June 12th last year was the day Nigeria came back into my life. After a three-decade love affair with Africa, for the past few years I had tried to put the continent out of my mind. But on 12th June I woke up in my hideaway in the Canary Isles, switched on my computer and read the BBC headlines. Olusegun Obasanjo was out of prison. I couldn’t believe it. I rushed into the kitchen to tell my wife Jeany. She cheered. She knew how frustrated I had felt as Obasanjo’s health deteriorated and his formidable spirits sank in the dank Nigerian jail where he had been dispatched by President Abacha in 1995. Obasanjo hadn’t been short of influential friends. When I visited former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt two summers ago to talk to him about a European rival to the International Herald Tribune, we ended up discussing Obasanjo. “We’ve tried everything. Frankly,” Schmidt said, taking a pinch of his eternal snuff, “Abacha needs to be bumped off.”
I had worked with Obasanjo in 1976 on a disarmament commission chaired by the then Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme. I had learnt to dislike politicians; the only one I got on with in a commission stuffed with ex-prime ministers and foreign ministers was Obasanjo, a military president, it is true, but the man responsible for engineering Nigeria’s transition to civilian rule in the late 1970s. He had then been jailed for opposing the officers who had reduced his democratising efforts to dust.
In Moscow we went off fishing together—or rather he borrowed a rod off some boys we met on a walk and showed them how to do it. In Hiroshima we bunked off from one more boring reception and walked the streets. Later, he sent me an air ticket and I stayed with him on his farm; a couple of years after that I visited again. We ambled down to his old school, a mud-built structure on the edge of Abeokuta and he inserted his big frame into his old desk and smiled—the smile of a man who knew what he was doing and what he believed.
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