*Photo: The late President Muhammadu Buhari *
“Abun duniya abun banza ne.” (‘Worldly things are worthless things.’) This is how, in 2023, Nigeria’s late former President Muhammadu Buhari articulated one of the principles that guided his chequered life from his birth on 17 December, 1942 to his demise on 13 July, 2025.
A soldier’s soldier, he fought in the Nigerian civil war which broke out on 6 July, 1967 and ended on 15 January, 1970. A traumatic experience for the nation, Dr. Chris Ngige who served as the Minister of Labour and Employment for all of the two terms of the Muhammadu Buhari Presidency, said in this regard: “The man fought a civil war to keep Nigeria one.” Dr. Ngige, who fought on the Biafran side, also said: “He [Buhari] recounted the experience of how General Danjuma will always send him to where the war was thick knowing fully well that he would not say ‘No.’ And while other officers were taking leave to go home, he will be there for General Danjuma as their Commander.”
Beyond the civil war, Buhari established his military bona fides when in 1983, as the General Officer Commanding (GOC), 3rd Amoured Brigade, he led his troops to repel Chadian invaders. To underscore the lesson Nigeria’s military set out to teach the intruders, he drove them back about 50 kilometers into Chad, by one account. Understandably, this created some international disquiet.
Moreover, in The Gambia, the opposition candidate, Adama Barrow, had defeated Yahya Jammeh who had ruled the country for 22 years in the 1 December, 2016 presidential election, and the incumbent congratulated the president-elect. However, Yahya Jammeh later retracted his earlier recognition of the results of the poll and insisted on staying on as President beyond the 19 January, 2017 handing over date. Nigeria spear-headed the international efforts to remove Yahya Jammeh, and deployed jets and troops for the purpose. Seeing the credible threat of impeding military action, Yahya Jammeh agreed to leave office.
It was reported that it was then-Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s private jet which was procured to ferry Jammeh and his family out of the country. In his remark to his presidential media team when they visited him in London where he was for medical attention, President Buhari said: “What we did in The Gambia has fetched us a lot of goodwill.”
Buhari was Chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), Chairman of the Nigeria National Petroleum Company (NNPC), Minister of Petroleum Resources, Military Administrator, military Head of State and civilian President. As Dr. Ngige put it, Buhari “has worked and served Nigeria in areas where even the angel would be tempted to be corrupt.” Yet, he emerged from each office morally above board. His public service has also been signposted by key infrastructure such as the 2nd Niger Bridge, railways, the Lagos – Calabar coastal road, and the Badagry – Sokoto Road, just to mention a few.
Ngige also noted: “His victory in 2015 over a sitting president, incumbent President Jonathan, is a good lesson for our democracy. … That victory deepened democracy in Nigeria. He showed that if you are in opposition and you preach well and you get your games correct, you can defeat an incumbent. … That victory was historic.” In fact, Buhari’s 2015 victory is the reference point and inspiration for the coalition which has declared its intention to remove President Tinubu from office in 2027.
Before Buhari, “No work, no pay” was largely an ineffectual labour slogan in the Nigerian university system; but in 2022, it became a live and enforced International Labour Organisation (ILO) principle which got the stamp of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN). Moreover, the Buhari administration, in which the dynamic, sometimes, controversial Dr. Chris Ngige oversaw labour matters, democratised university academic staff unionism by registering the new Congress of University Academics (CONUA) in 2023 to expand the opportunities for choice of union membership by lecturers. As with the “No work, no pay” principle, this decision was predicated upon ILO guidelines and was sanctioned by an NICN judgement.
Buhari knew how to seize the moment. He acknowledged that Chief MKO Abiola won the June 12, 1993 presidential election, which was annulled by the Ibrahim Babangida military regime, and had been a source of violence and unrelenting ethno-regional disaffection. Buhari also declared June 12 as Democracy Day and a national public holiday, and renamed the National Stadium, Abuja, the Moshood Abiola National Stadium, in honour of the democracy icon. For these actions, Buhari has been receiving annual adulations on June 12 as a champion of democracy. With his death now, these adulations would assume an endearing memorial significance.
