Ehis John Agadagodo
History has a stubborn memory. It recalls not just the ideals we proclaim, but the impact we leave behind, etched in the everyday realities of people who must live with the consequences. And in the case of Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s twice-serving former military ruler turned civilian president, history will not remember him kindly.
For a man who returned to power in 2015 riding on a chariot of public goodwill, Buhari’s fall from grace is not just a tale of disappointment, it is a monumental case study in how promise, when paired with rigidity and detachment, can curdle into tragedy. Now that he is gone – finally, forever, Nigeria’s collective memory has begun its audit. And what remains is not nostalgia. What remains is ash.
To understand the myth of Buhari, one must begin with the aura he carried. For decades, he was revered by millions as a paragon of discipline, incorruptibility, and spartan leadership. In an era when Nigeria reeled under the weight of corruption and insecurity, Buhari symbolized moral order. He had done it before, albeit with a military boot and many believed he would do it again, this time, within the constructs of democracy.
But therein lay the fatal error: mistaking rigidity for integrity, and stoicism for competence.
When Buhari swept into Aso Rock in 2015, defeating an incumbent for the first time in Nigerian democratic history, Nigerians believed they had elected a man who would turn around a ship long threatened by corruption, economic mismanagement, and insecurity. They saw him as a Moses of sorts: stern, silent, unyielding, a man who had spent time reflecting in political wilderness and had returned to lead his people to a promised land.
Instead, he took them deeper into the desert.
Eight years later, Nigeria emerged from his tenure more fractured, more indebted, more unsafe, and more despondent than it had been since the civil war. Under Buhari’s stewardship, the country’s debt profile quadrupled, inflation spiraled out of control, and the Naira, once holding steady at ₦197 to $1 when he took over tumbled into an abyss of over ₦700, and worse today.
Security? A disaster. Despite repeated declarations that Boko Haram had been “technically defeated,” the insurgency metastasized, spawning banditry in the Northwest, farmer-herder conflicts in the Middle Belt, and a cocktail of kidnappings and killings that left no region untouched. Terror became so normalized that train passengers could be abducted for months without a whisper of accountability.
And what of corruption: the very thing Buhari was supposedly born to fight? Under his watch, public officials stole with sanctified impunity. The EFCC became a tool for political witch-hunts, while sacred cows within his government devoured public funds unchecked. Ministers under his administration allegedly siphoned billions, yet faced no consequences. Indeed, his so-called war against corruption became more farcical than fierce, a grotesque theatre of selective justice.
Let us not forget the economy, if one dares call it that. Buhari’s poorly-thought-out border closure policy crippled trade. His decision to maintain an artificial fuel subsidy, despite railing against it for years, bled the national treasury. The Central Bank under his government became a glorified political ATM, printing money to paper over structural cracks, and engaging in opaque, illegal monetary experiments. It is now public knowledge that his CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, turned the apex bank into a dark room of fiscal irresponsibility, with Buhari either clueless or complicit.
More tragically, Buhari governed with a detachment that bordered on indifference. During crises, he vanished. When citizens were killed, kidnapped, or driven to suicide by poverty, Buhari issued cold, perfunctory statements, often days late. His infamous body language, once considered a deterrent to corrupt practices, became a source of dark national humor. His silence was not golden, it was galling.
He presided over the EndSARS protests not with dialogue, but with bullets. He turned the country’s youth: vibrant, brilliant, hungry for change into enemies of the state. The Lekki Toll Gate massacre will forever remain a stain on his legacy, even as he and his government tried to erase it from the nation’s conscience.
So, now he is gone. And the question is: will Nigerians miss him? The honest answer, with brutal candor, is no.
They will not miss the rationed electricity, the endless queues for fuel, the joblessness, the hopelessness, the bizarre monetary policies, the hunger, the fear, the silence in the face of grief, and the illusion of leadership. Nigerians will not miss a president who rarely addressed them, rarely inspired them, and rarely seemed to understand them.
What they will remember is that Buhari had one of the greatest political mandates in Nigerian history, a rare moment of unified national trust and he squandered it.
He had a chance to be great. He chose to be absent.
History, being impartial and unsentimental, will write of Muhammadu Buhari not as the man who saved Nigeria, but as the myth who broke its heart. A catastrophe dressed in khaki ideals and agbada authority. A president who came with the promise of renewal, and left behind ruins.
And now, as the nation moves on without him, it is not with mourning, but with a muted sigh of relief.
