A former military strongman, he won one democratic election in 2015, and another in 2019, but struggled to make good on promises to tackle corruption and terrorism.
Muhammadu Buhari, an austere soldier and politician who led Nigeria as a feared military strongman in the 1980s and, three decades later, as a democratically elected president, died on Sunday at a hospital in London. He was 82.
His death was confirmed by his spokesman and by Nigeria’s current president, Bola Tinubu, who sent his vice president to London to accompany the body back to Nigeria. Mr. Buhari suffered from ill health throughout his presidency, but what ailed him was kept a closely guarded secret, and the cause of his death was not known.
Both as a military ruler and as president, Mr. Buhari cast himself as a champion of order and discipline, fighting corruption and mismanagement, and attempting to instill a sense of restraint in Nigeria’s rambunctious public life. And in the run-up to his election in 2015, he also presented himself as a general who could bring to heel the violent Islamist group Boko Haram, which has ravaged the country’s northeast.
But by the end of his eight-year tenure in 2023, corruption, security and Nigeria’s economy had all worsened, and youth protests against police violence had been brutally put down, bitterly disappointing the young Nigerians who had helped bring him back to power.
Mr. Buhari was linked to several of the military takeovers that punctuated Nigeria’s first years of independence from Britain in 1960, culminating in a coup by senior commanders on Dec. 31, 1983, that brought him to power.
As head of state, he brooked no dissent.
Seeking to change his compatriots’ ways, he ordered what he called a war against indiscipline that brought soldiers onto the streets, wielding whips to force Nigerians to form orderly lines for buses and in other public places.
