Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari speaks to the media after casting his vote in his hometown of Daura, in northern Nigeria, Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019. (AP Photograph/Ben Curtis, File)
Ben Curtis/AP
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Ben Curtis/AP
LAGOS, Nigeria — Nigeria’s former president and one-time navy ruler, Muhammadu Buhari, has died at a hospital in London on the age of 82, a spokesperson confirmed Sunday.
Buhari, a towering and sometimes polarizing determine in Nigerian politics, had been battling an undisclosed sickness in current weeks. The presidency stated his physique can be returned to Nigeria for Muslim funeral rites.
His short-lived first time period in 1983 noticed him undertake an aggressive anti-corruption marketing campaign broadly accused as repressive. About 500 political and civilian figures have been detained, in line with Nigeria media, together with activists and journalists, earlier than he was ousted in a navy coup by Normal Ibrahim Babangida lower than two years later.
His time as a navy ruler noticed him each lauded by some for being uncompromising and however broadly criticized as a brutal and authoritarian chief. Nigeria’s Nobel Prize profitable creator, Wole Soyinka, who was imprisoned in an earlier navy regime, described him as a satan in his 2006 memoirs “You Should Set Forth at Daybreak”. In a play on the phrase “he who sups with the satan ought to have a protracted spoon”, he stated of Buhari, “In my calculation no spoon existed lengthy sufficient to justify the danger of even an impromptu snack.”
But public notion later shifted. After years spent as a principally a peripheral determine after which opposition politician, he gained a historic election in 2015 in opposition to President Goodluck Jonathan, when the ruling Individuals’s Democratic Occasion have been defeated for the primary time since a return to democracy in 1999.
In the course of the marketing campaign, Buhari referred to himself as a “transformed democrat” and returned to energy amid widespread anger at corruption and insecurity – notably the rampant Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria. He additionally solid himself as a nationalist, ‘man of the individuals’, repeatedly saying “I belong to everyone and I belong to No person.”
However regardless of large expectations, Buhari’s return from 2015-2023 was marked by disappointment, violence and dramatic financial decline. Regardless of positive aspects within the struggle in opposition to Boko Haram, insecurity and violence unfold throughout the nation, stretching Nigeria’s underfunded safety forces.
The nation additionally suffered its first financial recession in many years and inflation soared to close report ranges. His authorities was additionally dogged by corruption scandals and accusations of regional and ethnic factionalism.
His second time in energy was additionally marked by ongoing and largely undisclosed well being issues. Throughout his presidency, Buhari spent greater than 7 months on medical go away in London. In 2017, following considered one of his longest absences—throughout which he was reportedly identified with amnesia linked to an unspecified situation—he stated, “I could not recall ever being this sick, not even throughout my time within the navy… actually, I can say that in my 70 years.”
Regardless of a fraught legacy, Buhari retained a loyal following, particularly in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north, the place he was seen as a modest, austere chief who didn’t enrich himself whereas in workplace.
