Major General Muhammadu Buhari, who served twice as Nigeria’s president, once in the 1980s as a harsh military dictator and more recently as an unlikely symbol of democracy, has died in London aged 82.
Buhari’s life embodied the painful, still incomplete, transition of Africa’s most populous country from authoritarian state to a modern democracy. Though Nigeria, more than 60 years since independence, is far from completing that journey, most historians will credit Buhari with at least nudging his huge, near-ungovernable country towards that elusive goal.
A sandal-wearing ascetic and a devout Muslim from the north of the country, Buhari was a man of few words. In the north, where he had a cult following, that often did not matter. But in the Christian south, where he had to work harder to gain support, his difficulty communicating often counted against him.
Still, putting his military past behind him and declaring himself a “converted democrat”, he ran for the presidency in 2003, four years after the country had been returned to civilian rule. His commitment to Nigeria’s new democratic framework faced several stiff tests: only on his fourth attempt was he finally elected.
That was in 2015 when he defeated Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian who had overseen a profligate and corrupt government. Buhari became the first opposition leader in Nigerian history to defeat an incumbent at the polls, a huge milestone for the country — and, indeed, the rest of Africa.
By that stage, Buhari had softened his image and developed a modest, almost self-deprecating style. Although many saw him as a throwback to a previous generation, he convinced a majority that he had travelled with Nigeria on its journey to democracy.
Some voted for him because they thought he had changed. Others voted for him because they thought he was the same, hankering for a strong military man who could sort the country out. “We cannot build an economy where corruption is the working capital,” he said.
Not much in Buhari’s background prepared him for such a prominent national role. Brought up in the poorer north in Katsina state, if his father, a village chief, had stopped at 22 children Buhari would never have been born. As the 23rd child, he was raised by his mother when his father died. In 1961, the year after independence, Buhari joined the Nigerian Army, which took him to England for cadet training.
He served in the army during the war to quell Biafran independence, which the south-eastern separatists declared in 1966. The rebellion was definitively put down in 1970, by which time as many as 3mn Biafran civilians had died of starvation.
Buhari served military governments in various posts, including as petroleum minister. The generals handed back power to civilians in 1979, but the elected beneficiary, Shehu Shagari, was generally considered incompetent. By 1983, Buhari, now a major general, had lost his patience. He mounted a coup on New Year’s eve.
His 20 months in the presidency — ended by yet another coup — were marked by a brutal crackdown on corruption and “indiscipline”. Drug dealers were executed on the beach, journalists were jailed and civil servants, late to work, were made to perform humiliating exercises. Whip-carrying soldiers enforced discipline, including the art of queueing.
Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning author, accused Buhari of having “brutalised” Nigerians and established a “norm of despotism”, but even he voted for him over Jonathan in 2015.
In the years after he was ousted, Buhari spent three years in jail. After his release he took to farming, divorced his first wife, with whom he had five children, and married again, this time to Aisha Halilu, with whom he had five more. It was then he began his tortuous, but ultimately successful, democratic assault on the presidency.
Buhari’s second stint as president was disappointing, marred by illness and characterised by the rule of a largely unaccountable clique of trusted advisers. He did use a revived army to crack down on Boko Haram, the militant Islamist group, which had made dangerous inroads in the north-east.
But advances there were matched by setbacks elsewhere, especially by Fulani pastoralists who clashed with settled farmers in much of the country and whom Buhari, a Fulani himself, was accused of secretly supporting. His crackdown on corruption targeted high-profile individuals, but made limited systemic change.
Buhari’s efforts to revive the economy — admittedly no easy task — were patchy at best. He opposed allowing the naira to find a market rate, convinced that a strong currency was the mark of a strong nation. During his first stint in office, 30 years before, he had similarly opposed an attempt by the IMF to enforce what he saw as a devaluation that would turn Nigeria into a bargain basement for speculators.
He favoured local manufacturing, but seemed at a loss how to implement a strategy to bring that about. Rather than flourish, factories went under, crushed by lack of demand and unable to get the foreign exchange they needed to keep running. If there was such a thing as Buharinomics, it didn’t work.
If his first presidency was marred by overzealousness, his time as democratic leader was sapped by torpor. Buhari was gravely ill in his first term, when he disappeared for regular bouts of treatment in London, leaving his country of more than 200mn people in limbo.
During his first four years, Buhari was criticised for the lack of transparency over his illness. An intensely private man, he was uncomfortable bearing his soul — much less his medical records — to the nation. But that left a vacuum and provoked anger in some. His unwillingness to square with the country, they said, showed that Buhari had failed to absorb the true lesson of democracy: that elected leaders are accountable to the people, not the other way around.
His health improved in his second term, and with it the semblance of a more effective government. He duly left office at the end of his eight years in 2023, abiding by the democratic norms that he now embodied. But by then coronavirus and a crash in oil prices had set back what little economic progress had been made, and few were sad to see the back of him.
Nigeria is Africa’s great hope, and its perennial disappointment. Buhari’s leadership record was pretty much the same.
