Former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, has said his choice to pick former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as his running mate in the 1999 presidential election was one of the worst mistakes he made while in government.
The revelation was made by Obasanjo on Friday during a fireside chat with veteran entertainer and activist, Charles Oputa, popularly known as Charly Boy, in Lagos.
The event was said to have been organised to unveil Charly Boy’s foundation and his memoir, 999: A Memoir in Tribute to Late Justice Chukwudifu Oputa.
The video of the event was uploaded on the YouTube channel of iWitnessLive TV.
When asked what he considered his biggest mistake as president, Obasanjo said no leader could claim to have served in office without making mistakes.
But he picked his vice president in a manner he would not have picked him if he knew Atiku the way he knew him later in their political relationship.
“I have found in my own life that what could have been all my life… mistakes that could have been fatal, God had taken care of it for me,” Obasanjo said.
And when Charly Boy asked him to name one of his mistakes, the former President said, “Mistake when I was in government. “If I had known him like I came to know him later, I would not have selected him to be my number two, my running mate.”
When asked if he was referring to Atiku, Obasanjo responded, “My vice president. I don’t know what you want to call him, but my vice president, I mean that.
The former President said that his experience with Atiku after they assumed office together made him realize that he would have made a different choice if he had known what lay ahead.
“Well, thank God, of course, what I know about him later, because God did not allow his actions and reactions to overwhelm me, or to divert my own focus from Nigeria, or to harm Nigeria even,” he said.
Not a bit of bitterness’
Obasanjo said that, despite political differences, he harboured no bitterness towards his former deputy.
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“And there’s no bitterness because he did what he thought he had to do, and God did what God had to do, which allowed me to do what I was able to do,” he added.
Obasanjo and Atiku contested the 1999 presidential election on the platform of Peoples Democratic Party and were elected President and Vice President respectively.
They worked together for eight years from 1999 to 2007, but their relationship later turned sour because of political differences, especially during Obasanjo’s second term in power.
The former President also addressed the Nigerian Civil War, refuting claims that the civil war was a genocide.
He said the military campaign was aimed at keeping Nigeria united, even though he admitted the terrible toll the war took on Nigeria.
“The civil war was traumatic for all Nigerians. “It hurt some a little bit worse than others depending on where you were, but the civil war was bad for all Nigerians,” he said.
Obasanjo, who was deeply involved in the military operations during the war, stated that he had deliberately taken steps to reduce civilian deaths.
He cited the re-capture of Owerri as an example of his efforts to avoid unnecessary loss of lives.
“I did not drop one bomb inside Owerri, because it will be destructive; it will have killed innocent civilians. I dropped my bombs short of Owerri and beyond Owerri, to warn the people that we are coming home,” he said.