Military Leaders From Nigeria

"If a woman is there and is competent, she opens the door for others."

"Life has taught me the importance of appreciating family, friends. A lot of people contributed to who I am today."

"Your counsel is accepted."

"I am Queen Amina, feared cavalry warrior, ruler of Zazzau and all of Hausaland. Ride with me to victory."

"A wise investment. This will finance the upcoming cavalry raid."

"Amina daughter of Nikatau, a woman as capable as a man."

"[She continued to] wage war in the Hausa lands and conquered them all, so that the men of Katsina and the men of Kano brought her tribute."

"The Hausa would rather make peace than fight with you. Can we come to an agreement?"

"Did you not hunt for food? If you do not gather the resources to age up soon, you will quickly become the hunted."

"You can get away with that one, but count yourself lucky if I let you get more than that."

"Defend the Trading Posts to secure our trade monopoly!"

"My Nigerian princes requested that I pay an absurd amount of money for their ransom. What frauds!"

"The palace of the other Hausa ruler is more beautiful and influential than mine. I shall offer my sword to survive in grace."

"My emirs said the French have very beautiful palaces and that they would rather preserve than destroy them."

"I am happy about my promotion to the rank of a rear admiral in the Nigerian Navy and the fact that it is during my lifetime that females are now being recruited into the Nigerian Defense Academy to train as regular combatant officers."

"It was tough training in the Navy Training was tough and the best way I can describe it to you is to multiply what they put you through during National Youth Service Corps by 20 times and then you get an idea of what the training was like. I enjoyed it but wao, it was tough. But the good thing was that at the end of it all you come out fitter than you have ever been in your life."

"You come out more disciplined and you come out with a commitment to keep fit."

"Life was very interesting while I was undergoing my training as a naval officer. First of all, you know I had done NYSC so I had the creamy taste of military training. But the real Navy basic training was much more than that, and the thing is that at the end of it all you know it taught me a lot of discipline and it gave me strength that I didn't know I had, physical strength; so it was very good. Even though the training was not easy, the truth is that after surviving the first few days when you are acheing all over, you actually get used to it. I mean the human body is very resilient and at the same time interesting and you can actually train yourself to get used to it."

"If somebody offends in a squadron they will punish the whole squadron, I couldn't understand it. I was like if somebody offends and the person owns up why should you punish all of us? But one of the instructors told me that look, if you are in a hostile situation may be in a war situation you have to look out for everybody and that the mistake of one person can cause everybody's life because your survival depends on you as a group."

"My journey from United Kingdom to Lagos, took only 6:20hours. The journey was 3000 kilometers to Nigeria. It is a pity that my trip to Iwo from Lagos, a journey of 200 kilometers took six hours”. This was the condition of our infrastructure in Nigeria."

"We are the changes and we are part of the changes we want in Nigeria."

"Women who want to be up there must work for it. It is not a joke, you must show that you can do it. -At the 100 Years of the Nigerian Woman -Achieving 50/50 by 2020, Lagos, April 2013."

"I had a dream to get to the top of my career and nothing was going to let me go off that dream. Sometimes it looked like a distant dream, sometime it would even fade to a dot in the horizon, sometime I would want to give up but the good thing was that I had a lot of supportive people who believed in me, people who, when the going got really rough, said to me, no, you cannot give up."

"The major challenge, I must be very honest with you, is the fact that you know you meet a lot of men who wonder what you are doing in their territory and you have to spend everyday of your life proving that you should be here. For me there is nothing in this constitution that says I am not a full fledged citizen of this country. I don't see it anywhere, but you see, there are still people who still have issues with that, and such people vent their frustration on you. But you have to be resilient enough and claim your place because nobody is going to give it to you."

"In 1999, no woman contested as only two candidates, Olusegun Obasanjo of the Peoples Democratic (PDP) and Olu Falae of the Alliance for Democracy (AD), slugged it out. Mr Obasanjo emerged the winner. However, 2003 remains women’s best attempt at occupying Aso Villa. Of the 20 presidential candidates, two were women – Sarah Jubril of the Progressive Action Congress, (PAC) and Mojisola Adekunle Obasanjo of the Masses Movement of Nigeria, (MMN)."

"# Some people said that I should write a book,I don't think I will never write a book, mainly I don't want to hurt anybody, hurting in the sense that, there are certain people that I cannot resist abusing, but that hasn't to do with the children and grandchildren, so I don't want to hurt their children and grandchildren,so for the sake of their children and grandchildren, I have left them."

"The last general election was anything but free and fair. The only political parties that could complain of election rigging are those parties that lacked the resources to rig. There is ample evidence that rigging and thuggery were relative to the resources available to the parties. This conclusively proved to us that the parties have not developed confidence in the presidential system of government on which the nation invested so much material and human resources."

"I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody."

"I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room."

"The principal thrust of this new Administration is to consolidate on the achievements of the last four years, correct the lapses inevitable in all human endeavors and tackle the new challenges the country is faced with and chart a bold plan for transforming Nigeria."

