Olusegun Obasanjo
Olusegun Obasanjo has ruled Nigeria twice, as the general who took over when Murtala Muhammed was assassinated in February 1976 and handed power to an elected civilian in 1979, the first Nigerian soldier to do so, and as the civilian president elected in 1999 after the Abacha years, who served two terms, tried and failed to get a third, and presided over the return of the country to the world and the adoption of sharia criminal law by twelve northern states, which his government decided not to fight in court. He has spent the years since as Africa's mediator of choice and the writer of open letters to his successors. He was born in Abeokuta in 1937, a Yoruba farmer's son, joined the army in 1958, trained in England and India, and commanded the Third Marine Commando Division in the civil war, accepting the Biafran surrender in January 1970. He was Murtala's deputy in the coup of 1975 and inherited the government and the programme: a new capital at Abuja, the return to civilian rule, universal primary education, and the seizure of Barclays and BP's assets over South Africa. He kept the timetable and went to his farm at Ota. Abacha jailed him in 1995 on a fabricated coup charge, and he came out in 1998 when Abacha died, to be picked by the generals as the southerner they could trust and elected in February 1999 with the north's votes and not his own region's. The first term settled the debts, with the Paris Club writing off eighteen billion dollars, put the telecoms and the banks into private hands, and could not settle the Delta, where the oil was, or the Middle Belt, where Christians and Muslims killed each other by the thousand at Jos and Kaduna. When Zamfara adopted sharia criminal law in October 1999 and eleven states followed, with amputations and a stoning sentence that the world protested, he called it political sharia that would fade and would not challenge it. It has not faded. He won again in 2003 in an election the observers called flawed, and in 2006 the senate refused to amend the constitution for a third term. His chosen successor Yar'Adua was elected in 2007 in a vote worse than any before it, and Obasanjo went back to Ota and to chairing the party, which he left in 2015 by tearing up his membership card on television.
- Lived: 1937 CE – ?
- Nationality: Nigerian
- Roles: president, general, head of state
