As much as I thought I have read more than enough on former president and elder statesman, Chief Matthew Olusegun Aremu Okikiola Obasanjo, I was more than stunned by ace journalist’s Dare Babarinsa narration of the soldier’s odyssey from the army days to date.
Perhaps what further caught my fancy was how he discussed his encounter with the brain behind the first military coup in the country.
Excerpt below:
On January 13, 1966, Obasanjo had arrived in Kaduna after a military course in the United Kingdom. He decided to put up with his friend, Major Chukwuemeka Kaduna Nzeogwu, an instructor at the Nigerian Army. That night, the two friends shared the same bed. The following day, Nzeogwu left at dawn and he was not to return until the following morning with a bandaged hand. Unknown to Obasanjo, Nzeogwu had been busy leading Nigeria’s first military coup. He had also led the assault on the official residence of Ahmadu Bello, the powerful and much respected Premier of the Northern Region, killing him and one of his wives and bringing into a sorry end, the First Republic.
If Obasanjo had arrived a week earlier, he would have been told about the coup by his friend and may be would have become part of the plot. But it was still a dangerous thing to be associated with Nzeogwu, the assassin. Soon, some soldiers and civilians seeking to revenge the killing of Bello and some top military officers, were looking for Obasanjo to add him to the statistics of death. He went underground. The new ruler in the North, Colonel Hassan Usman Katsina, the first military governor of the defunct Northern Region, decided to send him to a safe place in Maiduguri. “That young man has a future in Nigeria,” Hassan Katsina said. He could not have been more prescience.
But that would not have occurred but for the happenstance in the then Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo) after the first prime-minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated and Obasanjo and many Nigerian troops had served as peace-keepers under the United Nations flag. A group of Belgian nuns were captured by the rebels and their fate can only be imagined in the hands of those rough men. Obasanjo was sent by his commander to go and negotiate the nuns’ release. Instead of peace, the rebels captured him, drove him away in the booth of their car and when they got to their camp, decided to execute him.
But it was Obasanjo lucky day. One of the rebels would not agree to his execution. As an officer, he was entitled to a pack of cigarette per day. Obasanjo, a discipline teetotaler, would freely give away his stick of cigarettes, including to total strangers. One of those who have benefitted from that generosity was the rebel soldier who was now pleading his cause. Soon a superior rebel officer came to intervene and Obasanjo was freed. Happenstance had saved him.
Culled from Dare Babarinsa from Obasanjo’s hard choices


http://legendvibes.com.ng

Summarily put, good deeds are never forgotten

kile leyi wa kowa

Obasanjo.......the wisdomful man.

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It shows that God had great plans for the old man, may God continue to protect all his faithful servants...

Stop posting nonsense... Pls confirm that ur date of 13 January... Obasanjo returned to meet the country in disarray after the Coup had failed already