Sule Lamido, former Jigawa governor and one-time national secretary of the defunct Social Democratic Party, says the SDP threw its weight behind Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999 because party leaders wanted “a Yoruba who could lead all Nigerians,” not a figure seen as championing strictly Yoruba interests.
In Chapter 9 of his new memoir Being True to Myself, launched May 13, Lamido recalls that some Yoruba leaders initially proposed Chiefs Olu Falae, Bola Ige, or Abraham Adesanya for the PDP ticket.
But, he writes, “none of these could make a fair and effective president in Nigeria.”
“The effort then was to support Obasanjo,” he says, explaining that retired generals inside the PDP argued the ex-head of state carried nationwide trust and already “had the profile of a prominent Nigerian.”
Obasanjo’s military résumé, chief of staff to Murtala Muhammed, then military head of state, reinforced that view.
Lamido also cites Obasanjo’s decision in 1979 to accept Shehu Shagari’s election victory, despite Yoruba pressure to back Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s court challenge.
That choice, he notes, “upheld the results of the elections” and burnished Obasanjo’s nationalist credentials.
Choosing the former general angered many Yoruba elites, Lamido concedes, in part because Obasanjo had not championed Chief MKO Abiola during the June 12 crisis.
Yet party strategists believed only Obasanjo could serve as “a Yoruba Nigerian President and not president of the Nigerian Yoruba.”
