If You Want To Thrive And Feel More Alive, Do Yourself a Favour and Study Chief Obasanjo
What has kept President Obasanjo alive long after many of his age mates and former military and governmental colleagues have died? Along with good health, which principally comes from God,… pic.twitter.com/dbliMV6Z4e
— Reno Omokri (@renoomokri) September 21, 2025
If You Want To Thrive And Feel More Alive, Do Yourself a Favour and Study Chief Obasanjo
What has kept President Obasanjo alive long after many of his age mates and former military and governmental colleagues have died? Along with good health, which principally comes from God, his longevity stems from the fact that he has a purpose to live for. He is purposefully committed to Nigeria.
Other than former President Jonathan, who is much younger than General Obasanjo, no other past leader in Nigeria, and, when you think about it, in Africa, has carried Nigeria and Africa on their head like Chief Obasanjo.
He considers himself, rightly or wrongly, a father of modern Nigeria and a pillar of contemporary Africa. Without invitation, he would dabble in statesmanship to identify dangers on the horizon and provide solutions before they manifest.
And that has kept his acumen agile. His continuous refusal to sit idly in one country, preferring to be a frequent traveller and a regular sportsman, playing squash daily and religiously, means that his body is forced to defy the laws of physics and biology and keeps serving him well into his eighties.
Whether or not you like or love him is not the point. The focus of this piece is what we can learn from him, because I have yet to see a person who is not suicidal who does not want to live long.
But the issue is that living long without living strong is only to exist. Mr. Obasanjo does not just exist. He thrives. And his life thrives because he strives, survives, and revives himself by the lives he imbibes and impacts.
Many people misunderstand strength. Especially in Africa, where strength is often only seen in physical terms.
Strength in reality is your ability to continue to assert your will through whatever means you can on this plane of existence.
When you read Chief Obasanjo’s best book, ‘Not My Will,’ which I first read as an impressionable seventeen-year-old in 1991, a year after it was first published in 1990, and then also yesterday, on the flight as I left Abuja, I am again in awe of the remarkable intellect of a man who was born to two illiterates yet has written more books than any other leader in Africa.
And because I have read almost all his other books, from This Animal Called Man, which was more or less his prison notes, to his My Watch series of books, it became evident to me that the reason for President Obasanjo’s consistent and unmatched relevance on the African continent from his involvement in the Congo Crisis in 1961, to his shuttle diplomacy in 2025, is because Africa in general, and Nigeria specifically, are god life’s focus.
Mr. Obasanjo epitomises the ‘Think globally, act locally’ mindset first impressed on the world by the Scottish sociologist Patrick Geddes.
Mr. Obasanjo’s books should be required reading in all Nigerian schools, from secondary level upwards.
Yes, he can be considered self-serving at times, and he does have an outsized ego. But who can be that brilliant without some eccentricity? In my view, those seeming vices were necessary and perhaps even active ingredients for making him the phenomenon that he is. Such types of superhuman intellect must manifest themselves in some unconventionality.
Could Michael Jackson have become the figure who has defied time and space and continue to pick up new and young fans at a faster pace than even the top current artists, even sixteen years after his death, if there was no madness to his magic?
Winston Churchill could not become himself after waking up unless he had consumed several large glasses of Scotch whiskey. Today, who is a greater Briton than him?
The positive outputs of Chief Obasanjo’s life, and their impact on Nigeria and the world, more than excuse his flaws, which are to a large extent exaggerated by his enemies.
If you, as a Nigerian, want to know how much you personally owe General Obasanjo, then read his 1980 book, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970.