On Obasanjo’s latest regret, the temperament a wiser elder saw three decades ago, and the single wound that has never closed
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Twenty-seven years ago, Olusegun Obasanjo swore that nothing on earth, not even the wives of two men, would ever come between him and Atiku Abubakar. On Friday, in Lagos, he stood before a crowd and called that same man the greatest mistake of his life.
Then, almost in the same breath, he assured us there was “no bitterness” in him at all.
The country heard both sentences. It is not deceived. A man at peace with a matter does not carry it to schoolchildren in 2022, into a July letter to Aremo Osoba, and onto a Friday stage nearly thirty years after the fact. Peace is silent. Only a wound speaks this often. Only an unhealed one reopens on its own.
He swore no force could part them. Now he calls the partnership his life’s greatest error. Both cannot be true.
THE VERDICT NO ONE CAN UNSAY
Long before the ballots, before Atiku had governed a single day at his side, one of the most upright northern statesmen of that generation looked hard at Obasanjo and refused to back him.
And this was no bystander. Chief Sunday Awoniyi was the very man who chaired the committee that wrote the PDP’s founding manifesto, the party’s own creed. He had known Obasanjo for three decades and did not find in him a man of consensus or consultation. In a newspaper interview of the day he called him “incapable of trusting anyone or of being loyal to anyone except himself.” He named him unforgiving. He named him vindictive. And he judged him, plainly, over-rated.
Read it slowly. Every charge Obasanjo now hurls at Atiku, a revered elder had already filed against Obasanjo in 1999, while Atiku was still innocent of any offence against him.
The man who wrote the party’s creed had already judged the candidate unfit to trust. Atiku had not yet sinned.
THE ANATOMY OF A RUINOUS TEMPERAMENT
Take that indictment apart, word by word, and each word names a wound the nation itself is made to bleed for.
A man who trusts no one cannot delegate, and a president who cannot delegate becomes a single narrow gate through which a whole federation must squeeze. He hoards. He gathers clerks where he needs partners. He mistakes the nod of a frightened man for competence. Around him, institutions starve, because institutions feed on shared power, and he shares none.
A man loyal to no one but himself spends allies like small coins and drops them the moment they buy him nothing more. Those who serve him learn the terms too late: nearness is not safety, it is a place in the queue for disposal. In the end the gifted stop coming, and only the pliant remain.
An unforgiving man rules by grudge. He keeps a private ledger of every slight and settles it with the machinery of a nation, until high office becomes an instrument of personal revenge. Hand a scorekeeper a country, and its institutions quietly turn into his weapons.
A vindictive man does not stop at coldness. He hunts. Strength that belonged to the nation is poured instead into the ruin of whoever he has marked, and we are watching that strength at work even now, thirty years on, trained on a deputy who stopped answering to him before some of today’s voters were born.
A man who over-rates himself cannot be told anything, for to be corrected he must first grant that he can be wrong, and that door he has bricked shut. Counsel reaches him as noise. Disagreement reaches him as treason. This is the exact self-worship that birthed the Third Term, and that has since crowned him the unelected examiner of every president after him, each summoned in a fresh open letter and marked down.
And a man neither consultative nor consensual, in Awoniyi’s phrase, cannot run a democracy at all, for democracy is only consultation and consensus written into law. Give such a man an army and he may command it. Give him free citizens and he will fail them, because free citizens must be won, never ordered.
THE MEN WHO WOULD NOT HAVE KNELT
Now set that temperament beside the men he might have chosen instead.
Abubakar Rimi, the choice his own party chairman pressed on him, was so fiercely his own man that when the party agreed to hand the presidency south, Rimi alone voted no, refusing to bow even to his own side. Put a Rimi beneath a principal who demands obedience and calls it loyalty, and the break comes not in year eight but in week one.
Adamu Ciroma. Mahmoud Tukur. Awoniyi himself. These were the northern elders who, knowing Obasanjo, threw their weight behind Alex Ekwueme rather than him. Men with their own names, their own convictions, and no gift for kneeling. Awoniyi could not be bought, fought the Third Term to the last, and was repaid with an attack on his own home. Ciroma spent a career telling party bosses the very words they least wished to hear.
Bamanga Tukur and Jibril Aminu, the Adamawa heavyweights on his shortlist, were a former governor and a former minister, each with a base of his own and a will to match it.
The conclusion writes itself. Every serious alternative was a harder, prouder man than the one he took, and every one of them would have collided with him sooner. Atiku’s sin was never disloyalty. His sin was that he served faithfully for eight years and then, on one question and one alone, refused to help his master break the constitution. Not one of the others would have survived the first.
