Olusẹgun Ọbasanjọ
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Olusegun Obasanjo (born March 5, 1937) is a Nigerian politician. He has been the President of Nigeria since 1999. A 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 13 February 1976 and 1 October 1979 and again, since 1999, as elected president.
Early life and first term as Head of State
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 29, 1975, led by Murtala Ramat Mohammed, he was named Murtala's deputy in the new government. When Mohammed was assassinated in an attempted coup on February 13 1976, Obasanjo replaced him as head of state.As chief of staff of Supreme Headquarters, Obasanjo was Murtala Muhammad's deputy and had the support of the military. He had commanded the federal division that took Owerri, effectively bringing an end to the civil war. Keeping the chain of command established by Murtala Muhammad in place, Obasanjo pledged to continue the programme for the restoration of civilian government in 1979 and to carry forward the reform programme to improve the quality of public service.
The model for the constitution, which was adopted in 1979, was modelled on the Constitution of the United States, with provision for a president, Senate, and House of Representatives. The country was now ready for local elections, to be followed by national elections, that would return Nigeria to civilian rule.
The military regimes of Murtala Muhammad and Obasanjo benefited from a tremendous influx of oil revenue that increased 350 percent between 1973 and 1974, when oil prices skyrocketed, to 1979, when the military stepped down. Increased revenues permitted massive spending that, unfortunately, was poorly planned and concentrated in urban areas. The oil boom was marred by a minor recession in 1978-79, but revenues rebounded until mid-1981 . The increase in revenues made possible a rapid rise in income, especially for the urban middle class. There was a corresponding inflation, particularly in the price of food, that promoted both industrialisation and the expansion of agricultural production. As a result of the shift to food crops, the traditional export earners — peanuts, cotton, cocoa, and palm products — declined in significance and then ceased to be important at all. Nigeria's exports became dominated by oil.
Industrialisation, which had grown slowly after World War II through the civil war, boomed in the 1970s, despite many infrastructure constraints. Growth was particularly pronounced in the production and assembly of consumer goods, including vehicle assembly and the manufacture of soap and detergents, soft drinks, pharmaceuticals, beer, paint, and building materials. Furthermore, there was extensive investment in infrastructure from 1975 to 1980, and the number of parastatals — jointly government- and privately owned companies — proliferated. The Nigerian Enterprises Promotion decrees of 1972 and 1977 further encouraged the growth of an indigenous middle class.
Plans were undertaken for the movement of the federal capital from Lagos to a more central location in the interior at Abuja. Such a step was seen as a means of encouraging the spread of industrial development inland and of relieving the congestion that threatened to choke Lagos. Abuja also was chosen because it was not identified with any particular ethnic group.
Heavy investment was planned in steel production. With Soviet assistance, a steel mill was developed at Ajaokuta in Kogi State, not far from Abuja. The most significant negative sign was the decline of industry associated with agriculture, but large-scale irrigation projects were launched in the states of Borno, Kano, Sokoto, and Bauchi under World Bank auspices.
Education also expanded rapidly. At the start of the civil war, there were only five universities, but by 1975 the number had increased to thirteen, with seven more established over the next several years. In 1975 there were 53,000 university students. There were similar advances in primary and secondary school education, particularly in those northern states that had lagged behind.
Obasanjo served until October 1 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 publicly support it.
Later career and presidency
During the dictatorship of Sani Abacha (1993–1998), Obasanjo spoke out against the human rights abuses of the regime, and was imprisoned with the claim of planning a coup. 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.In the 1999 elections, the first in 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 Christian, Olu Falae, the only other candidate. It is thought that lingering resentment among his fellow-Yorubas about his previous military 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. May 29, the day Obasanjo took office as the first elected and civilian head of state in Nigeria after 16 years of military rule, is now commemorated as Democracy Day, a public holiday in Nigeria.
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Obasanjo was re-elected in 2003 in a tumultuous election that had violent 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 European Union, and the U.S. National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute also reported widespread voting irregularities, including in the restive oil producing Niger delta where Obasanjo's party had unexplainedly won close to 100 percent of the vote tally. However, a delegation from the Commonwealth of Nations — led by representatives of former colonial power and trading partner Great Britain and African nations that had undergone troubled elections of their own — were less critical in their assessment. . Much more worrying was the increasing polarisation of Nigeria along geographic and religious lines. Obasanjo swept 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 public campaign against corruption and implementing economic reforms in his country, he has been widely seen abroad as an African statesman championing debt relief and democratic institutions (thrice rejecting government change by coup in the continent of Africa as the chairperson of the African Union). In 2005 the international community gave Nigeria's government its first pass mark for its anti-corruption efforts. However a growing number of critics within Nigeria have accused Obasanjo's government of selectively targeting his anti-corruption drive against political opponents and ethnic militants, ignoring growing concerns about wide-scale corruption within his own inner political circle. Religious, ethnic and political unrest escalated sharply under Obasanjo's administration from 1999 until 2003, when more than 15,000 people were estimated killed and 80,000 internally displaced. Violence flared again in early 2006 with Christian-Muslim violence in northern and eastern cities and attacks by insurgents in the Niger Delta against oil industry targets, including kidnapping workers and sabotaging facilities. Human rights abuses by Nigeria's military, of which Obasanjo remains commander-in-chief, continued to occur with troubling frequency under his administration, according to a 2004 U.S. State Department report. On at least three occasions between 1999 and 2005 — once in the central state of Benue and also in the towns of Odi and Odiama in the Niger delta state of Bayelsa — soldiers raided and burned down communities, killing numerous civilians. Obasanjo was criticised by rights organisations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International for publicly condoning the raids.
On October 23, 2005 (just hours after the crash of Bellview Airlines Flight 210), the President lost one of his wives, Stella Obasanjo, First Lady of Nigeria. Obasanjo has many children, who live throughout Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0307/04/i_if.01.html
In 2006, controversy arose over moves to change the constitution to allow third terms in office for the President and the Governors. While Obasanjo never officially declared his intention to contest for a third term, it was widely believed that he and his supporters orchestrated the campaign for the highly unpopular constitutional amendment. However, on May 16, 2006, the Nigerian Senate (second house of the National Assembly) rejected the third term bid, meaning President Obasanjo must depart office at the end of his second term in May 2007.
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This article contains material from the Library of Congress Country Studies, which are United States government publications in the public domain.
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