When Elders Forget Their Own Footprints: Obasanjo, Coup-Proofing, and the Burden of Hypocrisy

There is a proverb that warns that when an elder forgets the path he once walked, the entire village wanders in circles. Nigeria is living that proverb. The recent loud denunciations by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, casting the current administration as timid in the face of terror, might impress the uninitiated. But for anyone with even a modest memory of his years in power, Obasanjo’s rhetoric does not ring as the voice of wisdom; it sounds instead like a studied act of forgetting.

To understand why his latest outburst is so jarring, one must revisit both phases of his leadership – his first incarnation as military Head of State in the late 1970s and his second as elected president from 1999 to 2007 – and examine how his choices about the military, federalism, and state capacity helped shape the very insecurity and institutional weakness from which Nigeria now suffers. Only then does the extent of the ambivalence, and indeed hypocrisy, become fully visible.

Coup-Proofing by Weakening the Army

Obasanjo’s long-standing obsession with the military as a political threat is central to his story. As Head of State from 1976 to 1979, he oversaw the transition to civilian rule and cultivated an image of the soldier who voluntarily returned power to civilians. When he returned in 1999 as an elected president, he carried into the Fourth Republic the mindset of a man who knew the barracks too well and feared their capacity to unmake governments.

Faced with a military that had dominated politics since 1966, Obasanjo moved swiftly to “coup-proof” his administration. Within months of taking office, he retired scores of senior officers who had held political appointments or were seen as too close to previous juntas. In theory, this looked like a decisive attempt to draw a firm line between the barracks and the State House. In practice, it amounted to a brutal amputation of institutional memory within the armed forces.

Retirements at that scale were not followed by carefully planned leadership regeneration. One layer of senior command after another was swept aside, but there was no corresponding investment in building a professional, well-trained, well-equipped officer corps beneath them. Promotions too often followed the logic of loyalty rather than competence. Budgets were appropriated, but corruption, opacity, and sheer neglect meant that procurement was poor, training shallow, morale fragile.

This is the classic pattern of “coup-proofing” seen in many post-authoritarian societies: regimes protect themselves from their armies by weakening those armies. Command structures are fragmented, parallel security outfits are strengthened, intelligence is politicised, and the officer corps is kept insecure. Such strategies may buy a president personal security in the short term, but they do so by trading away the state’s long-term capacity to deal with serious threats. Obasanjo followed this playbook to the letter.

Thus, by the time Boko Haram began to mutate from a fringe movement into a violent insurgency, Nigeria had an army that looked formidable on paper but was brittle in reality – an institution where the memory and experience of older officers had been purged, professionalism eroded, and weapons systems and logistics left to decay. The very force that should have been the backbone of the state’s response had been systematically enfeebled in the name of preventing coups. Nigerians would pay dearly for this false sense of security.

Boko Haram: The Tumour He Chose Not to Treat

It is impossible to talk about Boko Haram without acknowledging that the group came into being during Obasanjo’s second presidency. Founded in 2002 in the north-east, under the leadership of Abubakar Lawan and later Mohammed Yusuf, Boko Haram emerged in a region already burdened by long-standing structural problems: chronic poverty, youth unemployment, the Almajiri system that left thousands of boys drifting between Qur’anic schools and the streets, and a history of religiously framed protest stretching back to the Maitatsine uprisings of the 1980s.

Any serious national security strategy under Obasanjo would have recognised this constellation of risk factors: a neglected region, simmering grievances about corruption and exclusion, and a religious movement preaching purity against a “sinful” state. Yet Boko Haram was treated as a nuisance, not a warning. Security agencies either misunderstood the doctrine, trivialised the group as an eccentric sect, or chose to ignore the intelligence flows from local communities and some northern elites who were already worried about its radicalising message.

The result was that Boko Haram was allowed to consolidate quietly. It acquired an organisational structure, ideological coherence, and a network of sympathisers and recruits. Its sermons spread across mosques and open grounds; its camps and indoctrination sites multiplied; its critique of the Nigerian state as corrupt and un-Islamic resonated with angry, marginalised young men. All this happened under the gaze of a federal government headed by a former general, who had both the authority and the time to develop preventive strategies combining intelligence, policing, and targeted social interventions in the north-east.

