BY EMAMEH GABRIEL
There is an old saying that we should believe nothing of what we hear and only half of what we see. In Nigerian politics, we often have to believe the exact opposite of what we hear, especially when it comes from a master of the political game who has been playing it longer than most of us have been alive.
Yesterday, former President Olusegun Obasanjo stood on a stage in Accra, Ghana, and with the straightest of faces, told the world a ghost story. He declared, with all the gravitas he could muster, that the infamous third term agenda, the concerted, year-long, multi billion naira effort to amend the constitution and keep him in power in 2007, was just that. A spectre. A phantom. A tale told by fools.
“I’m not a fool,” he said. “If I wanted a third term, I know how to go about it. And there is no Nigerian, dead or alive, that would say I called him and told him I wanted a third term.”
On the face of it, the statement was breathtakingly brazen. Below it, it was an insult to the collective memory of every Nigerian who lived through that tense, scheming period. To hear him tell it, the entire national drama, which nearly tore the country’s democracy apart, was a collective hallucination. A bizarre national project that just… haphappened byy itself spontaneously.
Let’s be honest here. President Obasanjo is a smart man. A former general, a political titan, a survivor. He didn’t get to where he is by being straightforward. He is a man who knows that the most effective power is often the power you deny wielding. You don’t issue commands; you create an atmosphere. You don’t give orders; you let your intentions be known through a nod, a wink, or a carefully placed silence. You use proxies.
And what proxies they were. For almost a year, the nation watched, transfixed and horrified, as a well-oiled machine of political surrogates, sponsored media campaigns, and lavish financial inducements rolled out. The goal was singular: to manipulate the National Assembly into removing the constitutional term limits that stood between Obasanjo and more years in Aso Rock.
Lawmakers were allegedly offered immense sums of money. The air was thick with pressure and intimidation. It was a dirty deal, and it wasn’t done in the shadows. It was done in the glaring light of day, with Nigerians watching the debate on live television, their hearts in their mouths. It was then-Senate President Ken Nnamani and that courageous assembly who, against all odds and pressure, stood firm and thwarted the agenda. They saved our democracy from a terrible precedent that day.
Yet, according to Obasanjo’s recent revision, he was just a passive spectator in Aso Rock, watching this strange, expensive, high stakes plot unfold around him like a viewer watching a particularly engaging Nollywood film. He didn’t direct it. He didn’t produce it. He certainly didn’t fund it. Which ghost, then, came up with such a lofty and expensive idea? Which benevolent, anonymous political angel spent all that money and political capital for a cause the principal knew nothing about?
It doesn’t add up. It never did. Atiku Abubakar, his own vice-president at the time, along with many other prominent Nigerians, spoke out loudly against the plot. They were not fighting a ghost; they were fighting a very real, very powerful political machine with one man at its centre. Colleagues in the National Assembly pointed fingers at each other, naming names of those involved in the “dirty deal.” They knew where the instructions were coming from.
Obasanjo’s defence is a classic tactic: the technicality. “No one can say I called him…” It is the logic of a clever courtroom lawyer, not a statesman. Of course, the master strategist wouldn’t be making clumsy, direct phone calls. That is for amateurs. The game is played through intermediaries, through (innuendo), through the unspoken understanding of what the Big Man wants. To deny it based on the lack of a recorded phone call is to pretend the game wasn’t played the way he himself has mastered it.
His other argument is even more revealing: “If I could get debt relief, which was more difficult than getting a third term, then if I wanted a third term, I would have got it too.”
This is where the mask slips. This statement admits two things. First, it admits that he believes a third term was an achievable goal—something that could be ‘gotten’, like a commodity. Second, it frames it as just another political project, like debt relief, to be conquered. But democracy is not a project. Term limits are not a problem to be solved. They are the bedrock of preventing the very kind of life presidency that has crippled so many African nations.
It is really disappointing that a man of his experience, who now rightly cautions against leaders who overstay and commit the “sin against God” of believing they are indispensable, cannot see that he is describing his own past actions. The third term agenda was the ultimate expression of that sin.
At this stage in his life, after decades of immense service and equally immense controversy, this half-denial, this clever-by-half rewriting of history, does him no favours. Nigerians are not fools. We have long memories. We remember the tension, the fear, the bulldozing of democratic norms. To try and airbrush it out of history now feels small. It diminishes his legacy far more than admitting a miscalculation ever would.
There is a certain pride in owning one’s mess. There is armour in authenticity. The truly wise man can look back and say, “I fought for what I believed was right at the time, even if others disagreed. I was convinced I had more to give. But the democracy we built was stronger than any one individual, and it worked as it should.”
That, we could respect. That would be the mark of the true statesman he claims to be. This current path of spectral denials, however, just keeps a ghost alive—a ghost of ambition that continues to haunt his own considerable place in our history. It’s a ghost he himself created, and the only way to lay it to rest is to finally, honestly, wear it.
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