Major General Muhammadu Buhari, who died in a London hospital this month at the age of 82, came to international prominence on the last day of 1983, when he and his deputy, Major General Túndé Ìdíàgbọn, overthrew the Second Nigerian Republic of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. The stated reason for the coup was the regime’s ‘inept and corrupt leadership’, epitomised by Umaru Dikko, the head of the presidential task force on rice, who was himself hoarding rice in order to artificially drive up the price, and who had remarked that Nigerians could not really be considered poor since they ‘had not reached the point of eating from dustbins’. Although little was known about Buhari at the time, he was well-received by a population that had grown disillusioned with Shagari’s version of democracy and did not yet understand the true nature of military rule. The new junta asserted its difference from the old regime by releasing Dikko’s hoarded stock.
Born in 1942 to a Muslim local chief in Daura, in the far north-east of the country, Buhari was the twenty-third child of his family. He attended Qur’anic school and helped rear cattle (a hobby he retained throughout his life). Though he initially wanted to study medicine, the only option in the country at the time was pharmacology – a field in which it would have taken him many years to qualify – so he joined the military to continue his education there. A dour man who was known for never smiling in public, Buhari quickly showed his hand upon coming to power. He wasted no time in launching the so-called War Against Indiscipline, which saw people flogged in the streets by battle-ready soldiers for such crimes as urinating in public and not queuing at the bus stop. These harsh measures were nothing new: Nigera had long been a semi-militarised state designed by the British colonists to control an unruly amalgam of world religions (Christianity and Islam practised in roughly equal measure) and 350 ethnic groups (of which three accounted for more than half the total population). This fragmented nation, so the thinking went, could only be kept together by force of arms, no matter the colouration of the government.
Buhari undoubtedly brought more discipline to the public sphere, trimming the number of ministries and senior civil servants along with senior police and naval officers deemed to have outstayed their usefulness. Yet the junta was best known for its repressive bent. It proscribed both the Nigerian Medical Association and the National Association of Nigerian Students, as well as enacting the Public Officers Decree No. 4, which made it an offence for a newspaper to publish any information, true or false, which could ‘bring the government or a government official into ridicule or disrepute’. If convicted, the publication could be proscribed and the journalists imprisoned for up to two years. State Security Decree No. 2 of 1984 allowed for three months’ renewable detention at the sole discretion of Ìdíàgbọn for anyone alleged to have ‘contributed to the economic adversity of the nation’, while Decree 20 sanctioned the retrospective execution by firing squad of three men – 30-year-old Lawal Ojúọlápé, 26-year-old Bartholomew Owoh and 29-year-old Bernard Ògèden`gbé – who were convicted of possessing drugs, even though this offence had not carried the death sentence at the time. The killings caused an outcry at home and abroad, yet Buhari was unmoved.
It took only twenty months for Buhari to be deposed, to popular acclaim, by the charming Major General Ibrahim Babangida. The ousted leader was detained for three years in a guarded bungalow in Benin City, after which he retreated to his hometown. Yet those who celebrated his overthrow would soon be disappointed. IBB, as he was known, courted popularity by repealing Decree No. 4, releasing the journalists detained under Buhari and promising a return to civilian rule. But he did not repeal Decree No. 2. On the contrary, he doubled the period of detention from three to six months and began the practice of assassinating dissenters, including the journalist Délé Gíwá, who was killed by a parcel bomb delivered to his house one Sunday morning. IBB also took corruption to a new level, most obviously through a decree which allowed him to use the Central Bank of Nigeria to divert $4 billion worth of oil sales following the 1990s boom in crude.
After eight years in office, Babangida was eventually forced to ‘step aside’ in favour of his deputy, General Sani Abacha, who brought the sulking Buhari in from the cold by appointing him minister of petroleum affairs (a position he had previously held in the mid-1970s under the then General Olúṣẹ́gun Ọbásanjọ́). This gave him the chance to loot to his heart’s content. Curiously, though, there is no evidence that he did anything of the kind. A report in New African praised his department’s levels of transparency as a rare ‘success story’. As Buhari himself later remarked, ‘I came into this world with nothing and I will leave with nothing. Why should I steal?’ Not so for Abacha, who enriched himself to the tune of $5 billion stashed in Swiss bank accounts with the help of the notorious Chagoury brothers, his Lebanese bagmen, before making the fatal mistake of overseeing the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the environmental activist and writer, following a kangaroo trial – prompting an international backlash that destabilised the regime. In 1998, after five years in power, Abacha read the writing on the wall and tried to organise elections to civilianise himself in keeping with the new post-Cold War imperative. But he died in mysterious circumstances before the vote, ostensibly at the hands of two Indian prostitutes flown in to assassinate him.