It was only after Obasanjo left office that the tumour he had left untreated exploded. The 2009 uprising and its brutal suppression created martyrs and deepened cycles of revenge. By 2013–2014, Boko Haram had seized territories, hoisted flags, and proclaimed a caliphate over swathes of Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. Soldiers fled positions, complaining about inadequate weapons and support. Citizens watched in disbelief as their country’s army – touted as one of Africa’s largest – struggled to hold secondary towns against ragtag insurgents.

This is the backdrop against which Obasanjo now mounts the moral high horse, asking why drones are not simply deployed to “take them out,” and why negotiations or other non-kinetic methods are even on the table. The irony is violent. When a preventive approach, rooted in intelligence, community engagement, and timely coercive action, would have been appropriate, his government looked away. When a long-term military investment was needed, he chose coup-proofing and underdevelopment of the army. And when the monster finally matured, his successors inherited the catastrophic consequences of his neglect.

To be clear, Boko Haram’s evolution has passed through many hands and many errors – Obasanjo is not solely responsible for its later brutality. But it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that the story of Nigeria’s north-east insurgency began after 2007. The group’s formative years coincided with his presidency, and the state’s failure to diagnose and act decisively in that period is part of his legacy.

Federalism as Weapon: Lagos, Tinubu, and the Politics of Punishment

The contradictions of Obasanjo’s leadership appear just as stark when one examines his relationship with Lagos State under Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Here we see a pattern: when a state sought to expand its capacity, modernise governance, or push constitutional boundaries in the direction of true federalism, Obasanjo responded not with dialogue or reform, but with punishment and obstruction.

The battle over local government allocations is emblematic. When Lagos created additional Local Council Development Areas to improve service delivery to its teeming population, the federal government under Obasanjo stopped releasing the constitutionally mandated allocations due to the state. The dispute went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that withholding the funds was illegal. Yet, the president simply refused to comply. For years, Lagosians were effectively punished because their state governor belonged to an opposition party and dared to test the limits of federalism.

This was not a mere technical quarrel. It signalled that the centre would use control over resources as a cudgel against states that stepped out of line politically. It also underlined a deeper trait in Obasanjo’s style: a reflex to personalise institutional matters, to see legitimate constitutional experimentation as an affront to his authority. In a democracy still struggling to consolidate, this kind of imperial presidency did damage far beyond Lagos. It hardened partisan divisions and strengthened the culture of “federal might,” where the party at the centre wielded national resources to cow opponents rather than build a mature system of cooperative federalism.

The clash over electricity followed the same script. Faced with a collapsing national grid and a federal power sector that had gulped billions of dollars without delivering stable supply, Lagos sought to chart its own path. The state entered into Independent Power Project arrangements to generate electricity and dreamed of directly powering critical parts of its economy. Instead of treating this as a welcome experiment and a model for other states, Obasanjo’s government deployed constitutional arguments to shut it down, insisting that electricity was squarely within federal competence and that states could not independently generate and distribute power.

Yet the same federal government that hid behind the Constitution to frustrate Lagos was perfectly willing to tolerate, and even enable, de facto autonomous power generation and distribution within spaces it favoured – a contradiction that leads directly to the Redeemed Christian Church of God’s Redemption Camp.

The Redemption Camp Exception: Religion, Patronage, and Double Standards

Nothing exposes the hollowness of Obasanjo’s constitutional arguments more than his relationship with the RCCG and its sprawling camp off the Lagos–Ibadan expressway. In practice, the Redemption Camp operates as a parallel municipality: it generates its own electricity, reticulates power, runs its internal transport system, and relies on an infrastructure web built and maintained largely outside state structures.

During Obasanjo’s tenure, the federal government granted RCCG generous import waivers on materials and equipment required to build and expand this quasi-city: iron and steel for construction; large generators; fleets of yellow buses; musical and audio-visual equipment for Dove Media; and a variety of other goods that would ordinarily have attracted substantial duties. The figures involved ran into tens of billions of naira in forgone revenue. The practical consequence was clear: a private religious organisation was allowed to massively increase its infrastructural capacity at minimal cost, including the capacity to generate and distribute reliable electricity within its boundaries and sell it to residents.

