The Man Olusegun Obasanjo

Olusegun Obasanjo (born March 5, 1937) is the president of Nigeria (since 1999). A born-again Christian of Yoruba extraction, Obasanjo was a career soldier before serving twice as his nation's head of state, once as a military ruler, between February 13th, 1976 and October 1st, 1979 and again, currently, as elected president.
Obasanjo was born in Abeokuta, Ogun State, and he enlisted into the army at the age of 18. He trained at Aldershot and was commissioned as an officer. Although he did not directly participate in the military coup of July 29th, 1975, led by Murtala Ramat Mohammed, he was named Murtala's deputy in the new government. When Mohammed was assassinated in an attempted coup in February 13th 1976, Obasanjo replaced him as head of state. He served until October 1st 1979, when he handed power to Shehu Shagari, a democratically elected civilian president, becoming the first leader in Nigerian history to surrender power willingly. In late 1983, however, the military seized power again. Obasanjo, being in retirement, did not participate in that coup, and did not approve of it.
During the dictatorship of Sani Abacha (1993-1998), Obasanjo spoke out against the human rights abuses of the regime, and was imprisoned. He was released only after Abacha's sudden death on 8 June 1998. It was after his release from prison that Obasanjo announced that he was now a born-again Christian. Some commentators have seen this as a crucial factor that in cementing his popularity in Nigeria's southern states where Christianity is the predominant faith.
In the 1999 elections, the first for sixteen years, he decided to run for the presidency as the candidate of the People's Democratic Party. Obasanjo won with 62.6 percent of the vote, sweeping the strongly Christian South-East and the predominantly Muslim north, but decisively lost his home region, the south-west, to his fellow-Yoruba and fellow-Christian, Olu Falae, the only other candidate. It is thought that lingering resentment among his fellow-Yorubas about his previous administration of 1976 to 1979, after which he handed power over to a government dominated by northerners rather than by Yorubas, contributed to his poor showing among his own people.
Obasanjo was handily reelected in 2003 in a tumultuous election that had ethnic and religious overtones, his main opponent (fellow former military ruler General Muhammadu Buhari) being a Muslim who drew his support mainly from the north. Capturing 61.8 percent of the vote, Obasanjo defeated Buhari by more than 11 million votes. Buhari and other defeated candidates (including Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the former Biafran leader of the 1960s), claimed that the election was fraudulent. International observers from the British Commonwealth were more nuanced in their judgement. They concluded that while there had been incidents of fraud on both sides, Obasanjo's margin of victory was so huge that electoral malpractice would not have changed the result. Much more worrying was the increasing polarization of Nigeria along geographic and religious lines. Obasanjo made a spectacular sweep of the South, including the south-west where he had lost four years earlier, but lost considerable ground in the North. For a nation in which ethnicity and religion ties in strongly to geography, such a trend was seen by many as particularly disturbing. Other commentators might simply note that in 2003, unlike 1999, Obasanjo was running against a Northerner and could therefore expect his support to erode in the North.
Since leading a charge against corruption and economic reforms in his country, he is seen widely as an African statesman championing debt relief, free trade, market reforms and democratic institutions (thrice rejecting government change by coup in the continent of Africa as the chairperson of AU -African Union)
Alcohol and includes such punishments as amputation for those guilty of theft. Ethnic tensions have already erupted into violence this year. Clashes in a Lagos market last month between Yoruba and Hausa, the two largest groups in Nigeria, left at least 50 people dead.


A lot rests on the new President. Friends describe him as a pragmatic and down-to-earth man who talks straight but has a short temper. After stepping down as leader in 1979, he retired to his farm outside the town of Otta, 80 km north of Lagos, where he farmed pigs and chickens and eventually set up an international think tank called the Africa Leadership Forum. Now based in the capital, Abuja, Obasanjo still likes to escape to Otta, where he runs local errands, eats goat stew with his fingers, reads, and writes to old colleagues overseas.

"Because of what happened in the recent past, many Nigerians were about to give up in desperation," Obasanjo said in May. "[They asked:] 'Is there any hope? Can it be done?' Now they are coming back, [saying] 'Maybe it can be done.' And I believe it can be done." It will be years, perhaps decades, before Nigeria regains the confidence it had during the oil boom of the 1970s. But under Obasanjo, a military-man-turned-democrat, at least the country has renewed reason for hope.