Yesterday...
'The Igbo engineers and other southern officers whose wives had welcomed me to Kaduna had been shot and killed. And the killers were still looking for the Yoruba man with a red Peugeot car.'

     Fisticuffs with Benjamin Adekunle

We flew in an Air Force helicopter to Maiduguri and Mai Deribe came to the airport in a Mercedes Benz car to receive us. We had a one-storey building. Every morning I wrote the menu for the day and handed it over to the cook. Jocularly, my husband said we were at last having our honeymoon which we had no time to enjoy in London. We would drive to Lake Chad, Bama and many other interesting places in Bornu area.

The crisis in the North-West and Central Nigeria didn’t have any effect on Maiduguri, which was calm and peaceful. Mr. Victor Pam, a senior police officer, briefed my husband of developments in the country regularly. While we were there, my father sent my mother to Kaduna to find out how we were faring because they had not heard from us during the bloodletting.  My mother stayed with her brother, Mr. Ogunlaja, who did not know our whereabouts.  

After two weeks in Maiduguri, Hassan Usman recalled us to Kaduna. Killings were still on but on a lesser scale.  On our return there a few days later, my husband said he was going to address his officers and men in the engineering corps.

I protested, thinking it would be unsafe. But he insisted that was his command and he must assume control. I insisted I would go with him so that if anything happened, they should just shoot me along with him because I had “taken in” while we were in Maiduguri; I was ready to die with him. I followed him there and he addressed the officers. There was no Ibo officer in the line-up. The Ibo officers’ wives who received me on July 20, 1966 had become widows. It was during that occasion that Major Alabi Isama nick-named me second-in-command.

Benjamin Adekunle came to our house in Kaduna. He had returned from Enugu. I noticed in his manner of speech that he was hot-headed; I met Comfort, his wife. Adekunle and my husband visited each other a few times. There was still tension everywhere because civilians were also killing people.

Ending the War

It will be wrong for people to say that Adekunle was within an ace of ending the war at the time that my husband took over the command of the Third Marine. Adekunle had fought a good fight but my husband had also beaten back the secessionist advance in the West before the Second and Third Divisions were hastily assembled. He stopped the Biafrans’ approach to Lagos. So he was not new to the war. He was in it before Muhammed and Adekunle. Taking over the marines was no big deal because he had been in charge of commands.

After the altercation between my husband and Mrs. Adekunle which I witnessed, I also heard a story which shows all was not well between them.

The story was that in the office of the Chief of Army Staff, Brigadier Hassan Usman Katsina, my husband and Adekunle met perhaps, to iron out issues of handing over the command. Adekunle was reported to have poured abuses on my husband. Unfortunately, both officers are short-tempered. My husband slapped Adekunle and the two went into a fight in the presence of Hassan.

There was no need to separate the aggressors who were staging what they should do to the enemy in the forward areas in his office. Hassan shouted for an aide to call the press to watch the drama. The two pugilists stopped as soon as they heard the word, “press.” They became apologetic to their boss.

Let me say that my husband was the blue-eyed boy of Hassan. With him, Obasanjo could hardly do any wrong. He was so enamoured of him he made the prophetic statement that Obasanjo was destined to play a not insignificant role in the life of Nigeria.

When Obasanjo left for Port Harcourt, communication with him was not regular. At a period, we didn’t hear from him at all. Rumours circulated that he had been wounded and a leg had been amputated. As I did not know what to believe, I left my fate in the hands of God. The war was raging fiercely because the secessionists were putting up a stiff resistance. Nigeria had even lost and recaptured Owerri.

Suddenly, he came to Lagos and Ibadan. He said he hoped Segun would be born toward the end of the war. Really, he had been wounded and the bullet scars were evident in his leg. But he did not make heavy weather of wounds suffered in battle; a real macho image. He returned to the war front and Segun was born on November 4, 1969. Gowon asked him to come to Lagos. He declined to leave the fighting there.

Governor Adebayo and the Western Nigeria Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Olumuyiwa Somolu, arranged for the christening of Segun. Obasanjo sent a soldier down from Port Harcourt for the ceremony.

Two months later, in January 1970, rumour was rife that the war would soon end and that he had broken the back of Biafra. January 15, the war ended and he received the instrument of surrender from Lt. Col. Effiong. We waited for six weeks to see him. He arrived and spent two weeks with us.

He took me and the children to Port Harcourt. There, I saw people trooping out and returning in droves to Calabar and Uyo. The scars of war were visible and mind-boggling. Damaged buildings, burnt bushes and men and women with lost limbs were testimonies to the mercilessness and ferocity of the war. It moved me to pity.

During a trip to Port Harcourt, Mr. Obikoya, my husband’s friend from Ibadan, was also around.  It was clear he was a regular visitor there.  Being an Army contractor, who supplied foodstuff, he was well known to the officers and soldiers.  In my mind, everyone seemed to regard him higher than Obasanjo.  My husband told me he was planning to travel to Lagos the next day and directed that I should sleep in the guest room.  That was strange to me as I thought it was Obikoya who should sleep there.  Instead he and Obikoya were to share the room.  I refused and locked myself in his room and threw the key out.  Obasanjo was so enraged he beat me for my audacity.  

