Former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, has revealed his usual practice of saving insulting and derogatory articles written about him, when he was leading the country.
He stated this on Wednesday, while presenting his keynote address at the first international conference of the African Studies Association of Africa, at the International Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan.
Obasanjo said all the insults published about him, were kept in the archives at his presidential library.
He said: “If you visit the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta, you will find thousands of archived newspaper comics and columns meant to spite and insult my person even as a sitting President.
“No individual or group of people was ever queried or jailed or repressed for expressing this freedom. Rather, I encouraged them because I derived fun and pleasure from the humour as I know who I am and nobody needs to tell me who and what I am not”.
“The right to free speech, the right to express a different view point, the right to draw personal conclusions based on self-instituted research and to querry certain cultural practices and beliefs are part of the huge liberty that the continent of Africa now boasts of”, Obasanjo added.
