Muhammadu Buhari was a Nigerian military ruler turned democratic president. He died on July 13th 2025, aged 82.
As an 18-year-old Buhari won a competition to spend a summer in Britain, where he was struck by Liverpool's orderliness. He attended military college in Nigeria and at Aldershot in England—the career of choice for bright young men from the newly independent country's north. He was a former head boy.
Buhari was thrust to the head of a military government by fellow senior officers on December 31st 1983. He launched a "War Against Indiscipline" in which tardy civil servants were forced to do frog jumps and queues were whipped into line. Almost 500 politicians and businessmen were arrested for corruption and sent to jail by military tribunals. A new currency was issued to flush out the stashes piled floor to ceiling in the homes of the elite.
His refusal to bow to the IMF and devalue the naira left the economy groaning under the weight of low oil prices and external debt. Journalists were locked up and drug dealers executed. Diplomatic relations with Britain were broken off when a British customs officer discovered the previous regime's transport minister trussed up in a Lagos-bound crate marked "diplomatic baggage". Ibrahim Babangida, the chief of army staff, overthrew Buhari in a bloodless coup in August 1985.
Buhari was held under house arrest for more than three years in the south of the country. Detention destroyed his first marriage, with Safinatu, the mother of his first five children. He remarried, to Aisha, who gave him five more children. After his release he returned to his family farm in Daura, Katsina state. He later chaired an oil trust fund under Sani Abacha, a military dictator far more brutal than himself.
Buhari lost three successive presidential elections, his support never breaking out of the Muslim-dominated north. Each time he unsuccessfully appealed against the result, enduring the interminable court process, he said, to head off anarchy and bolster Nigeria's nascent democratic institutions. His supporters turned on southern Christians in 2011, leading to more than 800 deaths. He won on his fourth attempt in 2015—the first time an opposition candidate had defeated an incumbent at the ballot box in Nigeria.
When he returned to power in 2015 he reported just $150,000 in a single bank account, a drop in the ocean of wealth hoarded by Nigeria's elites. His personal probity was never in doubt, an ascetic egalitarianism first nurtured at boarding school, where British teachers favoured boys with good grades over those with gold wristwatches. But his nickname became "Baba Go Slow", as he took months to name a cabinet and graft cases inched through the courts.
Low oil prices again took their toll. Buhari ordered the nominally independent central bank to defend the naira, stamping out a nascent devaluation in summer 2016 when it was clear the currency had further to fall. Dollars were rationed and imports of everything from toothpicks to rice were banned. Inflation soared and growth was choked off. The jihadists of Boko Haram were pegged back but continued hit-and-run attacks regardless of the government's claim that the Islamist rebels had been "technically defeated". At the beginning of 2017 he left Nigeria for medical treatment in London, his tall, already rail-thin frame shrinking further. His wife, when she publicly criticised political appointments, was told she belonged in "my kitchen, my living room and the other room".
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