It was during a thanksgiving service in Port Harcourt after the war that I noticed a woman walk up to Obasanjo in the church to peck him.  I later learnt she was Gold Oruh, a reporter with the Nigerian Television Authority, who later had children for my husband.  

Here was I barely three and half years after my return to Nigeria being the wife of a war hero, a very important person, a mother of three, yet a very young lady that was maturing beyond her years.

Life with Obasanjo was bliss at that period of my marriage because he cared for the family even as spoilers, men and women, had started to creep in to disrupt the evident concord in our relationship. Perhaps, this was why he gave me a gold pendant in 1970 with the inscription, “My Remi, man spoils good things.” Seven is a significant number. Seven days make a week. 1970 was the seventh year of our marriage. Perhaps, from a prick of conscience, he knew he had started to cheat. I did not understand the import of the message because I was so busy raising my young children and pursuing my career. I was oblivious of his philandering. How I wished his recognition of his guilt of cheating on me had checked him of his monumental moral indiscipline that was to smear our marriage.

My husband worked with competent lieutenants like Lt. General Alani Akinrinade, late Major General George Agbazika Innih, Major General Armah and many gallant officers. Victory is never by one man, although the leader takes all the encomiums. I am on behalf of the Obasanjo family paying compliments to all the officers and men in that division who made my husband’s task easy to accomplish.

     The separation

In football parlance, they call them strikers. In some other social circles, they call them Casanovas. I did not know my husband to be a flirt before our marriage. Perhaps, he was a master of decoy to have made me ignorant of that side of his life. Mark you; I was in my early teens when we met, just about to begin my secondary education. He was in the last lap of his and for seven years we courted before marriage. I was a school leaver of barely six months when we married. He is the only man I have known all my life. I had not the luxury of mixing or experimenting like some other women before I married.

He manipulated me at his will, knowing my experience in the world was limited to his. He raised me, so to speak; gave me the books I should read; dictated the course I studied; sent me to England, paid my fees at school there; hired a flat for me, paid my way back. In short, he took control of my life and moulded me. So when I found out his philandering exploits, I regarded it as the unkindest cut for his breaking the sacred vow we took at the London Registry.

There had been a woman, older than my husband, who was pestering me. She was Mowo Sofowora. The woman became a terror to her husband, threatening he could be liquidated if he objected to her illicit relationship with Obasanjo. Any time she was in Lagos, my husband never slept at home.  They usually had their rendezvous at Ikoyi Hotel. It was my driver who first gave me an inkling of who she was. Obasanjo’s batman had told me that the woman troubling “madam old pass Oga sef”.
    
One day in 1973, she phoned the house to brief Obasanjo of her experience in Vienna, Austria where she had just returned from one of her numerous trips to buy lace fabrics.  I was eavesdropping on the phone downstairs while Obasanjo was in the bedroom.  They had spoken for about 30 minutes when she then said she was having a headache. I had heard enough, so I butted in:

“It’s that headache that will kill you, shameless married woman dating a younger man”.

On hearing my voice, Obasanjo charged downstairs to beat me and we had one of the many fights that had come to define our marriage.  I later obtained her telephone number and I phoned her whenever I thought her influence was making me unhappy.  

“Mowo, leave my husband alone.  Face your home. Leave us alone”.

One day, her husband picked the phone and warned me to stop disturbing his peace. I abused him for allowing his wife to ridicule him so much.  He later divorced her. But I met Mowo in flesh in a fortuitous manner. I was pregnant with Dayo and had gone to Unity Hospital to see my doctor.  I had been kicked out of the house at that point and while awaiting the doctor I overheard a nurse announcing that one Mrs. Obasanjo was coming to the hospital with her sick children. I sat up.  Lo and behold, she soon appeared with Busola and Segun, my children.  I removed my head tie, tied it around my waist to hold my wrapper in place and lunged at her.

“Mowo, Oko ni o gba, o le gba omo mi”,
I screamed, meaning: you may snatch my husband you can’t snatch my kids.  

I slapped and punched her.  It was a spectacle. The hospital was turned upside down.  I ran after the car that brought her, smashed the side glass.  Finally, Dr. Charles Williams, the hospital director, calmed me down and arranged for Mowo to leave.  I then bought some food for my children as they looked hungry and poorly fed. I stayed with them in hospital for sometime. Dr. Williams later advised Obasanjo to let me have access to my children as a mother was the best nanny for her kids.  

My husband’s womanising knows no bounds.  When we were in Ibadan, we attended the Baptist Church in the Salvation Army area of the town.  Opposite the church was the house of a popular shoemaker, Mr. Akinsanya.  We always called on him after service.  I did not know that my husband was dating one of the daughters.  A lot of suitors proposed to the lady but she stuck to a married Obasanjo.  Beauty fades with time.  The lady is no more the beauty she was.  She has been dumped.  She was just another disposable needle.  On another occasion, Mrs. Sodeinde during one of her visits from Kaduna had mentioned to me in confidence that my husband was having many affairs, including relationships with married officers’ wives.



Tomorrow...
'People often wrongly thought it was Stella Abebe’s appearance in his circle that hurt our relationship. Hers was the least of the problems'

‘Bitter-Sweet: My Life with Obasanjo’ is published by Diamond Publications Ltd. Launch date: Tuesday November 11, 2008 at NIIA,Victoria Island, Lagos.

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