Former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari — who led his country first as a junta strongman and later as an elected democrat — died Sunday at the age of 82, the presidency announced.Current President Bola Tinubu said in a statement that his predecessor died in London at about 4:30 pm (1530 GMT) “following a prolonged illness”. Buhari governed Nigeria with a strong hand as a military ruler in the 1980s before reinventing himself as a “converted democrat”, serving two terms from 2015 to 2023. “He championed discipline in public service, confronted corruption head-on, and placed the country above personal interest at every turn,” Tinubu said.For critics, Buhari’s time in office failed to turn around long-standing issues like graft, poverty and armed violence, and there were allegations of rights abuses by security forces.Tinubu said he had ordered Vice President Kashim Shettima to go to England to accompany Buhari’s body back to Nigeria.He also ordered flags to fly at half-staff. Buhari’s frequent trips for medical treatment during his presidency attracted criticism about transparency and worries about leadership during some of his longer absences. Buhari spent nearly three months away receiving treatment in Britain.Although the nature of his ailment was never made public, Buhari once confessed he had “never been so ill” as during one trip and that he had received several blood transfusions.- ‘A failure of leadership’ -Last week Buhari’s former spokesman Garba Shehu launched a book, titled “According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience”, in which he reportedly confessed to fabricating a 2017 story about rat invasions at the presidential office, to shift Nigerians’ focus away from the leader’s health.”When the surge in calls for explanation of why the president would be working from home, if truly he had recovered his health… I said to the reporters that the office, which had been in disuse, needed renovation because rats may have eaten and damaged some cables,” he wrote in the book, according to local media.The rake-thin 82-year-old Muslim from Nigeria’s far north made history in 2015 as the first opposition candidate to defeat an incumbent leader at the ballot box.Buhari was born under British colonial rule in the town of Daura in northern Katsina state, whose state governor Dikko Umaru Radda described him as “the embodiment of the common man’s aspirations”.His election victory in a country where re-election for the incumbent had been taken for granted was seen as a rare opportunity for Nigeria to change course. But his time at the helm failed to halt corruption and jihadist violence, while the oil giant was further dogged by economic woes.Despite concerns about his fragile health, his economic policies, the extent of his claims about better security, he secured a second term in 2019.In a 2020 opinion piece for The New York Times, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie charged that his tenure in office had shown “a failure of leadership”, writing that his government “has long been ineffectual, with a kind of wilful indifference.”It was also under his military rule that musical revolutionary and activist Fela Kuti was arrested in 1984 on what supporters say were trumped up currency smuggling charges.In 2021 Nigeria government imposed a seven-month suspension of Twitter, now X, after the social media giant deleted a post by Buhari for violating its rules.Condolence messages came from Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio, Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye and World Trade Organization boss and fellow countrywoman Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, while state broadcaster NTA interrupted scheduled programming to broadcast recitals from the Koran.”President Buhari’s leadership brought our two nations closer together and as we did so, this partnership contributed to Africa’s collective growth and development,” said South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