Here, then, is the paradox. A constitution that was supposedly rigid and “exclusive” when Lagos State sought to improve power supply for millions suddenly became flexible when a favoured religious community needed to power its city within a city. Federal authority, which claimed it alone could handle electricity, was quietly and selectively devolved – not to a federating unit accountable to voters, but to a private faith-based corporation accountable only to its own leadership.

This is not merely a legal contradiction; it is a moral one. It reveals that Obasanjo’s use of the Constitution was highly instrumental: a shield when he sought to block an opposition state, and a curtain behind which he opened doors for allies. It speaks to a patronage system in which religious institutions, especially those whose leaders cultivated closeness to the presidency, enjoyed privileges that state governments could not secure, even when acting in the public interest.

The implications are profound. By privileging such enclaves, Obasanjo participated in a dangerous fragmentation of state capacity. Instead of building strong, impartial public institutions capable of serving all Nigerians, he presided over an arrangement where islands of functionality – religious camps, corporate spaces, gated communities – flourished through special deals, while the wider public realm remained starved. The message to citizens was unmistakable: alignment with power and proximity to certain networks offered more practical benefits than democratic accountability or constitutional rule.

The Elder Who Lectures Without Remembering

When one brings together these strands – the coup-proofing that hollowed out the army, the neglect of Boko Haram’s formative years, the punitive approach to Lagos, the selective generosity toward RCCG – a consistent picture emerges: a leader who often subordinated institutional development to personal security, partisan rivalry, and patronage.

Against that backdrop, Obasanjo’s recent denunciations of the Tinubu administration’s security approach are unsettling not because criticism is unwelcome, but because they are shorn of any self-critique. He speaks as though he governed in an era of flawless judgement, as though terrorism sprang fully formed only after he left office, as though the Nigerian army’s early failures against Boko Haram had nothing to do with the choices made during his watch. He bellows that “we have drones” and demands to know why they are not simply unleashed, as if warfare in forests full of hostages is a cinema spectacle rather than a delicate, life-and-death calculus.

By contrast, the current approach – whatever its flaws – has at least attempted to move away from showmanship toward strategy: a gradual rebuilding of military capacity, expansion of recruitment, intelligence-driven operations, and a mix of kinetic and non-kinetic tactics that recognise that not every problem can be bombed into submission, especially where captives are involved. It is legitimate to debate how effective these measures have been or where they fall short. What is not legitimate is to pretend that the man who contributed to the weaknesses of the system now confronting terror stands outside history as a neutral referee.

The same is true beyond security. When Obasanjo postures as a guardian of constitutionalism, federalism, and good governance, Nigerians who recall his refusal to obey a Supreme Court judgment on Lagos allocations, his flirtation with a third-term agenda, and his selective empowerment of private allies over public institutions can only shake their heads. This is not the measured voice of an elder reckoning with his own record; it is the voice of a man who has chosen to curate a partial memory of his time in office.

True elder statesmanship is not the art of shouting the loudest from retirement. It is the craft of honest reflection. It requires a willingness to say, “This is where I erred; this is what we failed to see; this is how my choices contributed to the present.” Only then do criticisms of successors carry moral weight. A former leader who refuses that work of remembrance and self-interrogation has no real authority to lecture anyone on how to build or secure a nation.

Conclusion: Memory, Responsibility, and Nigeria’s Future

Nigeria’s crisis is too serious for the country to indulge in the sentimentalities of selective amnesia. Terrorism, banditry, energy failure, weak institutions – these are not problems dropped from the sky in 2023. They are the accumulated result of decades of choices: of underinvestment, politicisation, patronage, and a refusal by successive leaders to think beyond their own political survival.

Olusegun Obasanjo’s role in that history is complex. He helped midwife a return to civilian rule, and he took some decisions that did push the country away from overt military domination. Yet he also crippled the army in ways that later compromised national security, neglected emerging extremist threats that would become Boko Haram, subverted federalism when it displeased him, and bent constitutional arguments to favour his allies while punishing his opponents. That is the record – not the myth – against which his present interventions must be measured.

This does not mean that President Tinubu, or any current leader, is beyond reproach. It means simply that criticism must come with memory. For Nigeria to move forward, it needs fewer elders who perform outrage from a place of amnesia and more leaders, old and new, who are prepared to confront the full truth of their own footprints. Without that, the village will continue to walk in circles, guided by voices that have forgotten the path they once forced everyone else to tread.