As President, I Enjoyed Being Insulted - Obasanjo

Olusegun Obasanjo

Olusegun Obasanjo has confessed that when he was a sitting president of Nigeria he enjoyed being insulted by political opponents or critics.

Vanguard reports that Obasanjo made his surprising statement on Wednesday, October 14, speaking at the first international conference of the African Studies Association of Africa. The conference entitled “African Studies in the Twenty-First Century, Past, Present and Future” was held at the International Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan, Oyo state.

The former president revealed that all those published insults were kept in the archives at his presidential library.

“If you visit the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta, you will find thousands of archived newspaper comics and columns meant to spite and insult my person even as a sitting president. No individual or group of people was ever queried or jailed or repressed for expressing this freedom. Rather, I encouraged them because I derived fun and pleasure from the humour as I know who I am and nobody needs to tell me who and what I am not,” he said.

Describing himself as incurable optimist on a brighter future of Africa, Obasanjo assured Nigerians that the country and the whole continent would soon wriggle out of bad governance and corruption.
Premium Times reports that the ex-president recalled the ugly past when Africans were used as slaves by colonialists.

“As we are all aware, colonialism devastated and depopulated the continent through transatlantic slave trade,’’ he said.‎

He added that the inhumanity spread on the continent and later formed the basis for the seeming backwardness being experienced at present.

“The stain and stench of slave trade, the cold war, poor governance made some Africans to laud the good old days of colonialism, corruption and problem of human rights violations.
“In all these, I am delighted that the so-called great European historians who professed that Africa has no history lived to realise that African history and culture had impacts and ramifications on other parts of the world including theirs,” he said.

Obasanjo stressed that all factors that hindered growth and development were no longer in vogue in the continent.

“The right to free speech, the right to express a different view point, the right to draw personal conclusions based on self-instituted research and to query certain cultural practices and beliefs are part of the huge liberty that the continent of Africa now boasts of,” he noted.

In his speech, Akin Mabogunje, the chairman of the event, called for effective cooperation among African intellectuals to develop the continent.

“I wish to emphasise that the field of African studies in the 21st century can no longer ignore tropical issues of trade, migration, insurgency,’’ he said.

Earlier this week, Chief Obasanjo made a controversial statement that triggered an all out media outburst and brought to the fore incidents, which were long thought forgotten. The former president said that Nigeria would win the war against Boko Haram the same way the country defeated Biafra secessionist during the civil war.