In the end, the worst thing that could have happened to Muhammadu Buhari: he died days after his successor finally denounced him and his spokesman told the truth.
President Bola Tinubu, remember, was visiting Saint Lucia where, two years and two months after he assumed office, he abruptly, but finally, confessed that Buhari had indeed sold him a bill of goods.
Prior to that, he had consistently praised Buhari for “doing so well” and pledged to build on his “legacy.”
Then came July 2, 2025, when Tinubu used the b-word. “We inherited a country that was near bankruptcy,” he told Nigerians in Saint Lucia with a population less than Isele-Ekiti.
From “legacy” and “doing so well” to “bankruptcy” is a dramatic shift. To make it sound like a whisper, Tinubu chose an obscure country for the statement.
But Buhari was in his favourite London hospital, and Tinubu probably knew he would not make it. And then last Sunday, some 11 days after Tinubu indicted him, he died.
Buhari will be remembered for campaigning to bring change to Nigeria, repeatedly affirming: ‘Unless we kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria.’
But he did not just fail to kill corruption, through his pattern of appointments, aloofness, and policies, he fertilised it.
It’s not that Buhari didn’t build a highway or a school; it’s that he campaigned to be empowered to champion a new Nigeria but ended up delivering a worse one.
Last week, the New York Times said of him: “By the end of his eight-year tenure in 2023, corruption, security and Nigeria’s economy had all worsened…”
Al Jazeera agreed, stressing that while Buhari promised to defeat Boko Haram and restore order, “armed violence spread far beyond the northeast. Gunmen, separatists, and criminal groups operated with impunity across large parts of the country by the end of his tenure.”
Buhari did not really notice or care. His security strategy, if he had one, was to call meetings of his security chiefs when brazen insurgency attacks surfaced.
I was a cheerleader when Buhari campaigned for the job, partly out of ignorance. Having moved abroad in 1990, I had become less-than-educated about him, including the excesses of his Afri-Projects Consortium, which he established as executive chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund (or Petroleum Trust Fraud, thank you, Ray Ekpu).
In the mistaken belief that Buhari was an upright, motivated leader, but also because there was no alternative to the status quo in 2015, I supported him, and even advocated a “winning communication strategy” as early as August 2015.
By then, however, cracks about Buhari’s character and capacity had begun to appear, with an Abuja newspaper leading its June 3 edition with a story that Buhari owned a “sprawling Asokoro lakeside mansion” of N2.1bn just five minutes from the presidential villa.
As I have observed again and again, the “converted democrat” who loved to boast about his “integrity” did not respond with a denial. He did not sue. The newspaper conveniently disappeared.
This was the first thing that occurred to me last week when Buhari spokesman Garba Shehu reportedly admitted in a new book that in 2017, the infamous story about rats invading the Presidential Villa was a fabrication that he concocted to divert public attention from questions about Buhari’s health.
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A valid question at Buhari’s passing, then, is this: Given all the press statements and denials and affirmations and clarifications by his aides in eight years to make their principal sound good and invested, how many were not whoppers?
Where, for example are the “over $6bn additional investments for Nigeria” Shehu told Nigerians in April 2016 that Buhari’s trip to China had yielded?
Where are the public declaration of assets Buhari promised in “My Covenant With Nigerians,” a pledge he repudiated after using it to win the election?
Where was his Chatham House pledge “to always lead from the front”? What happened to his promises about being accountable? Where was the pledge to “always tell Nigerians the truth”?
I have a massive folder of photographs of ordinary Nigerians in all manner of poor conditions and long lines on March 28, 2015, some of them in wheelbarrows or on the backs of relatives as they struggled to “vote decisively for change,” as the IFES called it.
Sadly, following his oath of office on May 2015, Buhari turned his back on all of them.
He had fraudulently and ruthlessly deployed the hunger of Nigerians for good leadership to acquire the presidency. Insecurity became worse partly because he wanted to make sure that any Fulani man, whether he was behind a cow or behind an AK-47, had the right of road: politically, economically, literally and figuratively.
Trying to protect the violent herders, in April 2018 Buhari told Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that the criminals were foreigners “trained and armed by Muammar Gaddafi of Libya,” who had escaped from that country with their arms. But speaking at the UN General Assembly just months later, he said they were “runaway fighters from Iraq and Syria.” The closest he came to naming the cattle herders was when he told the citizens of Benue State who were being mowed down on their own land to “accommodate your countrymen.”
Buhari used the same methods of obfuscation and equivocation to protect Nigeria’s corruption conglomerate, deceitfully never naming them despite his promises, and never obeying court orders concerning returned loot.
He encouraged the most corrupt of other parties to join his APC, thus completing his re-engineering and re-energising of Nigerian corruption.
Keep in mind, also: If Buhari’s child wanted the presidential jet for a school assignment, she got it. If his child got seriously injured in an illegal motorbike race on Abuja streets, he was rewarded not with police summons but a trip abroad. If the president wanted to collect illegal gifts, why not? If his wife wanted to collect unethical gifts, what was wrong with that?
This was the framework of the Buhari presidency. I did not understand it until April 2023, just weeks before his tenure expired when he issued his famous line: “I got what I wanted.” He had fulfilled his dream of many years in control that was cut short in the coup of 1985.
It is ironic that in the end, Buhari, who in 1984 tried to have former Minister Umaru Dikko returned to Nigeria in a box from London himself returned from London in one, and a former spokesman announcing that were he treated in Nigeria, he would have died much earlier.
That is a reminder that Buhari neither believed in Nigeria nor thought Nigerians to be deserving of healthcare.
Now that it is over, it is important to recognise that Buhari exits with one dubious achievement: power exposed him and he damaged the Buhari brand so decisively that those who wear the name will often find they are not welcome among Nigerians.
The lesson is simple: We all die, leaving only our impression on the wider world, not our inner or paid circles, to speak for us. Buhari got what he wanted, but he betrayed Nigerians to do it. He was a pretender-patriot who may be celebrated by his beneficiaries but will be reviled by history and his victims.
Sonala Olumhense
