Olatunji Dare
Former President Olusegun turned 87 on March 5.
Ordinarily, an 87th birthday seldom ranks high on the calendar of a person or organisation. But Obasanjo is no ordinary person, and his birthday was marked with a strong national and international flavour and a touch of scholarship, all emblematic of his statesmanship and abiding concern with issues of leadership. And there was great merriment.
The occasion featured a lecture on governance by a most unlikely personage: former President Goodluck Jonathan whom Obasanjo, perhaps forgetting that he had foisted him on the nation, repeatedly characterized as inept and ineffectual, and who had in turn compared Obasanjo’s tactics to those of a motor-park tout.
It also featured the inauguration of the Leadership Academy at the Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) and a book on leadership, the latest volume in Obasanjo’s expansive bibliography.
Even without the grand party that followed on the Library’s grounds, it would have been a memorable Obasanjo outing.
There he was, in baggy shorts, at an informal gathering in the foyer of the OOPL dancing in measured steps to the beat of talking drums and sekere and other traditional instruments suffused with praise songs; there he was sallying forth now only to retreat deftly, deflecting slightly to the right and to the left moments later, turning and twisting in perfect synch with the beat.
But that was only the preliminary. Obasanjo seemed to have reserved the most intricate elements of his choreography for the grand party on the Library’s grounds, where Ebenezer Obey and his band serenaded guests, men and women of yesterday mostly, and a good number of today’s people as they arrived on the scene or circulated in the crowd.
Decked out in a designer outfit – unlike some two decades ago when he seemed to have had a carpenter for his tailor, he took his place on the floor, weaving, swaying, crouching one moment and springing upright the next moment, a veritable past master.
I mean no respect to the women present, least of all to the sedate Mrs Bola Obasanjo, but if there was a competition for the best dancer of the day, Obasanjo would have won outright.
Not bad for an 87-year-old man. He sure has the moves, as they would say here in America. And he has the vigour as well as the spirit. Age has not slowed him down. He spoke off the cuff on leadership for some ten minutes with nary a miscue, a testament to his mental acuity. As to his agility, look no further than his moves on the dance floor.
He seems set to go on and on with the years.
After he came out of General Sani Abacha’s infernal prison with his mind and body unimpaired, whereas his friend and former deputy, General Sheu Yar’Adua had perished in another Abacha jail, Obasanjo used to trumpet his Born Againism. But not for long.
As the story went, an aide who was on bantering terms with Obasanjo tugged at his agbada to pull him out of his revelry at an event in his first term featuring some damsels wiggling to the pulsating rhythm in a mesmerizing dance.
“But sir, you are a Born Again,” the aide remonstrated gently.
“Born again my foot. It is only from the waist up,” Obasanjo reportedly replied, in what may well be an apocryphal story. But I digress.
It was an added delight to see Dr Matthew Hassan Kukah, Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sokoto, on the dance floor not doing a perfunctory shuffle but “digging the show,” to employ the local parlance. Always, engaging, Archbishop Kukah.
But there were some notable absences, two of which struck me the most, the first being that of Aremo Olusegun Osoba who, as APC Governor of Ogun State, had assigned the site of the Presidential Library to Obasanjo, only to be schemed out of a second term by the PDP’s Fixing Machine controlled by Tony Anenih, he of the fearsome reputation of turning winners into losers and losers into winners.
There is corroborative evidence of fixing in the 2003 gubernatorial race in Ogun but it is not iron-clad. The defenestration rankles to his day nonetheless, and I doubt whether any development can move Osoba to attend any ceremony Obasanjo is staging.
The second absence would have been more telling if Dr Onaolapo Soleye, Obasanjo’s friend and confidante since their days at the Baptist Boys High School, Abeokuta, had not died some 10 weeks earlier, on November 15, 2023, four days after he turned 90.
You could hardly find two public figures who enjoyed a closer relationship. Most times when I was visiting Obasanjo at the Farm House in Otta, in the eighties and nineties, I would find Dr Soleye had preceded me or learn that he had just left or was being expected.
He was a fixture at various fora organized by Obasanjo’s Africa Leadership Forum. An exemplar of temperance and modesty, his wardrobe consisted almost entirely of clothes made from local fabrics, as Professor Babafemi Badejo of Chrisland University, Abeokuta noted in a fine memorial tribute in the online newspaper Premium Times. From his casual, avuncular bearing, you could not tell that Soleye was a well-regarded associate professor of sociology at the University of Ibadan.
He was a good listener, and came across as a person with whom your secret was safe, and whose goodwill you could take for granted. He was never one to raise his voice, however heated the discussion.
Soleye came into the limelight when he was appointed Commissioner for Finance at the creation of Ogun State in 1976, due largely, it was said, to the influence of Obasanjo, who was second-in-command in the ruling military regime led by General Murtala Muhammed.
Obasanjo is also widely believed to have influenced Soleye’s appointment as Minister of Finance during the first coming of General Muhammadu Buhari as Head of State, at a time not unlike the present, where consumer goods were scarce, foreign exchange was scarcer, and prices were steep. The administration steered the economy out of the doldrums.
Soleye was there at Obasanjo’s side during Obasanjo’s two presidential terms, unobtrusive as ever, but playing supportive roles. His membership of the Board of the NNPC was perhaps the most substantive. He figured prominently in the founding and running of Obasanjo’s Bells University of Technology, Ota. Their friendship and collaboration continued long after Obasanjo left office.
Then something snapped.
What snapped, and when it snapped, have remained mysteries. One no longer saw them together at ceremonies in which their presence would have been taken for granted. Those who confirmed my observation had no answer to my questions.
Not being “on ground” as the saying goes, I could not pursue the matter diligently. I did not know how to reach Soleye. The last time I had any direct interaction with Obasanjo was 2020 and was not sure how he would react to questions about what happened between him and Soleye.
He would have answered my questions in broad terms, I suspect, but would have held back on the most salient issues, being the very discreet person he is, especially on matters touching official secrets and national security, however tangentially.
When Soleye died, I scoured the media for a tribute by Obasanjo, and a letter of condolence to, if not a visit with, Soleye’s family. I did not see any gesture reminiscent of their decades of friendship that I had found exemplary and inspiring.
Maybe I missed it. But persons who should know confirmed my observation. I should add that, were Soleye alive, he probably would not have attended Obasanjo’s birthday bash.
When my relationship with someone I will always regard as my brother from another mother and who more than reciprocated in the same manner broke up suddenly and inexplicably, I sank into a deep funk, distressed that our relationship did not have the enduring quality of the Obasanjo-Soleye model. I grieve even today, years later.
That model served the Owu people, Ogun, and Nigeria well. I mourn its demise even as I rejoice with its surviving exponent.
Many happy returns of March 5, Mr President.
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