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Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo turned 89 on Wednesday and used an international colloquium at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta to deliver the most sustained critique of African governance he has offered in public in recent years — framing the continent’s persistent underdevelopment as a failure not of resources or geography but of institutional design and the character of successive leaders who have treated the state as a vehicle for personal accumulation rather than collective advancement.
Speaking at the colloquium titled “Burden and Blessing of Leadership: Reflections from Global Africa to the World,” Obasanjo described leadership as both a heavy burden and a profound blessing, drawing from decades of military command, imprisonment, and democratic governance. He reflected on pivotal moments that shaped his understanding of power, responsibility and service.
The speech’s central diagnostic was blunt: Africa had produced exceptional individual leaders throughout its modern history, but had failed to build the institutional frameworks that would make good governance independent of any individual’s character.
“We have produced extraordinary individual leaders like Mandela, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Sankara and Machel, but we have not consistently produced the institutional frameworks that make good governance endure and last regardless of who the individual leader is. We must solve the personality problem and the institutional problem. When an entire country’s trajectory depends on the character of one person, that country is permanently fragile,” he said.
Obasanjo said that by every measure of natural endowment, Africa should be a continent of prosperity, stability, peace, security and global influence. Instead, he said, a major part of the continent remains “a theatre of preventable disease and suffering, starvation, conflict, insecurity and poverty.” He added that the primary cause was not geography and not history alone — “though history has certainly dealt this continent grievous blows.”
He argued that to close the leadership gap, the continent must invest in leadership formation rather than merely leadership training. “We must invest not only in teaching leaders what to do, but in forming leaders who are constituted and imbued with attributes and values to do the job the right way,” he said.
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On democracy, Obasanjo said the system was imperfect, slow, and sometimes frustrating, but that alternatives Africans had experienced — military rule, one-party states, strongman governments — were demonstrably worse. He urged African governments not to treat democracy as a mechanism to be manipulated for electoral advantage but as what he called a covenant with citizens. “Let us take democracy seriously — not as a system to be manipulated for electoral advantage, but as a covenant with the people: a genuine commitment to good governance that is accountable, transformational, transparent, selfless and oriented toward inclusive development and the common good,” he said. He called on leaders to defend independent judiciaries, protect free expression, reform inherited colonial democratic frameworks for African realities, and build civil services, regulatory bodies, and universities capable of outlasting individual governments.
Obasanjo reflected on formative moments from his own career, including his role as Commander of the Third Marine Commando Division during the Nigerian Civil War and his imprisonment under the late military dictator Sani Abacha in the 1990s. He cited his incarceration as a stark example of the price that can accompany standing by one’s convictions. He also described as one of the most fulfilling moments of his career the peaceful transfer of power from military to civilian rule in 1979, when he handed over to President Shehu Shagari — Nigeria’s first such transition.
Obasanjo urged African governments to engage the global African diaspora more effectively, describing it as an underutilised asset capable of accelerating continental renewal. He highlighted the African Continental Free Trade Area as a transformative initiative capable of expanding markets, attracting investment, and improving Africa’s global competitive position.
On Africa’s youth, Obasanjo said the continent’s median age was below 20 and that the demographic represented either a dividend or a disaster depending entirely on whether young people were educated, healthy, skilled, employed, and empowered.
“A continent that fails its youth does not merely waste a generation; it plants the seeds of instability that will haunt the next several generations,” he said.
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Turning to Nigeria directly, Obasanjo warned that ethnic and religious sentiments posed an existential threat to the country’s cohesion. He described Nigeria as “not merely a nation” but “an argument — an ongoing, unresolved, occasionally violent but ultimately vital argument about what kind of people we are and what kind of future we can build together.” He said advocates of religious and ethnic hegemony were “great enemies” of the country, and that Nigeria could not survive if it functioned as the property of any single region, faith, or community. “It will not work if Nigeria belongs only to the South or the North, the East or West, or to Muslims or Christians alone,” he said.
Obasanjo also addressed a forged letter that had recently circulated on social media purporting to be from him and alluding to his death. He said the people spreading it were wasting their time: “I dey kampe,” he said, using Nigerian pidgin to signal he was in full health.
The 89th birthday activities are scheduled to conclude on Thursday with a distinguished lecture titled “The Global African Enlightenment: From Chains to Renaissance,” to be delivered by Ambassador Jean Robert Pillard, Haiti’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, followed by a reception at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library.