"I came to this world with nothing and I will leave with nothing, why should I steal?"

"Nigeria remains deeply concerned over the illicit trade, transfer, and circulation of small arms and light weapons. Their excessive accumulation and uncontrolled spread in many regions of the world are having devastating humanitarian and socio-economic consequences, especially on the continent of Africa."

"Fellow Nigerians, on the strength of your overwhelming support for me and my political party, I started this journey with a great deal of promise and expectation from you. I never intended to be just politically correct but to do the correct things that will make meaningful impact on the lives of the common Nigerian."

"# Today, we are privileged to mark the longest period of unbroken democratic leadership and 5th peaceful transfer of power from one democratically elected government to another in Nigeria."

"# I was involved at close quarters in the struggle to keep Nigeria one. I can, therefore, do no more than dedicate the rest of my life to work for the unity of Nigeria and upliftment of Nigerians."

"# What we require is the will to get our acts together. Our strength is in our people our youth, our culture, our resilience, our ability to succeed despite the odds Buhari"

"# Without Nigerian influence and resources, the liberation of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and ultimately South Africa would have come at a greater cost."

"# With leadership and a sense of purpose, we can lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years Muhammadu Buharis democracy day speech"

"We have only one choice left to take us out of Egypt to the promised land. And that is the coalition of the concerned and the willing – ready for positive and drastic change, progress and involvement. Change that will give hope and future to all our youth and dignity and full participation to all our women.https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/256524-nigeria-needs-third-force-dislodge-buhari-obasanjo.html"

"The lice of poor performance in government – poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed – if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality – are very much with us today. With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood’.https://www.punchng.com/full-letter-obasanjo-writes-buhari-asks-president-to-halt-2019-ambition/%3famp"

"For Africa to move forward, Nigeria must be one of the anchor countries, if not the leading anchor country. It means that Nigeria must be good at home to be good outside. No doubt, our situation in the last decade or so had shown that we are not good enough at home; hence we are invariably absent at the table that we should be abroad.https://www.punchng.com/full-letter-obasanjo-writes-buhari-asks-president-to-halt-2019-ambition/%3famp"

"Nigeria has no business being poor, we have all it takes to make Africa great."

"It is always difficult to know which is rumor and which is fact, more so in a place like Nigeria. Certainly, it is clear that the forces of law and order have tended to fail the citizenry. It is equally true that under Obasanjo’s government, though called democratic, more people have been killed for various reasons; that life has not been secured under his government. It is equally true that throughout his government in the two years, Nigeria has had ethnic problems. These are factors, I suppose, with which one can judge the success or failure of Obasanjo’s government. And it is also the factors that would indicate to you that there are underlying problems of Nigeria that need to be looked into and that if Obasanjo is not looking well into them, then he is not doing his job. That’s how I see it."

"If the Igbos feel that things are best for them in a country of their own, why shouldn’t they have it? If after all we have been going through in Nigeria we feel that Biafra is best, we have every right to seek to re-create Biafra or any other place."

"I don’t know who decided on a structure of 36 states, but I say, if we decide to review it, why shouldn’t we? Those states, you and I must understand, were mainly punitive creations rather than a need for economic advancement of Nigeria or Nigerians. Let us stop burying our heads in the sand. We have had national emergencies and managed to get out of it. Let us look at each other eyeball to eyeball and decide the type of country that we want to live in. I believe that is essential."

"If America says to you today that they are proud of the fact that, for two hundred years, they have been trying to make their union more perfect, it sounds very reasonable. But, in Nigeria, you are not even allowed to question your union, which is ridiculous."

"The worst thing about Nigeria is that here is a nation that has so much potential but the only problem is that everybody seems unprepared to face the problems or the realities of the Nigerian situation. There is absolutely no way you can look at the Nigerian federation, the way it was conceived, and say it is a good federation. One of the federating units is bigger than the other units. The other thing is that everything that has worked in Nigeria, or appears to have worked, seems very much to have been an imposition. The idea that sovereignty belongs to the Nigerian people is all fiction as far as Nigeria is concerned."

"Having mandated me to proclaim on your behalf, and in your name, that Eastern Nigeria be a sovereign independent Republic, now, therefore I, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, by virtue of the authority, and pursuant to the principles recited above, do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria together with her continental shelf and territorial waters, shall, henceforth, be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of The Republic of Biafra."

"The Federation of Nigeria is today as corrupt, as unprogressive and as oppressive and irreformable as the Ottoman Empire was in Eastern Europe over a century ago. And in contrast, the Nigerian Federation in the form it was constituted by the British cannot by any stretch of imagination be considered an African necessity. Yet we are being forced to sacrifice our very existence as a people to the integrity of that ramshackle creation that has no justification either in history or in the freely expressed wishes of the people."

"He is just a very kind man, very polite, not intrusive. He cared less about what happened in the kitchen, he just settled for whatever you offered him. He respected me and my opinion a lot. Later, when the children got across to him, he would ask them what my opinion was on issues. And I loved him immensely in return."