While leading the Valentine morning service at his hilltop mansion in Abeokuta, former President Olusegun Obasanjo told his audience how God had been specially devoted to him in all his life’s ups and downs.
“God has always been giving me immense favour beyond my own expectations and what I deserve from Him. And I used to tell people that God has been partial to me from childhood,” he told his guests on Tuesday.
Going down memory lane, he narrated how the late despot Sani Abacha slammed him a
15-year jail term by a military tribunal in 1995 over allegations of coup plotting along with his former deputy in the army, Sheu Yar’ Adua who eventually died in prison.
Reading from the book of Isaiah 45:1-4, Obasanjo said he asked himself while in prison if he deserved such a raw deal. “But that he left everything in the hand of God.”
He recalled that as pressure from international community leaders which included former American president, Jimmy Carter, mounted, the Abacha regime reduced his sentence to
15 years..
According to him, the death of Abacha saw him spend only three years in prison, He noted that as part of the partiality of God to him, he came out from prisons to meet an agitation for him to contest for president.
He thereafter became president for eight years, starting from 1999. That, along with his regime as military president, has made him the longest serving president in Nigeria’s history.
“I was born in a village and anybody born in that village would have concluded that the popularity of those born there would not go beyond the next village. My parents were complete illiterates,” he said.
Thanking God, Obasanjo said he had experienced tribulations in his life but that God has been on his side throughout.
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