These memoirs are driven by the need to justify and rationalise past decisions, especially those that have attracted controversy or condemnation. Obasanjo writes as though every difficult decision was unavoidable, rational, and historically necessary. Whether he is discussing the Civil War, his first period of military rule, his second period as a civilian president, or the third term controversy, he positions himself as the reluctant but responsible leader. His memoirs are long because he is explaining himself to posterity
THERE is a curious literary habit in Nigeria that deserves closer attention. Whenever a retired general or senior public figure publishes a memoir, the country prepares itself for another enormous volume. These books are long and monumental. Olusegun Obasanjo’s My Watch runs to roughly one thousand five hundred pages. The recently released Yakubu Gowon’s My Life of Duty and Allegiances approaches nine hundred pages. Ibrahim Babangida’s A Journey in Service is shorter but still substantial at about four hundred pages. Even the memoirs of officers who never ruled the country, such as Godwin Alabi Isama or Bello Fadile, often stretch far beyond what the average reader might expect or would willingly read.
The question is why these books are so large, why they devote so much space to justification and rationalisation, and why they pulse with a deep desire for vindication. The answers lie in a mixture of economics, psychology, and the politics of memory.
The first explanation is the simplest. Ghost writers in Nigeria are often paid by the size of the manuscript. Payment is not tied to the quality of the writing or the clarity of the narrative but to the number of pages delivered. A thousand-page manuscript commands higher fees, larger launch budgets, and greater symbolic weight. In this environment, verbosity becomes a financial incentive. A ghost writer who is paid per page has no reason to compress. Instead, the writer expands. Every anecdote becomes a chapter. Every cough becomes a declaration of truth. Every rumour becomes a story worth elaborating in a salacious manner. The memoir grows because the economics reward it.
Publishers also have their own incentives. A thick book looks serious and authoritative, a kind of historical compendium. For public figures who crave gravitas, size becomes a form of self-advertisement and relevance. A slim memoir suggests a slim and insignificant legacy, or an attempt to cover up errors in power. A massive one suggests a life of consequence and importance. The inflation of pages is therefore structural, encouraging these men who often have very little to say, to say it at great length.
Beyond economics lies a deeper impulse. These memoirs are driven by the need to justify and rationalise past decisions, especially those that have attracted controversy or condemnation. Obasanjo writes as though every difficult decision was unavoidable, rational, and historically necessary. Whether he is discussing the Civil War, his first period of military rule, his second period as a civilian president, or the third term controversy, he positions himself as the reluctant but responsible leader. His memoirs are long because he is explaining himself to posterity.
Obasanjo is determined that no one else should control the narrative of his life. Every gossip, every rumour, every whispered allegation, every minor incident becomes material for his version of history. He understands, perhaps better than any other Nigerian leader, that repetition can turn speculation into accepted truth. His memoirs therefore operate on the Churchillian principle that history will be generous to the man who writes it. Churchill once remarked that history would treat him well because he intended to write it. Obasanjo has adopted that philosophy with even greater zeal. He writes to shape how future generations will interpret events. In a country where history is at the periphery of experience, the person who authors the longest book often wins the argument by default. Obasanjo knows this, and he writes accordingly, turning every rumour into a footnote and every footnote into a chapter, until his version of events becomes the version that survives in the popular imagination.
Yakubu Gowon’s tone is gentler and more reflective, but the purpose is similar. He must explain many things: the length of the Civil War, the humanitarian catastrophe that followed, the mismanagement of the oil boom, the coup that removed him, and even the betrayals that accompanied his acts of nepotism. His memoir becomes a long meditation on innocence and duty, and an insistence that he acted only for the unity of Nigeria.
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, the failed dribbler and the faux Maradona, faces an even heavier burden because of June 12, the Structural Adjustment Programme, endless transition programmes, the institutionalisation of corruption as a tool of governance, and all the fakery of a little to the left and a little to the right. His memoir is a dubious attempt to transform himself from military dictator into strategic reformer. He writes to soften the harshness of history’s verdict. He writes to persuade the reader that his decisions were part of a larger vision that no other Nigerian understood.
The justifications are long because the mistakes were huge and definitive. These memoirs are courtrooms where the reader becomes the judge, listening to each general make his final submission.
Justification explains the tone, but vindication explains the purpose. These men sense that Nigeria’s collective memory is weak and easily manipulated by ethnic sentiment. The memoir becomes their final appeal. For Bello Fadile, vindication is literal. He was imprisoned, tortured, accused of treason, and nearly erased from the system. His memoir is a plea for the state to acknowledge its cruelty. For Alabi Isama, vindication is a matter of historical accuracy. He writes to challenge Obasanjo’s version of the Civil War and to establish the incompetence of the Third Marine Commando.
For Obasanjo, Gowon, and Babangida, vindication is moral. They want to die with clean hands, or at least with the perception of it. They want to be remembered as patriots who sacrificed their lives on the altar of Nigeria’s unity and survival. Their memoirs are confessions without guilt or apology. They are attempts to persuade the few readers, for I am not aware of many Nigerians who can spare thousands of naira or the time required to wade through these volumes, that their intentions were noble even when their actions were not flawed but misunderstood or sabotaged.
These men know that scholars will critique their legacy. Journalists will expose them. Younger Nigerians will question them. They therefore write to pre-empt criticism and plant their version of events in the national consciousness. The memoir becomes a shield against future judgement.
When we step back to look closely at these memoirs, a pattern emerges. They are long because they are monuments and legal defences. They are political manifestos and historical interventions. Above all, they are ego projects designed to secure moral absolution.
In a country where archives are repositories of harmattan dust, the memoir becomes the place where power is re-enacted and history negotiated. The Nigerian military memoir is therefore a political act. Its length is part of its strategy. The more pages, the more authority. The more detail, the more credibility. The more words, the more the author hopes to drown out competing voices.
In the end, these books tell us as much about the anxieties of their authors as they do about the events they describe. They are the final campaigns of men who once commanded armies, now fighting a quieter but no less intense battle. It is the battle for how they will be remembered. And in the end, the ghost writers remain the only beneficiaries of the corruption that continues to be peddled.
- Dr Adeyemi is an associate professor of drama at the University of East Anglia, UK,
