President Buhari died the way he lived: shrouded in mystery, from a sickness he refused to disclose, leaving a nation to speculate. Even in death, he remains an enigma. Many Nigerians still believe he died years ago and that an impostor ruled in his place. While I reject that fantasy, it speaks volumes about our country: no one knows who is telling the truth anymore. His final act was to deny Nigerians the basic decency of transparency. What did he suffer from? Why the secrecy? Why were we not even asked to pray for him? Why did he die in a London clinic? Why didn’t he improve the healthcare of Nigeria as President so he could have received treatment at home? Many questions and little answers…
Perhaps he and his handlers believed the nation harbored no goodwill toward him. If so, they were not entirely wrong. Here was a man who had the privilege, some would say unmeritedly, the greatest opportunity of his life: to redeem Nigeria as a national leader. And he squandered it. I lament his death only because he died without facing accountability for the damage he inflicted on Nigeria. We are told to mourn him. But Nigerians should instead mourn their country—an idea, a dream, a project—that continues to wither under his successor President Tinubu with even greater speed.
Nigeria is dying before our eyes. Most of us know it but pretend otherwise, clinging to the hope that God will somehow rescue us from this descent into destruction. Buhari was not solely to blame—our collective guilt, especially among the elites, runs deep. He was the product of a rancid porridge of political, social, and religious dysfunction, cooked up by a self-serving ruling class and ladled over the masses. Those politicians and clerics now shedding crocodile tears are the same ones who enabled his catastrophic presidency. They must all share the burden of our shame and this national wreckage under which we suffer.
Yet the deeper problem is structural. Nigeria is built on structural injustice that breeds violence and elevates rulers like Buhari and Tinubu—men who dole out small doses of death to people; destroying our cultures, dreams, and hope as a people. In this confused land, no one is ever held to account. No consequences follow for the powerful, only for the powerless. The same shameless club passes the baton of power among itself, reducing citizens to beggars at their feasting table; turning our country into a client-patron extractive and transactional state in which the hoi polloi, that is, the masses of our people are expendable, manipulable, and disposable in the hands of conscienceless politicians and office holders.
Buhari destroyed Nigeria through three central failures.
First was his refusal to unite the nation. He was the first president in my lifetime—born after the civil war—who governed openly as a sectional leader. He lacked the humility to admit his ignorance or to acquire the skills of statecraft. Instead, he exploited Nigeria’s widening ethnic and religious fractures, implementing the most divisive administration of the modern era. He was not a national president but an Islamic supremacist and ethnocentric jingoist, beholden to the feudal ambitions of Fulani oligarchs, intent on capturing and pocketing the Nigerian state.
In a country that functions more like a unitary state than a federation, his appointments and resource allocations were lopsided, favoring the North, the Fulani, and Muslims. Buhari never trusted Nigerians beyond his tight ethno-Islamic circle. He had no interest in the extraordinary talent the nation offered. Instead, he confined power to a few incompetent loyalists who treated the state as their private enterprise, with predictable failures in policy and governance. These rudderless acolytes presided over an aimless administration that left Nigeria adrift.
Second, Buhari failed to keep Nigeria safe. Under his watch, the nation became a vast graveyard. Kunle Adebajo of HumAngle reported that Nigeria’s safety index collapsed from 7.14 in 2008 to 2.35 in 2019. By the end of Buhari’s tenure, the Global Terrorism Index ranked Nigeria the sixth most terrorized country on earth. The U.S. State Department warned travelers of rampant armed robbery, kidnapping, carjacking, rape, and terrorism. Nigerians endured a Hobbesian nightmare—life uncertain, brutish, and expendable.
While the killings multiplied, Buhari looked away. He assembled incompetent security chiefs, selected not for merit but for ethnic loyalty. His armed forces, under his orders, turned their guns on peaceful Anti-SARS protesters—young Nigerians demanding a future—while offering only platitudes whenever terrorists slaughtered villagers. Where was the plan? Where were the trials? Why were no masterminds brought to justice? The answer is simple: too many of the perpetrators were Fulani. Buhari would not turn against his kin, even as rivers of blood flowed. He locked up law-abiding citizens who felt at some point that they could no longer bear the suffocating structural violence and ethnic and religious animus from this heartless president. The political activist, Nnamdi Kanu, for example—wrongly termed a secessionist—was silenced by Buhari and is still held in custody in defiance of a court order asking for his release.
Today, under Tinubu, the insecurity has worsened. The violence that Buhari unleashed has metastasized. Nigeria now hosts a criminal ecosystem of bandits, kidnappers, and terrorists who operate freely, often with the collusion or indifference of the authorities. It is no exaggeration to say that Nigeria has become unlivable for millions.
Third, Buhari presided over the steep decline of the economy. According to the World Bank, in 2020 Nigeria suffered its deepest economic contraction since 1983. The COVID-19 crisis contributed, but decades of squandered resources and visionless leadership left the nation defenseless as the poverty headquarters of the world (2018). By 2020, the Human Development Index ranked Nigeria 161st out of 189 countries. Sixty percent of Nigerians were surviving on less than $2 per day. Inequality remained endemic. The economy shrank. The GDP tanked. Poverty deepened. Social misery spread. Nigeria became an archipelago of ungoverned spaces. Hope receded.
In truth, Nigeria’s poverty is not inevitable. It is engineered by a predatory elite. Buhari promised to fight corruption, but his party became the most corrupt in living memory. He pledged security but delivered carnage. He claimed patriotism but governed like a tribal Islamic general. When Ken Saro-Wiwa was led to the gallows, he asked, “What sort of country is this?” Today, countless Nigerians echo that question in anguish.
Buhari’s death is a reminder of the leaders who have poisoned our national life. But we must face an even harder truth: the forces that empowered him remain entrenched even though like chameleons they have changed their colors and ethnicity. They are invisible but omnipresent—a deep state with tentacles in our institutions, our military, our security agencies, our judiciary, our financial systems, and our religious bodies. They are the authors of the funeral dirge of a dying nation. Unless we confront them, unless we reclaim our agency, the decay will continue.
One of the surest signs of a conquered people is that they lose faith in their agency and power to change their circumstances. Oppression neuters the spirit, convinces the citizenry that nothing can ever improve. This is the most insidious legacy of Buhari’s rule: a hollowed-out national psyche that doubts its worth. But we must not surrender to despair. Nigeria needs its second liberation and the death of Buhari has opened many wounds requiring a national therapy for our post-traumatic/Buhari disorder.
Pope Francis, in his wisdom, urges us to reimagine political participation itself. He calls for popular movements that “invigorate local, national and international governing structures with that torrent of moral energy that springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny” (Fratelli Tutti, 169). He warns that democracy without the people is hollow—a mere word, a facade. True democracy demands citizens who refuse to be spectators in their own tragedy but are rather protagonists in their own history.
We cannot heal our country by mourning Buhari alone, nor by pretending that President Tinubu is a departure from Buhari. They are two sides of the same coin. We must mourn our collective complicity, our cultivated apathy, our silence in the face of injustice. We must grieve the country we have lost—and then resolve to rebuild it.
If there is any redemption in this moment, it will not come from politicians. It will come from ordinary Nigerians choosing courage over cynicism; from religious leaders choosing prophetic denunciation of the misrule, corruption, and misconduct of our extractive and transactional office holders who are milking our country dry. It will come from a new moral movement willing to name the truth, to disrupt the old order, and to reimagine Nigeria as a land of dignity and possibility. Until then, the ghosts of Buhari’s failures will haunt us all. May President Buhari rest in peace and may none like him ever come near our state house again, Insha Allah!
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