Nigeria’s former president, Muhammadu Buhari, dies at 82

Muhammadu Buhari, soldier, politician, and former president of Nigeria, has died in a London hospital at age 82, as reported by the New York Times on July 13th.

A former military strongman, Mr. Buhari led Nigeria in the 1980s, and decades later won a democratic election in 2015, and another in 2019, but he struggled to make good on his promises to tackle corruption and terrorism.

His death on July 13th was confirmed by his spokesperson and by Nigeria’s current president, Bola Tinubu, who sent his vice president to London to accompany the body back to Nigeria. Mr. Buhari suffered from ill health throughout his presidency, but what ailed him was a closely guarded secret, and the cause of his death is not known.

Both as a military ruler and as president, he cast himself as a champion of order and discipline, fighting corruption and mismanagement, and attempting to foster a sense of restraint in Nigeria’s public life. In the run-up to his election in 2015, he presented himself as a general who could bring to heel the violent Islamist group Boko Haram, which has ravaged the country’s northeast.

Yet by the end of his eight-year tenure in 2023, corruption, security and Nigeria’s economy had worsened and youth protests against police violence had been brutally put down, bitterly disappointing the young Nigerians who had helped bring him back to power.

Mr. Buhari was linked to several of the military takeovers that punctuated Nigeria’s first years of independence from Britain in 1960, culminating in a coup by senior commanders on Dec. 31, 1983, that brought him to power.

Seeking to change his compatriots’ ways, he ordered what he called a war against indiscipline that brought soldiers onto the streets, wielding whips to force Nigerians to form orderly lines for buses and in other public places.

Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian Nobel laureate and author, once said that Mr. Buhari’s campaign went to “sadistic levels, glorifying in the humiliation of a people.”

Mr. Buhari’s days as a soldier-conspirator ended abruptly in August 1985, when he was himself overthrown and placed under house arrest for over three years.

In the end, it was his reputation for iron-fisted rule in the 1980s that helped return him to power as an elected president in 2015, after three unsuccessful campaigns, and espite a mixed record in his first term, Mr. Buhari was re-elected for a second term in February 2019, though voter turnout was just over a third of the electorate.

Despite criticism, the former president managed to maintain his image as someone whose own hands were clean. Current president, Bola Tinubu, said of Mr. Buhari’s life as being defined by “duty, honour, and a deep commitment to the unity and progress of our nation.”

Mr. Buhari is set to be buried on the grounds of his house in the northern state of Katsina on July 15th.

New York Times, Maghrebi.org