Olusegun Obasanjo

In the world economic rankings over the last few years, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and potentially richest country, has fallen from No. 48 to 176. The nation was bled dry under 16 years of military rule, culminating in the brutal terror of Sani Abacha. One recent estimate in the Financial Times is that $225 billion in oil revenues were mismanaged, squandered or looted in the last 25 years. But when Abacha died suddenly last June, Nigeria was offered another chance at democracy.

On Feb. 27, Olusegun Obasanjo, a longtime opponent of the military regime--and former general and president--won Nigeria’s first national elections since Abacha seized power in 1933. When Obasanjo takes office as president on May 29, he sees his job as restoring Nigeria’s fortune, purging the country of corruption and channeling its immense oil wealth into productive development. Beyond that, Obasanjo seeks to shore up the country’s democratic institutions and make sure that, in business and financial life, accountability and honesty replace the sordid deals of the past.

Twenty years ago, at age 42, Obasanjo walked away from the presidency and the army to start a chicken and vegtable farm. He says he wanted to show his people that there was no shortcut to prosperity, that work was hard and meant getting dirt under one’s fingernails. He had been commander in chief of the armed forces and president from 1976-79, and he had accepted the Biafran surrender at the end of the Nigerian civil war in 1970. But he left power because, he asserts, he wanted to get the army out of politics and hand the country over to democratically elected politians.

Until now Obasanjo has had little success on both scores. His farming was regarded by many as a personal idiosyncrasy, and the democracy he founded was overthrown four years later.

Obasanjo combines, to a rare degree, brain, brawn and charm. Of massive build, he displays much self-assurance and determination. His detractors have called him ruthless; he certainly does not suffer fools, and many have withered before his unconcleled scorn. Yet, arrogance is not his vice. He is a deeply religious man. A Baptist,he wrote two books with spiritual themes while imprisoned by Abacha. Obasanjo is married and has two sons and four daughters from an earlier marriage.

This conversation, his first full-length interview since his election, began in his house in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, and continued on the presidental plane, en route to London at the start of a world trip that brings Nigeria’s elected leader to New York tomrrow.

Question: Some critics say you are in debt to, and even fear, parts of the army. Former northern general and strongman Ibrahim Babangida bankrolled your election campaign. And many army officers will be disgruntled if you cut down on the corruption they have long feasted on.

Answer: I have to say that people who believe that Babangida is the one who made me must have their heads examined. By every standard, it should be the other way round.

Q: How are you going to deal with the army, which has come to depend on patronage, on the fruits of the oil economy?

A: Well, it is not only the army. Some civilians are in the same sort of form and shape and the same frame of mind and same condition. You must show that the practices you want to get rid of are punished. When they know that you mean business about it--it will take some time--sooner or later you will achieve success.

Q: So you are going to crack the whip from the beginning?

A: I will more than crack the whip, I will use the whip.

Q: What about the $800 million that Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, the current president, said he discovered Abacha had stolen?

A: Well, if that is true, I will crack the whip about it. That is not the story that Gen. Abubakar himself has told me. The amount recovered is not up to $800 million but is more than $700 million. A substantial part of it already has been put back into the common pool. That is what he has told me, and I believe that before he leaves office he will explain himself.

Q: Are you going to ask Switzerland, Britain, Lebanon to freeze the foreign bank accounts of some of those who held high office over the last few years?

Jonathan Power is an internationally syndicated columnist.

A: I will set up an anticorruption body that will be empowered to seek and search and to recover Nigerian money and property, ill-gotten gains left anywhere in the world.

Q: Are you going to privatize the oil industry?

A: What I have said is that privatization will not be done just for the sake of privatization; it must have a purpose behind it. It should not be a religion. The purpose of privatization should be to bring efficiency and investment into the area in which you want to privatize. That is No. 1. No. 2, we must talk about the proper method of privatization. Some things people are talking of privatizing, they don’t even know the value. If you want to privatize something, you must know the value of it, whether you are talking of the worth in terms of replacement value or in terms of depreciated value, or in terms of return from investment.

Q: People of the oil-rich Niger Delta have watched billions of dollars flow from their soil as they grow poorer. One leader, the novelist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed by Abacha in 1995. Do you have a plan for repairing the moral and political damage wrought by your predecessors?

A: Yes. I have talked to the Ijaw people, and the Ijaws are quite rightly bitter because of real, terrible injustice. The insensitivity that some parts of Nigeria have exhibited is just unbelievable. Yes, the first thing is to understand what has gone wrong and what is going on in the Niger Delta. Then devise what will work, because the problem of Niger Delta can be put in one word: underdevelopment.

Q: Let’s talk about the rest of Africa. Democracy is now returning to Nigeria, but in many parts of Africa, in Zaire, Angola, Sudan, the Congo, democracy is circumscribed. There is an enormous amount of tension, there is fighting, corruption. Many observers in the West now say there is nothing we can do to help Africa in this predicament. The old order is crumbling; Western intervention of any kind is almost counterproductive. Do you look at it in that way?

A: Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that most of the things that will endure in Africa must come from inside Africa. They must be internally generated, like in Nigeria. Of course, we do need assistance, understanding, cooperation from outside for the sustenance of democracy, for the deepening and widening of our democracy. Because we must never make the mistake of thinking that once an election takes place, that is the end of democracy. . . .

