An Introduction by Olusegun Obasanjo

An Introduction by Olusegun Obasanjo

In the third volume of my last book, My Watch, I authored a chapter on the Presidential Library in which I laid out my dream for this centre. Towards the end of that chapter I cracked a joke about how, if asked now—with the foreknowledge of the ensuing decade of work and sweat and near disaster that was the building of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library—whether I would have begun the journey at the time that I did, and I would have shouted a resounding, No. But we began the journey. A journey that was the fruit of conversations that began in 1988 between myself and Mr Nyaknno Osso, conversations that were interrupted by a three-year stint in prison, taken up again immediately after I regained my freedom and during my term as elected president, and solidified with a ground-breaking ceremony in 2005.

As you, dear visitor and citizen, begin your tour of these facilities, I want you to see my footprints not only in the sands of time, but also on the sand of history. You will learn some of the things I have done and have come to admire in the span of my life, about humanity and about my birth—my village background with its enchanting allure and beauty, towns and cities, success and failures, happiness and sadness and what shaped my life.

President Olusegun Obasanjo