@Max, you are absolutely right about OBJ's government being a turning point and I think that it was all by divine orchestration. There is something very mystical and spiritual about the whole thing and I honestly doubt that it could happen like this anywhere else on the world where the children of great men who fought and murdered one another almost 40 years earlier could all be linked to the same man and working at the same place, at the same time and in the same government. I am not sure that OBJ himself was really concious of what he was actually doing at the time but if there is one thing that I have learnt about that man if nothing else it is that he is very spiritually tuned in and sensitive. Let me give you just two examples. Had it not been for his rejection of Major Victor Banjo's appeal (through Professor Wole Soyinka) to allow him to enter the Western Region unimpedded with his Biafran forces the history of Nigeria would have been completely different. If Banjo had entered and joined forces withn the yoruba officers under Obasanjo's command and if Oduduwa republic had been declared by them and at the same time Benin Republic had been declared in the Mid-West, all three newly declared republics would have come together to fight the north and they would have marched on Lagos together and thrown out the garrison of northern soldiers and officers that was there. It would then have been a straight fight between the north and the south. Obasanjo's single and split second decision to reject and resist Banjo's suggestion averted that and ensured that it couldn't happen. This was the main reason that the north, ever since that time and up until 2007, trusted and respected him so much. Again Obasanjo was one of the closest officers to Major Nzeogwu and was with him the night before the coup (OBJ had just come back from India the day before) and yet he was not implicated in that coup but rather, when it mattered the most, he and most of the other yoruba military officers threw their wait solidly behind the northern officers at every relevant point in time. If they hadn't done so things would have been very different after the January 15th (Nzeogwu), the January 16th (Ironsi) and the July 29th (Northern officers) 1966 coups. The only mistake that Obasanjo ever made in terms of selection in my view was when he chose Yar'adua to succeed him as President and I think that he regretted that bitterly right up until today. But the truth is that even that was divinely orchestrated by God because had it not been for the fact that Yar'adua came in and then passed on on the job, the way would not have been paved for Goodluck Jonathan who, as you quite rightly said, has absolutely NO links with the events of 1966-970 or the events of Nigeria's civil or indeed post civil war politics and history. GEJ is purely a product of Nigeria's post-military Fourth Republic politics (1999-2007) and he is the first Nigerian ruler to be in such a position. No one knew him or who his father or family was before then. This is indeed a new and refreshing era. Thanks my brother. - Chief Femi Fani-Kayode

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