The success of democracy in Nigeria will have implications for the advancement of democracy in Africa. In the first instance, it means, straight away, that 20%-25% of the population of Africa south of the Sahara are under some form of democratic rule. South Africa is there, Nigeria is there. You have other smaller countries that have been bastions of democracy for a long time. Then Nigeria can also be in a position to help other African nations. To me, the kind of help that Nigeria can render to other African nations is to help them democratize, and by helping them democratize it will help them to prevent conflicts which come out of real and perceived injustice. Most of these real injustices can be prevented through striving and working to fashion democracy.

Q: Supposedly to preserve democracy, Nigeria is directly engaged in the civil war in Sierra Leone. Is this a fruitful way of trying to spread democracy?

A: I don’t know. I will not go into how Nigeria found itself in Sierra Leone, but having found itself in Sierra Leone, Nigeria is under obligation not to abandon Sierra Leone without bringing some form of order and security and peace into Sierra Leone. I don’t believe that peace or reconciliation will come only through military means. That is why, when I had the opportunity, not so long ago, to meet with President [Ahmad Tejan] Kabbah, I made it clear that, first of all, he must know Nigeria cannot keep troops forever in Sierra Leone. We promised to help, and everybody I have been talking to believes that these and the reconciliation conference now planned will go a long way to bring everybody together--both those in the bush and those in the towns, those in the country and those outside.

If the rebels on the other side think that if they hold out against peace and democracy and against peace and reconciliation, one day Nigerian troops will be pulled out and they will overrun the government, they had better be warned that that will never happen. On the government side, if they think that it is business as usual, and they can just sit pretty and do nothing, they too had better be warned.

Q: As you know, there has been a United Nations human-rights report about the behavior of Nigerian troops in Sierra Leone, accusing them on occasion of severe brutality. Isn’t this counterproductive for an army trying to bring peace?

A: Well, those who write these reports are, of course, accusing Nigerian troops of bad behavior and acts of indiscipline, and I would hope that when such acts do occur the normal military process of dealing with them will take place. We should also understand that for soldiers deployed away from their country to defend another country for a cause that may not even be clear, some of them must be asking, “Why are we here?” I am not saying that they should not be condemned, but try and put yourself in the position of these people.

Q: The U.N. has just pulled out of Angola. The Western powers seem to have thrown up their hands with the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda, five years ago. In fact, President Clinton went to Africa last year and made an apology for not being more interventionist at the time. Where does the world community go next with the many civil wars now raging in Africa?

A: When we establish what is fundamentally wrong in each case, then we take a collective action to do what is right, to help that country. I was in Paris a few days ago, and President [Jacques] Chirac and I went over almost all the conflict areas of Africa. I was satisfied at the end of our discussion that the situation in Africa is not a hopeless situation. It is also not a situation where we should expect an overnight wonder.

Q: Was it a mistake for the U.N. to pull its troops out of Angola?

A: I believe that is a mistake. Remember, it was U.N. withdrawal that led to the massacre in Rwanda. The U.N. has to accept that when you send troops into a place, it also will involve a certain amount of loss. If sending U.N. troops is regarded as a quick fix, then U.N. troops are not required. To my own way of thinking, you might as well send in Boy Scouts.

Q: So you believe that even in a situation as serious as Rwanda was before the genocide that, with the right degree of deployment by the U.N., those massacres could have been substantially avoided?

A: I think that it was the fault of everybody who looked the other way. They could have been avoided.

Q: You have often spoken to me of the disequilibrium in society that is suddenly propelled from ancient to modern. You once said, “We have got caught up in the conflicts of culture of trying to graft the so-called sophistication of Europe and America onto our African society.” Do you still think that?

A: Of course I do. Somebody was talking to me the other day about information technology. When you go to most of our cities, you see that most of our well-off people all have information technology. The Internet is there, e-mail is there, all that is there. And then you go 10 kilometers out of town, and they don’t even have good drinking water, they don’t even have electricity. Then you wonder, How do these two coexist side by side? This is not politically sustainable--it is morally wrong and socially dangerous.

I am not advocating that we should live in the stone age, but I am saying we must think of reasonable development within our society. It comes down to the story somebody told me yesterday. There is this story of a priest who used to go to a village not far from the capital Abuja--a new, modern city. And they asked him to leave his car and wade through a stream that didn’t have a bridge. Then the village head came and saw him wading through the water. The priest said to the head man, “There must be something wrong in our country. In Abuja, we have bridges where there are no rivers, and in your village, where there are rivers we have no bridges.”

Some of this goes back to the basic idea about development. What do we make of development? I think we got it wrong initially. We see development as whatever we can import and graft onto our big cities, not what we can do for ourselves. That basically is it. What we can do for ourselves is development.

Q: What journey would you like Nigeria to go on in the next 25 years of your life?

A: I have four years ahead of me. I don’t even know whether I will live that long. If for the next four years I live, and things work in Nigeria, I will be happy with that. I want to take Nigeria out of the rot of the past 20 years and bring Nigeria back into a situation that it can become a country that can be reckoned with.*

“I have four years ahead of me. I don’t even know whether I will live that long. . .I want to take Nigeria out of the rot past 20 years.”

“U.N. withdrawal. . .led to the massacre in Rwanda. The U.N. has to accept that when you send troops into a place, it also will involve a certain amount of loss.”

“Most of our well-off people all have information technology. . .Then you go 10 kilometers out of town, and they don’t even have good drinking water.”