With the return to democracy (or what passes for such) in 1999, Buhari initially kept a low profile, perhaps out of respect for his former boss, Ọbásanjọ́, for whom the elections were rigged in order to provide a continuity of sorts, swapping khaki for agbada. But he emerged to fight the general elections of 2003 and 2007, losing on both occasions, whereupon he cried foul play and vowed that if the results were not overturned within one month, he would render the country ungovernable (they weren’t, and he didn’t). Buhari put himself forward again in 2011, calling on his followers in the predominantly Muslim north to police polling centres and ‘lynch anybody that tries to tinker with the votes’, which resulted in the killing of at least 170 Christians, with many more injured and thousands displaced. On his fourth attempt in 2015 he swore that ‘by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood’ should he lose again, but fortunately for the animals at least this time he finally got what he believed he was owed. He was helped by prominent intellectuals such as the writer Wole Ṣóyínká, who managed to convince himself that the man he once referred to as a ‘slave driver’ had somehow become a ‘born-again democrat’.
It was an illusion shared by many. Eight years of mind-boggling corruption under Ọbásanjọ́ had left Nigerians clamouring for ‘change’, which quickly became the new government’s mantra. Buhari pledged to deal with the corruption that permeated every area of public life, while paradoxically declaring that he would not probe past leaders if they repented. Then everything went horribly wrong. It wasn’t entirely Buhari’s fault – the precipitous decline in global oil prices was bound to hurt – but he didn’t help matters by overriding advice on how best to stem the concomitant fall of the currency. With inflation running at almost 18%, rumours circulated that Buhari was running the country with a kitchen cabinet of fewer than half a dozen family members whom nobody had voted for. His wife, who claimed that Buhari was suffering from PTSD from his junta days, remarked that she was receiving ‘complaints upon complaints’ from the Nigerian public. ‘It is left for the people’, she declared, ‘to decide whether he is in charge or he is not in charge.’ Her outspokenness was unprecedented. No Nigerian First Lady had ever come out publicly against her husband. At a joint press conference with Angela Merkel on the day the interview aired, Buhari could only smile uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know which party my wife belongs to’, he said, ‘but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room.’ The German chancellor simply glared at him. Buhari seemed oblivious as to how his quip had gone down with the world’s most powerful woman, whom he had come to beg for €18 million in humanitarian aid.
The defining event during Buhari’s otherwise lacklustre two-term tenure was his response to the 2020 #EndSARS movement. Late one evening at the beginning of October, members of the country’s notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad were filmed shooting a young man in a hotel car park on suspicion of being a ‘Yahoo-Yahoo boy’ (the common term for an internet scammer). The footage went viral on social media, along with the hashtag #EndSARS, and young people took to the streets in several cities. As usual, the government overreacted and up to ten people were killed by the ‘regular’ police. On the fourth day of protests, Buhari announced the disbandment of SARS, promised to address the people’s ‘genuine concerns’ and offered assurances that ‘all those responsible for misconduct’ would be brought to justice. The protesters weren’t interested; they wanted radical reform of the entire structure of government. They also happened to belong to the 20% of the population aged between 15 and 24 who are reckoned to be under- or unemployed in an economy that was tanking even before the Covid-19 pandemic drove down the price of crude (40% are even younger than that, meaning more trouble ahead).
The protests, which took place in the largely Christian south along with the Federal Capital Territory Abuja, were remarkable for their discipline, even in the face of provocations from a state itching for a showdown. After a fortnight, the army issued a warning to ‘all subversive elements and troublemakers’ that it stood ready to maintain ‘law and order’ by opening fire on the crowds in Lagos. ‘They just came with guns blazing’, recalled Obianuju Catherine Udeh, a musician with a large social media following, who live-streamed the gory scene as she escaped, gathering bullet shells along the way. By and by, the government announced SARS’s replacement with the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) force, so named perhaps because someone in the seat of power was enamoured of the American acronym, which spoke all-too-loudly of the government’s priorities.
Buhari blamed the unrest on ‘misinformation’ designed to ‘mislead the unwary within and outside Nigeria into unfair judgement and disruptive behaviour’. He also claimed that the government had put in place measures to ‘lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty’. Yet, two years after his departure from office, more people now live in poverty than before – continuing the downward spiral of immiseration which stretches back to so-called ‘independence’ in 1960. The problem, at bottom, is that since the inception of sovereign Nigeria its ruling class has been unable or unwilling to wean themselves off the colonial ‘master’. When it became obvious that the colonial order was no longer viable, the British government hoped – according to a Foreign Office draft paper – to ‘forestall nationalist demands which threaten our vital interests’ by creating ‘a class with a vested interest in co-operation’. Buhari was a product of this legacy.
Now he is gone, and few seem to mourn his passing. The current incumbent, Bọ́lá Ahmed Tinúbú, announced that 14 July would be a public holiday in Buhari’s honour, but this is only of interest to the 89,000 civil servants out of the country’s 220 million people, the vast majority of whom cannot afford the luxury of a day off. Buhari cost the country nine times the recommended monthly wage for each night he stayed in his London hospital: a facility with no equivalent back home. His widow’s recent statement might stand as his epitaph: ‘After leaving office, one thing he repeatedly told me was that if he died before me, I should plead with Nigerians to forgive him for the mistakes he made during his tenure.’ Some hope.
Read on: Adewale Maja-Pearce, ‘The Kingmaker’, Sidecar.