Muhammadu Buhari, an austere soldier and politician who led Nigeria as a feared military strongman in the 1980s and, three decades later, as a democratically elected president, died on Sunday at a hospital in London. He was 82.
His death was confirmed by his spokesman 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 kept a closely guarded secret, and the cause of his death was not known.
Both as a military ruler and as president, Mr. Buhari cast himself as a champion of order and discipline, fighting corruption and mismanagement, and attempting to instill a sense of restraint in Nigeria’s rambunctious public life. And in the run-up to his election in 2015, he also presented himself as a general who could bring to heel the violent Islamist group Boko Haram, which has ravaged the country’s northeast.
But by the end of his eight-year tenure in 2023, corruption, security and Nigeria’s economy had all 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.
As head of state, he brooked no dissent.
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.
Civil servants who arrived late to work were ordered to perform military-style exercises known as frog jumps. A draconian decree curtailed Nigeria’s freewheeling media, once known as the least restrained in Africa. Military tribunals jailed hundreds of people on corruption charges. Convicted drug smugglers, counterfeiters and arsonists could all face execution.
“Mr. Buhari can be a severe man,” Max Siollun, a Nigerian historian, wrote in a New York Times opinion article in 2015. “His resolve, puritanical streak and iron will are renowned.”
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.
Paradoxically, it was his well-earned reputation for iron-fisted rule in the 1980s that helped return him to power as an elected president in 2015, after three unsuccessful campaigns.
Despite a mixed record in his first term, Mr. Buhari was re-elected for a second term in February 2019, though the voter turnout was just over one-third of the electorate.
He was not the first Nigerian coup plotter to shed his general’s uniform in favor of civilian robes: that was a predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo.
But the election of Mr. Buhari, a Sunni Muslim from the Islamic north, who trained as a soldier in Britain, India and the United States, represented a significant milestone: When he easily outpolled President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015, Mr. Buhari became the first opposition leader to unseat an incumbent president since independence.
In a speech on May 29, 2016, marking a year since his inauguration as president, Mr. Buhari recited a litany of woes confronting his government when it took power: low oil prices, “decrepit” infrastructure, huge debts to contractors and “palpable” insecurity. “Corruption and impunity were the order of the day,” he said. “In short, we inherited a state near collapse.”
Perhaps nothing better demonstrated Mr. Buhari’s inability to bring that chaos to heel than the fate of some 270 schoolgirls from the northern town of Chibok, abducted in April 2014 by Boko Haram. Eighty-two of the girls remained unaccounted for, along with hundreds of other kidnapped children. And defying Mr. Buhari’s frequent assertions that they had been defeated, the insurgents maintained a campaign of suicide bombings and attacks.
Muhammadu Buhari was born on Dec. 17, 1942, in Daura, in the Katsina region of Nigeria. He was the 23rd child of his father, Adamu Buhari, a village chief who had three wives, as permitted under Islamic law. His father died when he was 4, and he was raised by his mother, Zulaihat Buhari, according to an authorized biography published in 2016 by an American scholar, John N. Paden.
After attending Koranic school and then spending nine years at a boarding school, he began training as an officer cadet at the age of 19 in 1961. Between 1962 and 1965 he underwent military training in Britain. By the time of the Nigerian civil war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970 and pitted the federal authorities against secessionists in the self-proclaimed state of Biafra, Mr. Buhari was an infantry commander.
He attended the United States Army War College, in Carlisle, Pa., in 1979 to secure a master’s degree in strategic studies. At the time of the coup in December 1983, he was a divisional commander with the rank of major general.
His tenure lasted less than two years. He was overthrown by Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, who said on Sunday: “We may not have agreed on everything — as brothers often don’t — but I never once doubted his sincerity or his patriotism.”
Mr. Buhari divorced his first wife, Safinatu Yusuf, whom he married in 1971. They had five children, a son and four daughters. The son, Musa, and a daughter, Zulaihat, both died of sickle cell anemia.
In 1989, he married Aisha Halilu, 29 years his junior, who had studied for college degrees in public administration and strategic studies and who became an advocate for women’s and children’s rights. As in the first marriage, the couple had five children, again four daughters and a son. Mrs. Buhari and their children survive him, along with the three from his first marriage.
After military rule ended in 1999, Mr. Buhari ventured into politics as an opposition candidate, losing elections in 2003, 2007 and 2011. While campaigning in 2014, he survived an assassination attempt by Boko Haram in the northern city of Kaduna.
In the early years after Mr. Buhari’s election, his health became a major worry for Nigerians, who wondered who was running the country during his long absences for unexplained treatment.
He also attracted widespread outrage when he responded to public criticism from his wife by saying, “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room.” The last was taken to be a reference to the bedroom.
Early on, Mr. Buhari garnered a reputation as a strongman in the West African region, a role that has often fallen to Nigeria.
But as he completed his first term, and then embarked on his second, the Giant of Africa, as Nigeria is known, lurched from one economic shock to the next. Millions of people slipped into poverty, while security crises — including kidnapping, terrorism, militancy in oil-rich areas and clashes between herdsmen and farmers — multiplied. Early in his first term, the Nigerian army killed 350 Shiite Muslims from an opposition movement, members of which celebrated the news of his death on Sunday.
Massive youth-led protests against police brutality were met with harsh crackdowns, in echoes of Mr. Buhari’s military era. And then, just before the election, his government decided to redesign and roll out a new currency, causing widespread cash shortages and suffering.
By the end of his eight years, a record 89 percent of Nigerians thought the country was going in the wrong direction.
Some analysts put his failures down to a lack of savvy in a country dominated by political cronyism and intrigue, and to too much trust in his appointees.
“He tried to do his best and achieved quite a lot, but the biggest challenge, Nigeria’s political culture, was a challenge that eluded him,” said Antony Goldman, a biographer, on Sunday.
Mr. Buhari’s also failed to turn around Nigeria’s reputation for corruption. He was succeeded by Bola Tinubu, who was last year identified as one of the world’s five most corrupt people by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
But Mr. Buhari did manage to maintain his image as someone whose own hands were clean. Mr. Tinubu said on Sunday that Mr. Buhari’s life was defined by “duty, honor, and a deep commitment to the unity and progress of our nation.”
Mr. Obansanjo, the other Nigerian general turned president, lamented his death on Sunday. Given Nigeria’s current travails, he said, it needs “the totality of the experience, and what I may call statesmanship, of all of those who have had opportunity to run the affairs of this country.”
Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Ismail Auwal and Saikou Jammeh contributed reporting.
After a long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015, based in London.
Ruth Maclean is the West Africa bureau chief for The Times, covering 25 countries including Nigeria, Congo, the countries in the Sahel region as well as Central Africa.
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