Once Obasanjo was installed as military head of state during the first months of 1976, three issues dominated his attention until he transferred power to a civilian successor in October 1979: economic and social development, foreign affairs, and the creation of democratic institutions. Murtala's regime had laid down the main lines of policy in several fields. These Obasanjo followed ‘religiously’, as his chief official adviser remembered. Yet it would be wrong to think that Obasanjo's regime ‘was like a tired anchor leg of a relay race’. In Nigerian circumstances, implementing policies was more difficult than formulating them.

In carrying out the programme, Obasanjo, as he insisted, was only executive chairman of the Supreme Military Council, where he encouraged debate and consensus. During his first year of office, especially, he continued to cultivate a low profile of modesty and austerity that won him much popular sympathy. He could not defy the Council's powerful complement of northern officers, especially the army chief, Danjuma. He relied heavily on his young Chief of Staff, Yar'Adua. For ideas, Obasanjo looked beyond the cowed civil service to the Cabinet Office thinktank and to his wide circle of professional and academic acquaintances, holding an informal seminar on a current issue each Saturday morning. ‘Anyone who had any moving idea was free to speak out and be challenged’, a participant remembered. ‘Originality was his greatest fetish.’ Above all, Obasanjo sought to master his job as he had mastered everything to which he had set his mind.