Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has revealed that he
formed the National Unity Organization in order to compel Abacha to relinquish
power. This was as he revealed the reasons why he allowed himself to be arrested
by the Abacha regime despite many opportunities to escape and accept an offer
of political asylum by the United States.
The former president
was among the opposition lights that were against the régime of the late Head
of State, General Sani Abacha, who ordered their arrest, trials and sentences
but spared their lives owing to international pressure.
Abacha was the most senior military officer in the Interim
National Government led by Chief Ernest Shonekan after the then military
president, General Ibrahim Babangida, was forced to resign over the annulment
of the historic June 12 June, 1993 election presumed to have been won by
Moshood Abiola, who later died in the military gulag.
But in his latest
memoir dogged by controversy, ‘My Watch’, Obasanjo said he was at that time
meeting with some leading politicians and non-politicians in every part of the
country on the need to free the country from the jackboot of Abacha whom he
said, “was so much below average as an officer that no serious attention was
paid to him until he was made to announce the coup.
“I was not in doubt that Abacha would attempt to silence.
This was clear from his apparent ambition for life presidency of Nigeria and
his insatiable appetite for corruption; his looting directly from the Central
Bank; his need to silence everyone that could oppose him in any form; his
actions towards my close surveillance of me by his security both within and
outside Nigeria.”
Obasanjo recalled how during his visit to Kenya for the
funeral of the father of the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, where the
Nigerian Embassy officials wrote a report indicting him, stating that “since
Odinga was in opposition to the government of Kenya when he died, I had gone to
Kenya to create problems for the Kenyan government by supporting the
opposition, and the Nigerian government should restrain me from causing great
problems between Nigeria and Kenya.”
Recounting further, the former president wrote “Rumours
about Abacha taking action against me stated to spread and ring louder and
louder. I had no fear because I had done nothing to cause me fear or anxiety. I
was going about my life and my business unperturbed.”
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