The demise in mid-July 2025 of Nigeria’s former president and military autocrat, Muhammadu Buhari, merited national attention…. He was a man who had no idea of economics was ever ready to impose his village pastoral concept of subsistence agriculture to solve the crisis of food security in Africa’s largest nation. A man who had little knowledge of current international relations was flying the flag of Nigeria’s diplomacy in the world of the internet.
Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first African-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993.
Quite justifiably, Mr. Buhari belongs in that select group of elite Nigerians on whom Nigerian history has been most kind and generous. Obviously amongour few military oligarchs, Buhari was variously regarded as a nationalist, patriot, military leader and civilian democrat. In the nation’s automatic glorification of the heroes of our civil war, it did not matter how Buhari ascended to such heights. It has not mattered whether Buhari or some of his colleagues earned their promotions in the army by flunking their promotional examinationsbut being in the good books of kind senior officers. For whatever else he stood for, Buhari ranks with Obassanjo among Nigeria’s hybrid leaders, those who presided over national affairs both as military coup leaders and as elected civilian democrats. Along the line, Buhari even happened on a mythic stature among past Nigerian leaders, glorified as both a messianic figure and once a fiery patriot.
By the time he passed on last week in a London clinic, the only honour and tribute that the nation still owed Buhari was perhaps the full state military burial that he got. In all of it, he bowed out of the stage more like a tragic hero whose whole career had been devoted to the realization of a foretold tragic destiny. But he was mostly all tragedy and little heroics except in his own imagination and those of the mobs up north who used to hail him : “Sai Baba” at political rallies.To the rest of Nigerians, Mr. Buhari ended up as a historic leadership disaster.
Clearly a beneficiary of historical timing, Mr. Buhari shot into the limelight using the professional vantage of his military career. Prior to his 1983 emergence as a coup leader, he was at best one of the generals propped up by the Nigerian civil war (1967-70). Alongside his other colleagues, the nation accorded Buhari the unearned benefit of a heroic stature. He and his deputy, Mr. Tunde Idiagbon, bestrode the national centre stage like messiahs because the nation had rotted away under the watch of political leaders. As with most ambitious military coup leaders, Buhari struck the right chord in our collective consciousness. He and his colleagues converted our weaknesses and challenges into their regime’s unique selling points. We needed patriotism. We were undisciplined, rowdy, lawless and worshipped corrupt leaders. Our political leaders were common petty thieves and touts. Buhari’s mission to rein in these deviations fitted into a national mood and hunger, hence the quick popularity of the junta he led. Nigerians stood endlessly in ques waiting for essential supplies that hardly came. Soldiers wielded horsewhips on innocent people for minor social infractions.
Mr. Buhari came to be valorized for his draconian descent on citizens who embodied the negatives of the nation at the time. He jailed over 500 politicians for periods ranging from a few dozen years to many life times. Some innocent people were arrested and detained without trials. Whatever trial there was was presided over by military tribunals. Journalists were detained and jailed for just being journalists. Hunger for a better nation was replaced by fear of those who came to save the nation. The state degenerated into a terror machine that went as far as kidnapping a citizen in far away London ready for rendition to Nigeria as ‘diplomatic baggage’. Thus Mr. Buhari earned his overthrow by the more liberal faction of the military led by Ibrahim Babangida barely two years into his reign of terror.
Though he was toppled after a mere two years in office, Buhari somehow registered in national memory as easily the best and most forthright leader Nigeria deserved. He carried that mythic mantle for as long as the military remained in power before handing over to civilians in 1999. It was perhaps this mythic profile that powered his conversion into a ‘democrat’ in subsequent years. He enrolled in the political system and serially contested the presidency on three different occasions until he finally succeeded in 2014/15 in defeating the incumbent Goodluck Jonathan.
By a cruel irony, it was good that Mr. Buhari was elected civilian president and came to rule Nigeria for eight years. The yearnings of those who had lionized him as a messiah was to be realizedmostly in the reverse. Over the next eight years of his tenure as civilian president, his myth came crashing down. Civilian president Buhari was crassly incompetent, slow in action, clueless on policy matters, condescending towards the people who elected him into power. He needed months on end to appoint a cabinet and forever to replace dead or absent cabinet members. He spent months as a patron of London hospitals attending to undisclosed ailments ranging fro ear achetoleukemia.
