Military service suited many aspects of Obasanjo's personality: his sense of discipline and duty, his compulsive activism, his ambition, perhaps his need for a surrogate family and for a cause, which he was to find in the Nigerian nation. When he retired after twenty years’ service, he told his assembled colleagues that ‘for the total development of man within his environment physically and intellectually, there is no better ground than military training and full military career.’

Not all of this can have been clear to him in March 1958 when he enlisted and was sent to the Regular Officers’ Training School at Teshie in Ghana. His main concern then was to find a job that would pay him to acquire further training. Owu people were proud of their military past, but unlike many officer cadets, Obasanjo had neither family connections to the army, fascination with military display, nor athletic prowess. What he shared with many was relatively lowly social origin and a readiness to defy his parents, whom he did not even inform. ‘A message just came to us at Abeokuta that we should come and pick his property because he had gone to Angola [Ghana] to join the army’, his sister recalled. ‘When he came back and was asked why he did not inform our parents before going, he said he was sure that our parents would not have allowed him if he had told them.’ Opposition by family and friends to an educated young man joining the army was common.