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 Picture/Ben Curtis, File)
Ben Curtis/AP
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Ben Curtis/AP
LAGOS, Nigeria — Nigeria’s former president and one-time army 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 mentioned his physique shall 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 extensively accused as repressive. About 500 political and civilian figures had been detained, in response to Nigeria media, together with activists and journalists, earlier than he was ousted in a army coup by Common Ibrahim Babangida lower than two years later.
His time as a army ruler noticed him each lauded by some for being uncompromising and however extensively criticized as a brutal and authoritarian chief. Nigeria’s Nobel Prize profitable writer, Wole Soyinka, who was imprisoned in an earlier army regime, described him as a satan in his 2006 memoirs “You Must Set Forth at Dawn”. In a play on the phrase “he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon”, he mentioned of Buhari, “In my calculation no spoon existed long enough to justify the risk 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 towards President Goodluck Jonathan, when the ruling Folks’s Democratic Get together had 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 “converted democrat” and returned to energy amid widespread anger at corruption and insecurity – notably the rampant Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria. He additionally forged himself as a nationalist, ‘man of the folks’, repeatedly saying “I belong to everybody and I belong to Nobody.”
However regardless of enormous expectations, Buhari’s return from 2015-2023 was marked by disappointment, violence and dramatic financial decline. Regardless of beneficial properties within the struggle towards Boko Haram, insecurity and violence unfold throughout the nation, stretching Nigeria’s underfunded safety forces.
The nation additionally suffered its first financial recession in a long time and inflation soared to close document 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 mentioned, “I couldn’t recall ever being this sick, not even during my time in the military… honestly, 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.
