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John Iliffe's Obasanjo, Nigeria and the World provides a rich and dispassionate biography of one of post-independence Nigeria's most noted and controversial figures. Much more than a biography, Iliffe's account offers a revealing and remarkably comprehensive overview of postcolonial Nigerian history. A military head-of-state in the 1970s and a civilian president from 1999 to 2007, Olesugun Obasanjo was a central actor in nearly all of Nigeria's recent history, from the civil war in the late 1960s to the recent transition to civilian rule and the country's troubled efforts to bring about democracy and development in the twenty-first century.
Given Obasanjo's polarizing legacy, and particularly the extent of his unpopularity at the end of his second term as a civilian president, when he was widely believed to have attempted to engineer a third term by manipulating political and state institutions for his own benefit, Iliffe's account may come across to some as insufficiently critical. But even to those who will judge Obasanjo's career and historical impact more harshly, in reading Iliffe's account it will be impossible not to be struck by how integral Obasanjo's life story has been to Nigeria's history over the past fifty years. The fact that Iliffe can tell, more or less, the entire post-independence history of Nigeria through the prism...