Twenty years after the Nigerian Senate buried the third term agenda, Olusegun Obasanjo is still fighting the war he lost in 2006. This past week alone, at a fireside conversation in Lagos, he declared that choosing Atiku Abubakar as his running mate in 1999 was the biggest mistake of his presidency. Days earlier he resurrected an allegation that Atiku bribed the late Speaker Ghali Na’Abba to impeach him — an accusation against a dead man who cannot rise to answer it. Atiku’s reply was titled with surgical precision: the grave is not a witness box. Neither, I would add, is a Lagos fireside chat, a presidential library podium, or any of the endless platforms from which this man conducts his one-man tribunal against everyone who ever told him no.
Let us remember what actually happened in 2006. Obasanjo’s people moved a constitutional amendment to hand him a third term. Legislators later spoke openly of inducements offered to grease its passage. The Senate, to its eternal credit, killed it on the floor in May 2006, live on television, and the man most responsible for stiffening the opposition was his own vice president. That is Atiku’s unforgivable sin. Not corruption. Not incompetence. He said no to a man who has never once heard the word without plotting revenge. Every attack since — the recycled allegations, the rewritten history, the crocodile regrets — flows from that single wound to a bottomless ego. And the timing now is transparent: 2027 is taking shape, Atiku carries the ADC flag, and Baba is clearing the runway for his preferred kinsman. This is not elder statesmanship. It is kingmaking by character assassination.
Let us also be honest about who is lecturing Nigeria on virtue. This is the president on whose watch soldiers razed Odi in Bayelsa in November 1999 and Zaki-Biam in Benue in 2001 — entire communities put to the torch, women and old men among the dead, collective punishment as state policy.
He has never truly answered for either. This is the president who, while still in office, acquired shares in Transcorp, a conglomerate bidding for state assets his own government was privatising, a conflict of interest so brazen it would end a career in any serious democracy. This is the man who raised billions for his presidential library while still holding the levers of power, with businessmen and governors falling over themselves to donate to the man who could still bless or break them. Ill-gotten gains parked behind so-called billionaire fronts, favours laundered through philanthropy — and today he wags his finger at the nation like a village headmaster.
My family remembers an older version of this same man. My father, Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC — Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General, first African Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations — laboured for reconciliation and the end of the civil war. For that service he was awarded an oil prospecting license in 1969, the first private Nigerian holder of such a bloc. When he declined to use his standing with the American oil companies to run errands for Obasanjo’s benefit, that license became a target and the harassment became full time. Serve me or be destroyed: that has always been the Obasanjo method, tribal vindictiveness dressed in agbada and called governance.
It is no different in kind from what we condemn in Tinubu today, and the elders of my father’s generation could tell you exactly where certain self-declared war heroes were found when soldiers came looking during the coup years — and it was not at the front. My father himself once had to put Obasanjo firmly in his place aboard a Caledonian Airways flight, when a then down-and-out former head of state insisted on planting himself in first class with a second class ticket. The entitlement never left him. It simply acquired a library.
Even the military legend is largely self-published. Read the accounts of officers who served in the 3rd Marine Commando: the hard, bloody grinding of that campaign was done under others, and Obasanjo arrived in time to accept the surrender in January 1970 and then spent the next five decades writing himself into the centre of the story. “My Command” indeed — the most accurate title he ever chose, since “my” is the only pronoun he has ever fully mastered. This is the George Washington of Nigeria? Washington surrendered power once and went home to Mount Vernon in silence. Cincinnatus returned to his plough. Obasanjo tore up his party card for the cameras, writes open letters titled “Before It Is Too Late” as though he were not himself the author of much of the lateness, and cannot surrender a microphone even at eighty-nine.
And the moral sermons? This is a man whose own household has answered him. His son’s sworn divorce filings contained family allegations so disgraceful I will not repeat them in print — allegations he denied, but which the whole country read, and which sit rather awkwardly beneath the halo he polishes daily.
A man whose own blood petitions the courts against him should approach the pulpit with humility, not a megaphone.
Nigeria’s 2027 conversation belongs to the living and the young. It should be about the grid that still collapses, the naira that still bleeds, the bandits who still tax our highways, and the millions of brilliant young Nigerians planning their escape from their own country. It should not be held hostage by the recycled grudges of a serial score-settler auditioning, one last time, as kingmaker. Atiku is right that the objective is to confer advantage on a preferred candidate. Nigerians are too discerning for it. We can smell a stale vendetta from Stockholm.
So let it be said plainly. Sit down, Baba. Quietly. Write your memoirs — you have had plenty of practice inventing them. Tend the farm at Ota. Let Nigeria breathe. This country needs a younger, modern leader with no tribal baggage, no military mythology, no billionaire fronts, and no appetite whatsoever for the treasury. No more recycled generals. No more self-anointed fathers of the nation. No more Washington stooges.
A fresh start — or nothing.
Kio Amachree writes from Stockholm. He is Founder and President of Worldview International.
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