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26 — Vanguard, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2022
The letter, the spirit, and
The Letterman
IF there was a prize for Nigeria’s number
one letter writer, journalist-turned-lawyer
and one-time minister, Tony Momoh, would
appear to be the undisputed champion. The
late Momoh performed the difficult task of
making sense of General Ibrahim
Babangida’s largely messy and convoluted
political and economic programmes by
writing regular letters to “fellow countrymen”.
His extensive and elaborate undertaking later
packaged as a book entitled, Letters to my
Countrymen, was, to put it mildly, a labour of
misery. It was a thoroughly thankless job. But
how can Momoh’s letters ever hope to
compete with those of former President
Olusegun Obasanjo? It’s not about differences
in the audiences alone. There are also
significant differences in approach,
temperament, style, context, message and, of
course, potency. Momoh may get the prize
for the most consistent cabinet minister who
tried to endear a largely despised government
to the public through regular correspondences
later codified. But the record of the most
controversial, most volatile - and some might
even add, most annoyingly pontifical epistles
- may deservedly go to Obasanjo, a medal that
only his daughter, Iyabo, attempted in vain to
snatch in just one devastating piece of literary
ambush.
Not latter-day hobby
It would seem that this was a latter-day
hobby, cultivated in the last one and a half
decades or so after Obasanjo was accused of
behaving as if he left something behind in
office. But a new book by Nigeria’s foremost
investigative journalist, multiple awardwinner,
and Editor-In-Chief of Premium
Times, Musikilu Mojeed, suggests very clearly
that Obasanjo’s love of letter-writing has been
a life-long indulgence. Mojeed’s new
book, The Letterman, an enthralling narrative
in presidential history, provides rare access into
the literary closet of a man loved and despised
almost in equal measure, but who remains –
like him or not – perhaps the most
consequential leader in Nigeria’s turbulent
62-year history. As far as good occasionally
comes from bad,
it is gratifying
that the Obasanjo
Presidential
Library, which
was built with
over N6 billion
largely from
cronies rounded
The Letterman
is a story of
Obasanjo’s
odyssey through
his personal
letters
up in Obasanjo’s
last days in office in defiance of public
criticisms, is turning out to be a treasure trove
of extremely valuable historical stuff. Until I
read The Letterman, I wasn’t quite sure who
the real letterman was — whether it was
Mojeed, a journalist with well over two and a
half decades of extraordinary variety of stories
- or Obasanjo whom most might be forgiven
to think used Babangida as first target-practice
at letter-writing. From the account in The
Letterman, however, by the time Obasanjo took
on Babangida in the public arena around the
mid-1990s, the former president was already
an accomplished author of sorts, with a fairly
large and even dangerously vitriolic collection
to show for his long-standing talent. Apart
from letters written to him by his parents 70
years ago, he started cultivating his love of
correspondences as far back as over five
decades ago. In Mojeed’s words, “Obasanjo’s
records show that he has been writing to almost
every key person who played important roles
in the affairs of Nigeria, Africa and the world
since 1969.”
Practice targets
From Head of State Yakubu Gowon to
President Shehu Shagari and from Babangida
to Sani Abacha and even first premier of the
Western Region, Obafemi Awolowo, and a
number of foreign leaders, Obasanjo never
shied away from telling them, in writing,
exactly what he thought, sometimes even at
considerable personal risk. His letter to his
superior officer, Brigadier Eyo Okon Ekpo at
the height of the Nigerian civil war in 1969,
for example, made me
wonder if many officers who
were compelled to fight
Boko Haram with bare
hands at some point during
the insurgency, would have
dared to think of, much less
compose, such a letter. And
what did Obasanjo have
against his superior? While
the war raged, Brigadier
Ekpo had managed to enroll
as a part-time law student
of the University of Lagos.
Obasanjo found out. Instead of enriching the
rumour mill with his own version of gossip,
he wrote his boss questioning the propriety of
his decision in war time, when other officers
who could also squeeze out spare time for a
past-time sacrificed it for the country. Yet,
credit must also go to Brigadier Ekpo who,
instead of taking offence (Major General
MammanVatsa was executed for reasons that
remain unclear), took the criticism in his
stride, saying, “I will continue with my
reading, and any officer or individual who
does not like it may please himself.”
There’s no indication what Obasanjo did
after that. But that encounter certainly did not
impair his appetite for throwing punches
above his weight. He landed a literary blow
against his army chief, Brigadier Hassan
Katsina, who had expressed concern about
some changes he was making in his Division.
Obasanjo said, in writing, to his boss, that he
was “disappointed and disturbed” that his boss
should express apprehension based on a
suspicion of tribalism. Obasanjo did not spare
his commander-in-chief, Gowon. During the
war, for example, he wrote “at least four
unsparing letters”, accusing the military
authorities of tempting defeat by sleepwalking
over his request for vital war equipment
supplies, a charge that, if the shoe had been
on the other foot, Obasanjo would hardly have
taken with the calmness with which Gowon
treated it. But Obasanjo being Obasanjo,
neither personal safety nor sense of danger
matters when national unity, reputation - or
as it sometimes turns out, personal ego - is at
issue. In about 130 published and previously
unpublished letters and mimeographs, with a
collection of a few rare photos of the former
president laid out in 462 pages of 25
chapters, The Letterman is a story of
Obasanjo’s odyssey through his personal
letters.
Words, not a few
Hardly a man of few words when he chooses
to write, perhaps the longest of the letters in
the book was Obasanjo’s response to Major
James Oluleye, who upon the outbreak of the
civil war decided to voluntarily forgo his
scheduled staff course in India and requested,
instead, to be posted to the warfront. The
erstwhile National Chairman of the People’s
Democratic Party, PDP, Audu Ogbeh, had his
fair share of Obasanjo’s lengthy epistolary
attack too, which eventually ended in his
removal; but Oluleye’s letter beats Ogbeh’s
for length, though not for vitriol. A
disagreement over strategy between him and
Obasanjo led to an incredible literary
crossfire, in which Obasanjo reminded Oluleye
(the operations officer of the Nigerian Army
at the time), in one of the most ponderous
pieces in the collection, that he (Obasanjo)
read his battle more “on the ground, rather
than on the map”, a sarcastic reference to the
former’s background role during the war. If
the letterman’s missile to Oluleye stood out
for its length and sarcasm, the cache of letters
to Babangida in this collection was
remarkable for both length and sarcasm, not
to mention their frequency, intensity and, well,
damning wit. Yet, given Babangida’s gift for
taking Nigeria for a ride at the time, not a few
thought he was eminently deserving of
Obasanjo’s bitter tongue.
Just like he would do to Presidents Goodluck
Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari many
years later, although under different
circumstances, Obasanjo told Babangida to
stop playing games with the country. “Just
pack and go,” he said in a letter that summed
up the country’s mood at the time. In six years
of painstaking work rendered with significant
restraint, Mojeed curated letters that captured
Obasanjo’s domestic wars (the face-off with
Lt. Col. Godwin Alabi-Isama raged for years,
spilling into their post-service era). If Obasanjo
was a prophet without honour at home, the
book doesn’t leave out his clout on the foreign
stage, where he is without question, one of the
continent’s most durable, respected and
accomplished figures.
Continues online:www.vanguardngr.com