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President Olusegun Obasanjo says he did his best in his eight years rule, while also rejecting foreign and domestic criticism of the just concluded general elections.
President Olusegun Obasanjo says he did his best in his eight years rule, while also rejecting foreign and domestic criticism of the just concluded general elections.
Speaking with AFP, President Obasanjo said: "The day I meet God I'll tell him: not everything was perfect but I did my best."
He gave assurance that he would leave on May 29 as planned.
"I will go back to my farm. Afterall I did it in 1979," he said, referring to the time when, as Nigeria's military leader, he handed power over to a civilian administration.
Amid calls for the annulment of the elections' results and the opposition's planned nationwide protest, Obasanjo said he had no problem with protests, provided they were peaceful.
"If you want to demonstrate, demonstration is part of democracy, provided it does not lead to disorderliness," he said.
Obasanjo, who admitted a few days earlier, in a national address that the elections were far from perfect, waved aside the criticism trailing the polls, especially coming from international observers.
"Some of them came with their own prejudices," he said of the bevy of foreign condemnations of the elections.
He said delays in getting ballots to voters were beyond the government's control.
"The outcome of the election, to me, is a true reflection of the situation," he said, adding: "This country is united from the North to the South."
Obasanjo said his greatest achievement in the past eight years was having "given hope back to Nigerians" and having got some of his compatriots living in exile since the seventies to return home after refusing to come back under military leaders, Gen. Sani Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida.
He said his greatest regret was not having tackled the country's chronic electricity shortage problem.
"If I have another opportunity and I know what I know now, I would handle electricity generation much earlier than I did," he said.