant we went to his office and opened up discussion on the subject matter. But first, I went down to carry the folders up to his office. I was a bit startled when he asked, ‘Apart from working at Newswatch, are you a security man? I responded, ‘Security man? No, Sir, He wanted to know if I was an agent to any of the security agencies because what he saw about himself in those folders were too thorough. I told him that my idea was that whatever I have learnt outside Nigeria in the big media agencies across the United States and the United Kingdom in terms of how they organise information, was exactly the way I would organise information at Newswatch.
Baba was becoming so curious and attentive. He asked if gathering and organising the 20 folders on him was all I was assigned to do at Newswatch. ‘Do you do any other thing? he asked. I took time to explain to him that he was not the only person we had folders on, and that everybody who was important in the country had folders like the ones with his name.
I told him that in modern media organisations, that’s what we do so that if anything happens to influential people in the society, it becomes easy to profile such a person. As I spoke, I noticed that he was interested in what I was saying. He said, ‘Okay, in that case, I think you will be a consultant on this project’. That was it! There was no appointment letter. It was simply pronounced by the boss. No conditions of service. No salary attached.
The truth is that I perceive Baba differently. I believe that God connected me with him not to get his money but to get the exposure; and the connection that I have built with people. People warned me when I started working with him.
They said, ‘This man doesn’t give money to people. Why are you going to attach yourself to him? But that attachment has opened several doors and created the right connections for me. My decision to work with him was because I didn’t just want to work in a media library and end there. I recall that when the late Sani Abacha came to power, apparently due to my relative popularity at that time, I was approached to serve as the National Librarian—a person in charge of all libraries in Nigeria.
I just went to the farm, met with Baba, sat down with him and said, “Baba these people want me to come and help them in the national library. He said, ‘Please don’t go. They will frustrate you. They will reduce you to nothing’. His fear was that they will give me the appointment, make so much noise about it, but they will not give me money to function. He explained that the administration wanted to use my name to promote their evil course and then when I get frustrated, I would be kicked out on the excuse that I could not perform, especially if they also knew that I had connections to him. I believed him because there were people within the system who could have been promoted to fill that position. They did not need an outsider.
*Proposal on Presidential Library Project*
It was while I was at Newswatch that I read something in an international magazine about how President Jimmy Carter opened his presidential library on 1 October 1986. As soon as I read it, I became curious. So, I clipped it and read it again. I did more research on it. From there, I made a proposal on it to Baba—in 1988.
The thrust of my proposal to Obasanjo was that there is a tradition in the United States of America, that when you become the president, you don’t just leave the office of the president and go home. You become a statesman, and then they organise all the papers that you used in developing policies during your stay as president; all the engagements that you had; everything surrounding that administration is packaged in what they call a presidential library where people come to do research on your administration. I told him that in his own case, right from the time he and others forcefully took over power from General Yakubu Gowon in 1975, to when he handed over to President Shehu Shagari in 1979, such documentation would be of huge interest to politicians, historians, students, journalists, academics, to mention a few. Those materials were supposed to be kept in one place for proper referencing, research, proper recording and storage—so that nothing gets lost. That means if anybody is doing research on him, he knows where to get information about him. That is how it is done in America.
He liked the proposal. One of the reasons was that almost all the records pertaining to the period he was Head of State had been destroyed when fire burnt a part of the Defence Headquarters in Lagos. Though he liked the idea, he was not too sure that he was ready for it. I was disappointed. He collected the paper, read through it, and said, ‘This is an excellent idea’. I wasn’t too sure of what he would say next; Baba does not do things accidentally. In everything he does, he must sit down and think properly about it. He is a very deliberate human being.
He doesn’t take actions without thoroughly thinking them over. He must thoroughly deliberate on them before taking any step. When he collected my paper, I thought he was going to say: Can we; how much; what’s the budget for it; or go and prepare the budget and all that. Instead, he put it in a folder, wrote something on it and gave it to Ayo Aderinwale, who was his director atthe Africa Leadership Forum. That was the end of the matter at that point.
After that, I was involved in the day to day running of Africa Leadership Forum. I produced the working papers, and worked on the background of those people invited to the Farm House Dialogue. Most of the names I was selecting were names that I already had folders on, because they were Nigerians; intelligent people from the trade unions; from the student unions; from the market unions; from the academia; among others.
First, I had to produce background for him to go through. I became the coordinator in terms of preparing background of those to be invited for the dialogue we were having in the farm. That was my role. I started knowing almost all his friends. Professor Akin Mabogunje, Professor Tunji Aboyade; Emeritus Professor Oladipo Akinkugbe; Professor Thomas Adeoye Lambo, a world-renowned scholar and an eminent psychiatrist, who was the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan and later the Deputy Director General of the World Health Organisation. These were very intelligent human beings. It was my interaction with these people that convinced me that this country has produced wonderful and brilliant people. When you meet such group of people, and spend time with them—as it is often said, if you move with wise people, certainly you’d be wise—you learn so many things that you couldn’t read in books. That added to my knowledge.
That is what I was doing at Africa Leadership Forum. It started in 1988. It happened that anybody who came to the farm and heard about me wanted to see the face of the man who wrote the Newswatch Who’s Who in Nigeria. They kept saying: ‘Your book is fantastic. We’ve not seen anything like this before. We didn’t even know it could be done like this’. So, I became willy-nilly famous in the farm.
Extract From My Latest Publication; AGAINST ALL ODDS, My Testimony (Pp. 82-93)
