Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari who ruled his nation initially as a junta strongman and subsequently as an elected democrat passed away on Sunday at the age of 82, his aide and the presidency announced.
Buhari Passes Away in London After Long Illness
Current President Bola Tinubu in a statement reported that his predecessor passed away in London at around 4:30 pm (1530 GMT) “after a long illness”. He did not reveal the cause of the illness.
Buhari ruled Nigeria with an iron fist as a military leader in the 1980s before recasting himself as a “converted democrat” to serve two terms from 2015 until 2023.
“The family of the former president has announced the passing on of the former president, Muhammadu Buhari, this afternoon in a clinic in London,” Garba Shehu, who served as Buhari’s spokesman during his presidency, said in a post on social media.
Tinubu Orders Body Returned to Nigeria, Flags at Half-Mast
Tinubu stated that he had talked to Buhari’s widow and instructed Vice President Kashim Shettima to travel to England to escort Buhari’s corpse back to Nigeria.
He also directed flags to be flown at half-mast in tribute to Buhari, whose presidency was marred by rumors of ill health.
His repeated medical checkups during his time in office drew criticism of the government’s openness regarding his sickness and concerns over leadership throughout some of his extended absences.
Though the nature of his condition has never been publicly disclosed, Buhari admitted during one of the visits that he had “never been so ill” and that he had undergone many blood transfusions.
Medical Absences Expose National Healthcare Woes
Opponents also claimed the visits exposed the weakness of the nation’s health system.
Buhari had been out of the country for almost three months undergoing treatment in Britain.
The rake-thin 82-year-old Muslim from Nigeria’s remote north became history’s first opposition candidate to beat an incumbent leader at the polls in 2015.
His electoral victory in a nation where re-election for the incumbent had been assumed was viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Nigeria to go down a different path.
Rats, Renovation, and Office Absences
“When the surge in calls for explanation of why the president would be working from home, if truly he had recovered his health and fit for the office came, 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.
But his tenure in office did not bring an end to the nation’s age-old problems of graft and insecurity, while the oil behemoth was also beset by economic troubles.
Notwithstanding fears over his poor health, his economic strategies, the scope of his assertions of improved security, as well as the recipients of his anti-graft campaign, he won 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 the “government of President Muhammadu Buhari has long been ineffectual, with a kind of wilful indifference.”
