What we did to frustrate Obasanjo’s Third Term –Garba Shehu

What we did to frustrate Obasanjo’s Third Term –Garba Shehu

Garba Shehu was almost synonymous with the struggle against former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Can you give an insight into how you managed the turbulent circumstances and almost emerged victorious?



Well, you can see that there are offices and a number of staff behind this name. Even when we were doing all of that work it was never a work of one man, rather it was a collective work by all of us. We have a number of colleagues that have coordinating responsibility of this office. I think the work of public relations, as they say, is about 80 percent hard work and may be the 20 percent talking about the product of what you are doing.

When we set out against Obasanjo it was clear to us that we had engaged in the proverbial battle of the truth against falsehood and the triumph of the truth over falsehood. It is assured in all cases that you cannot suppress the truth because it is like oil, wherever you bury it, oil will always finds its way to the surface. And the Obasanjo administration was deeply an unpopular administration at that time because they were doing things that Nigerians did not like and did not approve of. You mention third term, from onset, it was clear that Nigerians didn’t want Obasanjo’s third term. They wanted him to go. And therefore to begin with, I must make the confession that we were lucky because we were sailing in the same direction with the wind. Therefore, the sailing was not easier but we got Nigerians from all walks of life willing to partner with whoever was working against third term.

So, when it was clear that Atiku, our boss, had made up his mind to oppose it and came out to proclaim his opposition to it, Nigerians from all walks of life supported him. You would be surprised that even people in banks were willing to come forward and give information that could help you in that struggle. People in mosques and churches and indeed, whoever that had information was willing to give you information that could help work against Obasanjo’s third term attempt. People were freely coming in and letting us have information. And when Obasanjo wanted to use the stigma of corruption against Atiku in order to tie him down and stop him from becoming president, it was easier for us to say no, that this man accusing Atiku of corruption should first look at himself. You want to remove a speck in this man’s eye but you are carrying a log in yours. It was actually easy to prove that corruption was on the other side and we had the fact to prove it. There was massive support for the work that we were doing and it was because we were doing what the people wanted.


Many wonder how you got those official documents that rubbished the former administration even though your boss was sidelined and virtually outside Aso Rock?


I don’t want to pre-empt the book that we are producing, because a book is currently in the press in which we highlighted our own experiences on how we worked. But I will say that again, in all cases where the truth is in fight with falsehood, the truth always triumphed. We had situations in which the former president himself was feeling so insecure right inside his house in the villa. That whatever he spoke, whatever he did, whoever he met to advance third term he could not conceal it or keep it away from us. We had a way of finding out the innermost current and up- to- minute details of whatever hideous move the former president did. As soon as the meeting got underway, we would know from wherever we were that the president was in a meeting, discussing third term, the governors of this and that states were there.

Because we also had credibility with the press, it was easy for us to pass the message to the media and we had never given information to the press which turned out to be misleading or false. So, having built this credibility, we also made sure that whenever we got information on those activities, of course, we double-checked and once we were sure we passed it to the press and our credibility was A+ with the media. Therefore, it was easy to see how the media was also consuming the kind of things that was being pushed out. Also, it was by their own predisposition that the media community in the country did not approve the third term and you cannot take away from them the fact that they put everything at their disposal in fighting third term.

In a nutshell, I am trying to say that to be engaged in a kind of warfare that we fought because I don’t want to call it propaganda of information, your ammunition that you need are facts, figures and factual information. We were never in short supply of this basic information and we were keeping them and saving them; we were dishing them out at every stage that call for the use of such information..


How did you manage the harassment by security agencies? We once witnessed one of such occasions when this office was ransacked and you were arrested.


I am happy you witnessed it. It happened right here when you (press) came for a different mission and I requested you to hang around and witness it because we were informed that the State Security Service (SSS) were around and they were coming to seize me. And it happened right there while you were in our office. It happened repeatedly.

How many times did they come around and also pick you?

I was taken away three times. Of course, the third time it was not only that I was taken away, but I was charged to court and also taken to Kuje Prisons where I was kept until I was fortunate to be granted bail by the court. Also, I was tried but I am happy, because even when there was a regime change we didn’t go begging anybody to withdraw cases against us. We allowed due process of the law to run its course. At last, we defeated the government in courts because the judges decided that there was no merit in the prosecution to which we had become subject.
But I must say to you that even those entire things, once you reflect upon them, you must thank God. We were very fortunate because there were no harm to our persons. In this book that I mentioned, we had narrated an incident in which some Armed Forces personnel detailed a lady on a social outing, whether it was under the influence of drugs or whatever, losing their own bearing, this lady picked information from them at that time that they have instruction to eliminate Garba Shehu, but that they didn’t see reason why they should do it and they were not going to carryout that instruction. That is just one incident.
From so many sources, it was gathered that there were planned attacks against our persons. I am a jogger and I use to jog on Abuja’s wide streets but I got to stop because I was told that it would land me in trouble as there was a plan to take me out. Sometimes, we had to abandon this office and we were operating from hideouts such as hotels and other places. We also made sure that we didn’t even repeat our presence in the same locations. Once we became suspicious that they probably knew where we were, we moved to another place. That was how we survived that difficult time.

Did you have moles in the security circle that leaked information to you? This is because there were lots of politically-motivated assassinations at that time, yet you escaped unhurt.