Deservedly, the University of Maiduguri, unarguably the North-East’s intellectual powerhouse, has been renamed “Muhammadu Buhari University, Maiduguri.” This decision is in preference to the suggestion to rename the Federal University of Transportation University, Daura, Katsina State, after him. The decision has avoided holding him up as a local hero. Localising a national icon was one of the reasons for the fierce opposition to the renaming of the University of Lagos after MKO Abiola by the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
In the campaigns towards the 2015 presidential election, there were insensitive claims that, following the pattern of Northwest Nigerian Heads of Government dying in office, Buhari would die before the end of his first term. So, when he took ill in 2017 and had to be away from Nigeria for extended periods of time, some of his detractors expected that their morbid predictions would come true. In fact, Buhari himself was widely reported to have said: “I have never been so sick.” In spite of the severity of his condition, Buhari denied his detractors the medal of clairvoyance. Indeed, some of them who had been so categorical about his not returning from London or their much younger relatives died before his arrival.
Amazingly, the frail Buhari who left Nigeria returned months later as a spritely, remarkably younger Buhari. And his traducers were so astounded that the only excuse they could give for what they thought was his metamorphosis was that the Buhari who left Nigeria for London had actually died and been buried. According to the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, in a 3 December, 2018 YouTube video, “Jubril is an impostor. They brought him in to act and behave like the dead Buhari.” In one attempt to justify the ludicrous claim, attention was being drawn to the shape of the ears of the original Buhari and Jubril of Sudan.
In a humorous reaction in the same video, President Buhari responded to a Nigerian at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland who sought to know whether he was the real Buhari: “A lot of people hoped that I died during my ill health. Some even reached out to the Vice-President to consider them to be his deputy because they assumed I was dead. That embarrassed him a lot and of course, he visited me when I was in London convalescing… It’s [the] real me [that’s standing before you]; I assure you.”
Besides “Jubril of Sudan,” there are other expressions by and about Buhari which would serve as his memorial. On Tuesday 10 May, 2016, without knowing that the comment could be picked up by others, then-British Prime Minister David Cameron told Queen Elizabeth II that Nigeria was “a fantastically corrupt” country. Asked by a journalist whether he was going to demand an apology for the undiplomatic put down from Cameron, Buhari said wittily: “I’m not going to demand any apology from anybody. What I’m demanding is the return of assets [stolen from Nigeria and kept in Britain] … What would I do with apology? I need something tangible.”
Probably the most popular and most enduring of President Buhari’s soundbites related to his wife’s politically vocal nature. On a trip to Germany, asked what her political affiliation was, the President said: “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 other room” has since become a folk euphemism in Nigeria.
When his time was ripe, since, as the Qur’an says, “Every soul shall taste of death,” President Buhari left Nigeria for the United Kingdom on 27 February, 2025, and breathed his last there on 13 July, 2025. Delivering his funeral oration at a special, expanded meeting of the Federal Executive Council on 17 July, 2025, President Tinubu, quite rightly, said: “President Buhari was not a perfect man – no leader is – but he was, in every sense of the word, a good man, a decent man, an honourable man. His record will be debated, as all legacies are, but the character he brought to public life, the moral force he carried, the incorruptible standard he represented, will not be forgotten. His was a life lived in full service to Nigeria, and in fidelity to God.”
President Buhari’s imperfections served as a canvass which showed so clearly how so much more imperfect some others around him were. Nothing revealed this more clearly than the criticism that he gave those who worked with him unrestrained freedom of action. That some of these aides performed below par or overreached themselves or swam in impropriety was a betrayal not just of the President or the nation, but of nature itself which has made us to come to expect that growing up was morally and ethically refining or that grown-ups didn’t need bottle-feeding or micro-managing.
President Buhari’s death creates an opportunity for us as a nation to begin to re-examine our democratically-elected Presidents, especially, of the Nigerian Fourth Republic, and from an amalgam of their relative positive qualities, set a standard for the ideal future Nigerian president. Noteworthy in this regard are President Olusegun Obasanjo’s reputation as a hardworking leader and President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s exquisite conscience which made him acknowledge that there were legitimate ethical questions to be raised about the 2007 elections that brought him to office, complemented by the willingness to correct the identified moral challenges in subsequent elections.
Also of key importance are President Goodluck Jonathan’s uncanny respect for the will of the electorate and his aversion to election-related bloodshed; President Buhari’s transparent honesty, love for the common people and the desire to bring out, unforced, the best in each of his appointees to public office; and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s methodical, sharply-focussed, long-term preparation for office, the courage to take necessary, even if unpopular, decisions, and his uncommon capacity for the consensual deployment of presidential powers.
As a fitting closing testimony to Nigeria’s late President Muhammadu Buhari, President Tinubu said: “Mai Gaskiya, The People’s General, the Farmer President – your duty is done.”