How Dare I Tell You How to Grieve?
An Obituary for Muhammadu Buhari and the Death of Selective Memory
Muhammadu Buhari is dead.
It still feels strange to write that. Not because death isn’t inevitable — especially for men like him, old men who lived long enough to watch their country bleed and somehow leave the world with state funerals and over-rehearsed eulogies. No, it feels strange because with people like Buhari, the man dies long after his damage does. His death, for many of us, is neither tragedy nor relief — it is a complicated, untidy thing. And yet, as is custom in these parts, the moral police have come out to lecture the bereaved on the proper way to grieve.
“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” they say. “Whatever you thought of him in life, death deserves respect.”
But how dare anyone dictate the terms of another’s mourning? How do you tell a person whose brother never came home after #EndSARS to “let bygones be bygones”? How do you correct a market woman in Kano who remembers the price of rice when Buhari first returned to power in 2015, and what it cost to feed her family by the time he left office? How do you patronize the young man whose job prospects evaporated with every recession we were told to endure with patience? There’s a kind of audacity in expecting the wounded to observe decorum for the architects of their wounds.
This is a country that forgets easily — sometimes out of necessity, sometimes from exhaustion. But Buhari’s memory has always been one of those jagged things you couldn’t smooth over, no matter how many times you were asked to. Long before he became the symbol of Nigeria’s civilian decline, he was already a figure of cold, indifferent violence. In 1984, when he first seized power through a coup, he announced his reign with what many then called “discipline,” but what we now know was repression. Journalists jailed, musicians detained (ask Fela’s ghost), citizens punished for the sin of surviving a collapsing nation. WAI (War Against Indiscipline) was the sort of fascist theatre that Nigerian elders recall with nostalgia until you remind them that it was poor people who suffered most.
And when he returned to power in 2015, it was on the back of an exhausted electorate desperate for something resembling order. What they got was a slow suffocation. The man who promised to defeat Boko Haram within months oversaw a security crisis so sprawling it made Nigeria’s map bleed. A Boko Haram insurgency that, while territorially weakened, gave way to a broader national crisis — from mass abductions and terror attacks in the Northeast, to banditry in the Northwest, to farmer-herder conflicts in the Middle Belt, to separatist agitations and military crackdowns in the Southeast. Nowhere felt safe.
The economy slipped into recession twice. Inflation skyrocketed. Fuel queues returned with frustrating regularity. The naira plummeted. In a country that prided itself on being the giant of Africa, basic goods became luxury items and survival itself a full-time job. His administration introduced policies like border closures that made no economic sense, plunged small businesses into crisis, and did nothing to curb the smuggling they claimed to target. The handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was lethargic and disconnected, with palliatives hoarded in warehouses while Nigerians starved. And through it all, Buhari spent record amounts of time abroad, receiving undisclosed medical treatments while citizens battled failing hospitals at home.
Corruption, the very demon he claimed to have come to slay, thrived in his government. From the Maina pension fund scandal to the Niger Delta Development Commission’s missing billions, to the Humanitarian Affairs Ministry’s fabricated beneficiary lists, graft remained the state’s most enduring enterprise. Even Diezani’s disgrace under Jonathan seemed modest next to some of the financial scandals that flourished under Buhari’s watch.
And the ultimate indictment? The unprecedented exodus of young Nigerians — a generation that simply gave up on their own country. Between 2015 and 2023, visa and permanent residency applications to the UK, Canada, and the United States surged, with Canada alone recording over 15,000 Nigerian permanent resident arrivals in 2021, a figure that more than doubled from five years prior. Tens of thousands more fled to the UK on the new Skilled Worker and Graduate Route visas. It wasn’t just the middle class either; doctors, tech professionals, students, artisans — all chose exile over what they saw as the impossibility of a better Nigeria under Buhari’s administration. The slang word for it — japa — became the most reliable escape plan and cultural export of the Buhari years. A country hemorrhaging its youth is a country hemorrhaging its future. That will be one of his most enduring legacies.
But perhaps the most defining event of his presidency was the #EndSARS protests of October 2020 — a youth-led uprising against police brutality that was met with bullets at the Lekki Toll Gate. Buhari’s response was a masterclass in evasion and gaslighting: a flat, detached address that offered neither accountability nor empathy, while protesters mourned their dead. It was a moment when the country’s young population, for whom Buhari was little more than an avatar of an older, indifferent Nigeria, recognized the depth of his disdain.
And now, in the shadow of these years, some of us watch as public figures, clerics, and opportunistic moralists attempt to shepherd national grief into quiet, orderly mourning. To insist that we must not celebrate his death is to refuse people the full expression of their complex, justified rage. It is to police emotion in service of a civility that was never extended to those whose lives and livelihoods were buried under the weight of his rule.
I have seen this script before. When Abacha died in 1998, the streets of Abeokuta erupted in wild jubilation. I was too young then to grasp the full implications, but I remember adults passing around bottles of Gulder and Star Lager beer in the afternoon sun. Nobody told them to behave. Nobody asked them to “respect the dead.” Abacha’s sins had been public and personal. To grieve a tyrant’s passing as one would a beloved statesman is to perform a kind of emotional dishonesty that Nigeria no longer has the stamina for.
Even globally, we’ve seen this tension. When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, entire communities in Britain’s north, still reeling from the economic violence of her policies, threw street parties. In parts of Chile, Augusto Pinochet’s death split the nation between mourners and those who finally felt they could exhale. Grief is not universal. It is shaped by proximity to harm. And it is the height of arrogance to ask those who suffered under a man’s rule to suppress their bitterness in service of your abstract sense of civility.
I understand the instinct, though. Death, in its finality, unnerves us. It forces a reckoning not just with the deceased, but with ourselves — what we tolerated, what we forgot, what we justified. Some people mourn Buhari because he was their father’s friend, their community’s benefactor, the man who built a road or awarded a scholarship. Fair. History is textured like that. But others mourn differently, or not at all, because they have lived too long in the consequences of his leadership.
How dare I tell you how to grieve? How dare you tell me?
It is a Nigerian impulse, this urge to flatten history in the name of peace. To say “leave it to God” when what we mean is “I don’t want to confront what this says about the country, about us.” But there’s no peace without memory. No healing without honest account.
So yes — Buhari is dead. May whatever God he met judge him fairly. But don’t tell me how to feel. Don’t tell the mother whose son was shot at the Lekki toll gate to whisper her grief. Don’t tell the young man who spent his twenties unemployed, the trader who watched her business collapse, the families torn apart by kidnappings, the communities displaced by violence, or the youth who traded their passports for a chance at dignity in a foreign land, to package their pain into polite condolences. Power leaves ruins in its wake. And sometimes, survival means naming those ruins without shame.
We owe ourselves that much.
Recommended Reading: The False Crisis of African Literary Estrangement by Tolu Daniel on Olongo Africa.
Hmmmmmmmmm! Baba Daada
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