On the matters that had been his trade marks- anti corruption, nationalism, bureaucratic tidiness, he fell flat on his nose. He ended up presiding over the shredding of the Central Bank, lent money to mostly invisible rice farmers who produced no rice but more propaganda. His administration produced some of the most corrupt public officials that the nation has ever known like the former Central Bank Governor with an estate of nearly 800 housing units in Abuja. He closed the borders to protect local producers of food but food scarcity and higher prices greeted the people towards the end of his tenure.
He was characteristically alienated and distant from the people. His indifference wass seen as patent insensitivity. He openly failed to understand the changing needs of the new generations of Nigerians, describing the youth as lazy. Most embarrassingly, a man that many had seen previously as a nationalist displayed the most brazen acts of xenophobic ethnocentrism in appointments. His partisan support for fundamentalist rascality was never in doubt as the phenomenon of armed herdsmen emerged to combat settler farmers in parts of the country.
At times, he could hardly hide his disdain for certain sections of the country. At inception, he swore he owed no development obligations to citizns in the south east who gve him less than 5% of the votes he scored. He was later to brand the illustrious Igbos of south eastern Nigeria as an irritating ‘dot’ encircled by the Nigerian circle. To the people of the oil rich south south , he ended the successful Amnesty Programme that neutralized widespread militancy in the region.
A man whose credential rested partly on his military background watched helplessly as the nation under his watch reeled under epic insecurity. Armed counter state terror squads came out openly to contest the coercive dominance of the federal state. He could not even secure his home state of Katsina or Abuja, the nation’s capital which came under frequent bandit and terrorist attacks up to engaging his presidential guards and bursting prisons located within earshot of the presidential villa. Nigeria under Buhari was at war with a nameless but omnipresent adversary.
Towards the end of his second term in elective office, the masses prayed for time to roll fast so that Buhari could depart. It seemed that he had no other aim than to complete his tenure and depart to his Daura country home. He had run out of energy, initiative, capacity and even basic interest in a job he spend years angling for. The common prayer among the people shifted to the necessity for him to leave before damaging the nation even further.
In Mr. Buhari’s tragic failures as an elected president, so many issues of political relevance have emerged. It is being said that he as a person was ascetic and hardly corrupt. But yet he had too many corrupt people in and around his government. The question that arises is that of the relationship between personal morality of a leader and the moral requirements of public office at the highest level. If the political leadership of a nation were to be insulated from proving moral leadership for government and the larger society, many nations would be content with choosing a Pope, Bishop, Mullah or Budhist monk as leader and leave society to its own desires and designs.Nigerians were least interested in Mr. Buhari’s modest taste and ascetic choices. They desired a state in which the common good governed public morality.
It has also been said in Buhari’s favour that he believed in the power of institutions to guide society aright. Those who hold this view insist that he was more a systems and institutions man. But in Africa, it has been proven again and again that what society needs to make progress is a delicate balance between strong state institutions and a strong leader who drives those institutions to do right for the common good without converting those institutions to private use. Mr. Buhari allowed the institutions of State to falter and fumble as he himself fiddled away in indifference, waiting to be reminded to do basic duties like addressing the nation in times of emergency and trouble like during the EndSars crisis.
In Buhari, then, we encounter a classic illustration of Achebe’s concept of “the trouble with Nigeria”, a recurrent paucity of enlightened and informed leadership. A man who had no idea of economics was ever ready to impose his village pastoral concept of subsistence agriculture to solve the crisis of food security in Africa’s largest nation. A man who had little knowledge of current international relations was flying the flag of Nigeria’s diplomacy in the world of the internet. He was still referring to ‘Western Germany’ at the height of his tenure in 2022!
Now the man is dead. So also is the halo of a fraudulent myth that some allowed to linger around his troubled image. As the nation finally bids farewell to Buhari, the challenge we still face on the leadership question is that of where and how to draw the line between villains and heroes in the growing pantheon of Nigeria’s leaders. To those who insisted on seeing Buhari as an ascetic hero, his passing will linger as the end of a failed promise of national redemption. But for the majority who were tempted to troop out in celebration of the demise of Buhari the bigot, autocrat and political counterfeit, the recurrent slogan is bound to be: “Let a new day dawn. Let evil die!”
Buhari the military despot was a masquerade that graduated into a myth. But Buhari the civilian president was the unmasking of a fake myth and the full realization of a personal tragic destiny.