I am a firm believer in providence, that no matter how much they plan they can’t take your life if God did not allow them to take it. And this is a basic principle. However, it would have been careless for one not to have taken precautionary steps. Some of us were fortunate because if we didn’t have a club life, where you go to stay late in the night and expose yourself.
I must also admit to you that in spite of their firm control of the security services, the government can only go as far as saying this is what we want to do but they cannot control each and every human being because they are sophisticated Godly creation. And it would amuse you to know that by the time we entangle with the security services, beside the fact that all of them are human beings and Nigerians, they live in this society and they have family members and friends, coupled with the fact they knew that that administration was a hated one, they knew they were going to enforce policies that were unpopular.
So, there was this sort of kindness that flowed from the minds of Nigerians wherever they are, whether Muslims or Christians and despite their ethnic affiliations. By the time you come across them, you would find that natural goodness has taken over whatever aggressiveness they are being pushed into carrying out against us. I have found a lot of friends. I found my journey into the cells, into the prisons as a journey of discovery, because at the end of it I came out richer. You can’t beat the knowledge of human beings. I have got to know many people in the security services and in the prisons, a friendship that I still retain. Yes, it is in place to say that we got hints about impending wickedness that were being hatched against our office and our operations. And these helped us to plan and succeed greatly in such ventures.

It is believed that there were some people close to Obasanjo that secretly opposed third term. Were you able to equally make friends out of them?

Without those kinds of contacts the whole fight against Obasanjo wouldn’t have been successful. You are talking about a situation where you get information from the most intimate of the sources. I said, at one point that, it was not possible for Obasanjo to talk to people on his third term scheme. He left his house and the building and went and sat down in the garden in the villa to talk to people about third term because he believed Atiku had bogged the entire building. He was so disturbed that whoever he met and whatever he said got to Atiku while he did not get to know anything about him. It was on record that there was a time he said he would fire his Chief Security Officer (CSO) and Aide de Camp (ADC). I am saying to you that if he had a cup of tea on his hand, we would have known that at that point in time Obasanjo was having tea and so and so person were sitting with him. We had absolute infiltration and that gave us information and with that information a lot of power was brought in the campaign we did.

Do you have personal contact with Obasanjo?

I had never known Obasanjo before I was appointed to the villa. But I had known Atiku before then. And I would also make a confession to you that in my own upbringing, it is not possible for one man to serve two masters at the same time. You got into the villa and you find this ugly situation where they say your boss is Atiku Abubakar but Obasanjo is also your boss. Now, as Head of State and Commander-in-Chief, I have no problem with it, but it mustn’t be that Obasanjo would use the infrastructure of his office and the presidency to undermine my boss, Atiku; who, in the first instance, hired me into the villa and then I should keep quiet because this one, too, is my boss. I think this was the conflicts that we found. Our priority and loyalty, in my perception, goes to the man who hired me to go and help him, which is Atiku. Of course, I was loyal to the president as head of the villa and head of the country, but I was not working for him because he had his own people who were working for his media team. I don’t believe in sycophancy. For the whole period we were there, I knew it was the practice of some of the villa employees to go on social visit to the president, sometimes carry their wives and children to go and meet Obasanjo. I never did that. I didn’t find it necessary to engage in that. I am sure throughout my six-months stay in the villa, if you ask Obasanjo who was Garba Shehu he did not know me and he wouldn’t have known because there was no forum for me to meet him. Except, may be, one or two times when they sat in the executive council and you accompanied your boss and you saw him from a far. But not even a handshake with Obasanjo has ever happen. When we came in as a team and I must commend Atiku also for the choice of his people. It was the media that began to say that Atiku had a bigger and formidable media team than Obasanjo in the villa. We didn’t create that situation but I am proud to say that we had a good company. We had Chris Mamah, who was there before me, we had Dr. Onukaba Ojo, a former Managing Director of Daily Times, we had Dr Laolu Akande, who was also there as Deputy Press Secretary before he left for Special Assistant. With these people we brought goodwill to the job.
We came to this job with lots of humility and not with arrogance. Now, this is not what we were hearing from the other side of the villa. Obviously, things are bound to go wrong with the press for them. And we probably couldn’t understand the situation where Atiku was getting good press while Obasanjo was getting a bad press. So, in order to do away with their incompetence or lack of coordination, they decided to point at our office and said that Obasanjo was getting bad press because Atiku wished him to get a bad press. This was a very lazy attitude but that was what they were doing. They identified Akande first, then myself, later on Ojo, then Mamah and finally all the media setting in Atiku’s office. However, the funny thing about all this was that in spite depleting Atiku’s media, Obasanjo continued to get a bad press which was to say, bad press, came to Obasanjo because he pursued bad policies. That was how it went and we all lost our jobs.
How is the working relationship between you and Atiku?

Working with Atiku, I think, is one of my most pleasant experiences and I am not saying this because I want to be sycophantic, but because I am doing something that I enjoy doing. The thing about this job we are doing in terms of management of the media or an individual is that the person must be willing to take corrections. As you know, a human being is the most difficult thing you can manage because you can package him and set him up on the stage and you give him chance to talk, because you are down there among the audience, the person, once he is there on his own, he can choose to say whatever he wants to say and that can land you into great trouble.
But Atiku is always prepared to learn and take suggestions. He is not dogmatic. By dealing with him, we believe when it comes to politics he is the professor because we are not politicians. But when it comes to our work, we never say Atiku do this and he says no, we never say don’t do this and he crosses. That is the beauty of it. As long as it is your own field, he concedes to you that you know better and that is the difference he made. I am saying this with all humility because we were in the villa; we knew the experiences our colleagues on the other side were going through. If you set Obasanjo for a TV interview, you can’t tell him that he probably needs a change of his gown; he would probably chase you away, but that is not with Atiku.