THE DEBT OBASANJO WILL NOT NAME
Since he has chosen the language of mistakes, let the account be read aloud, beginning with the plainest fact of all, the one that unmakes the whole complaint. Without Atiku and the PDM, there is no President Obasanjo. None.
He came to the Jos convention a broken man: three years out of a prison cell, his businesses in ruins, his pockets empty, and by the accounts of that season so discouraged that he brooded in a supporter’s house and all but walked away from a campaign he could not fund. It was the PDM chieftains, the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua among them, who lifted his spirit and held him to the course. And it was Atiku who marshalled the delegates, swinging the machine he had inherited behind a man the northern bloc could as easily have denied. The votes that crowned Obasanjo were votes Atiku delivered. Remove that bloc and the ticket falls to Ekwueme, and Olusegun Obasanjo goes quietly home to Ota, a footnote in another man’s chapter.
That was only the opening of the giving. When the party first came hunting a candidate, it was Atiku who vouched for him as a man the world respected and the barracks trusted, Atiku who sat on the team that drove to Ota to draw him in when he would not come of his own accord.
When his businesses lay in ruins, it was Atiku who brought in his old Apapa hand, Fashawe, to rebuild the broken finances.
It was Atiku who, at a single fund-raising, gave one hundred million naira of his own money, and offered to carry two years of rent on the party’s national secretariat, while asking not one office for himself.
It was Atiku who surrendered the governorship of Adamawa, a mandate already won and still warm in his hand, to stand one step behind him.
And when Obasanjo asked whether he was ready to take orders, Atiku answered that he always had. That was the loyalty. That is the thing now branded the greatest mistake of a long life.
In office he was no ornament. Responsibility has trailed Atiku the whole of his life, because responsibility trails the diligent. The young customs officer who rose by sheer application, the businessman others trusted with their ventures, the governor-elect: he has spent a lifetime being handed weight precisely because he could be relied upon to carry it. Diligence is a magnet for delegation. Men give their heaviest load to the one who will not let it fall.
And here is the sharpest irony in the whole affair. Obasanjo, the man who by Awoniyi’s reckoning trusts no one, still handed Atiku the running of the national economy, the council, the reform programmes, the years in which the economy climbed from about $58 billion to some $270 billion. A president who could delegate to almost no one delegated that to Atiku, because even a distrustful man cannot argue with diligence. The very burdens Obasanjo laid on his deputy are the measure of the deputy’s worth. No man hands his economy to his greatest mistake.
ONE WOUND, AND ONLY ONE
Clear away thirty years of accusation and a single stone sits at the bottom of the well. Obasanjo’s war with Atiku has one source. Not corruption. Not some ancient treachery. The Third Term.
For eight years the bond held. It held through two elections. It snapped on the exact day Atiku refused to help him rewrite the constitution and cling to a seat the law said he must vacate. Everything since, the memoir, the letters, Friday’s confession, is the echo of that one refusal. Atiku’s true offence was to rank the constitution above his principal’s ambition.
And here is the proof that Obasanjo knows it. In 2018, the very man who had sworn God would never forgive him if he backed Atiku stood at his own gate in Abeokuta, forgave him before the cameras, called him “president-to-be”, and told Nigeria he was fitter to lead than the man then in power. He said Atiku had found himself again and earned his blessing.
That was Obasanjo with the fever briefly broken, weighing Atiku as the nation ought to weigh him, and choosing him. The poison of today is not judgment. It is the old Third Term wound talking again, and it stands in flat contradiction to the clearest thing Obasanjo ever said about the man, said the very moment his grudge cooled.
THE CRUELLEST RETURN
So we reach the part that is not politics but plain humanity, and it is bleak.
A man surrendered his own governorship. A man rebuilt another’s fortune when that other had none. A man helped draft him into power, funded him, and served him eight years. And his reward, at the far end of a long life, is to be named on a public stage as its single greatest regret. Not argued with. Regretted.
Ingratitude is a heavy thing to carry to ninety. We were raised to know that a man does not erase the hand that steadied him, even when the two of them later fall out. Obasanjo may quarrel with Atiku as much as he pleases. He may not unwrite what Atiku was to him, and no sharp sentence on a Friday stage can perform that erasure.
He says there is no bitterness. Awoniyi saw it in 1999. Obasanjo himself laid it down in 2018. The whole country watches it rise again in 2026. And it is costing him far more than it has ever cost Atiku, whose name goes on a ballot in January while Obasanjo’s is spent, line by line, on a grudge that shrinks each time he repeats it.
The bitterness is his to set down. It is late. It is heavy. And it was never Atiku’s to carry.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General,
The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
1 August 2026
