The Kaduna pilgrimage: Revisiting Buhari’s legacy of ruin
By Lemmy Ughegbe, PhD
Something is unsettling- and tragically familiar- about the sudden resurrection of former President Muhammadu Buhari into national political discussions. The visits themselves are not shocking; the dishonesty, amnesia, and historical revisionism surrounding them are.
Nigeria’s body politics, always full of contradictions, is staging another performance of political theatre where the players behave as if the audience has forgotten the past.
On April 7, 2025, APC governors, headed by Hope Uzodimma, visited the ex-president in Kaduna, not his hometown of Daura. Their mission was refreshingly transparent, a departure from their usual approach—to canvas support for President Bola Tinubu’s re-election bid. So, they were honest? Sure. But it does not make their hare-brained scheme any less diabolical or dubious.
The April 11, 2025, visit featured a group of prominent figures led by ex-Vice President Atiku Abubakar and consisting of former governors Nasir El-Rufai, Aminu Tambuwal, Gabriel Suswam, Achike Udenwa, Ahmed Makarfi, and Jibrilla Bindow. This is quite different. Their mission, they claimed, was simply ‘post-Sallah’ felicitation- an excuse so feeble for the airtime or publicity it was given. With a roll of their eyes, the Nigerian people questioned the sincerity of this latest political power play.
After all, it is not every day that sworn political enemies find a reason to pay homage to a man they earlier described as everything but competent. That man is Muhammadu Buhari, a two-term President whose reign from 2015 to 2023 many citizens, for good reason, regard as one of the most damaging in the nation’s history. How has he become the spiritual and political epicentre of competing power blocs?
This newfound deference puzzles, if not disturbs, those of us who lived through—and endured—the Buhari era. Buhari presided over a government marked by gross nepotism, economic ruin, and deepening divisions for eight years. His contempt for the Federal Character principle was remarkable. He consistently favoured his kinsmen, neglecting those outside his northern base.
Insecurity worsened under his watch. Boko Haram, bandits, kidnappers, and criminal gangs terrorised Nigerians with growing impunity. Presently, Katsina- his home state- continues to grapple with horrifying levels of insecurity, making it all the more ironic that Buhari has opted to retreat to Kaduna, a significant distance from the chaos, a long way from his people. It is a move typical of his leadership style: remote, self-centred, and usually unbothered by the crises that plague ordinary citizens.
The economy shrank, then slid into multiple recessions. The naira collapsed, debt ballooned, and 133 million Nigerians fell into multidimensional poverty. Yet supporters and former critics are courting Buhari today as if he holds the key to Nigeria’s political future.
It’s highly contradictory that the former Minister, who has been critical of Tinubu, is now seeking a meeting with Buhari, with whom he also had a falling out. Ironically, the Kaduna State governor, an Accidental Public Servant, has allied with Atiku despite his past harsh criticism. This is a peak of contradictory behaviour. Surprisingly, Tambuwal and Makarfi, self-proclaimed defenders of equity and constitutional governance, would now support the very man who undermined those principles.
More importantly, what changed? Buhari has offered no regret for his shortcomings. He has not transformed in principle or vision. He left Nigeria bruised, battered, and bereft of hope. If anything, the facts of his misrule are more settled now than a year ago. So why are people currently visiting, consulting, and celebrating him?
It must also be said- and emphatically so- that the former president did President Tinubu no favours. Far from receiving a baton of progress, Tinubu inherited a broken, battered, and bleeding Nigeria. Buhari left a nation struggling. The economy was in ruins, poverty was rampant, and insecurity threatened every part of the country.
However, Buhari’s final sabotage may have been the fuel support debacle. Before the 2015 elections, Buhari called the fuel subsidy a scam and promised to end it immediately upon taking office. For eight years, he failed to keep his word. Instead, he kept the fuel subsidy intact, rechristened it while burning through trillions of naira, allowed corruption to fester in its shadow, and ultimately handed Tinubu a fiscal landmine.
Buhari neither dared to remove fuel support nor the integrity to admit to its retention and account for the cost of doing so. Instead, he employed a mischievous sleight of hand by omitting it from the 2023 budget and leaving the political and financial consequences to explode in the face of his successor. On his very first day in office, Tinubu stepped into the trap- declaring with a flourish that “subsidy is gone.” With those three words, the economic dominoes began to fall.
The aftermath has been catastrophic. More Nigerians have been plunged into poverty than the 133 million estimated to be multi-dimensionally poor under Buhari. Hunger has grown. Transport costs have become unbearable. Inflation has soared. Worst of all, Tinubu has failed to demonstrate the statesmanship required to either reverse the decision or effectively cushion its impact.
He pledged to use the funds left over from subsidy cuts to provide Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)- powered vehicles and a social welfare initiative. However, those promises are still illusory. There are no CNG-powered buses, no visible social safety net, and no public accountability. Similar to his predecessor, Tinubu has turned to the comfort of borrowing, plunging Nigeria deeper into debt with no structural reform in sight.
Worse still, he is building upon the previous administration’s worst legacies—both economically and politically. Remember that during the 2023 Presidential campaign, Tinubu promised to continue with Buhari’s legacies. On that count, he has delivered—unfortunately, in all the wrong ways. Nepotism remains uncurbed. Governance continues to be ethnocentric and elite-centric. Public trust is eroding fast.
Let us be clear: Buhari’s legacy is a cautionary tale. He did not just preside over policy failure; he normalised state capture, sectarian governance, and authoritarianism. Under his leadership, the protest was criminalised, dissent demonised, and innovation paralysed. He was indifferent to suffering, slow to act in trouble, and allergic to accountability.
Perhaps no episode better symbolised the turmoil of his rule than the infamous naira redesign policy introduced at the end of his time in office. Sold to the masses as an anti-corruption measure, it quickly became a catastrophe. Banks ran out of money. ATMs were empty. Nigerians queued for hours to withdraw their own money- often unsuccessfully. Sick persons died because they couldn’t pay for medication. People started to trade naira for naira- buying physical currency at exploitative rates from Point-of-Sale (PoS) agents, one of modern governance’s most ridiculous ironies.
It was administrative brutality dressed in reformist garb. The Central Bank, acting at Buhari’s behest, unleashed financial hardship that pushed more Nigerians into desperation. Businesses crumbled. The economic shock collapsed informal trade. The very people the policy was supposedly designed to help- the poor and unbanked- suffered the most.
His actions harmed the country in social, ethical, and psychological aspects and its financial state. The youth were betrayed. The middle class was decimated. Unity was shattered. Buhari’s rehabilitation suggests a national failure to learn from past trauma. Alternatively, the trauma may have become so commonplace it’s no longer recognised.
Nigerians must resist this revisionism. We must remind ourselves and the world that Buhari’s eight years were not a season of progress but a nadir of regression. We cannot afford to forget and must not allow political expediency to rewrite history.
The portrayal of Buhari as a statesman is offensive, given his lack of empathy for Nigerians during fuel shortages, the naira redesign chaos, insecurity, and economic hardship. He has not earned that title, and he does not deserve this resurgence.
Nevertheless, the real tragedy is not just the image of politicians trooping to Kaduna to see Buhari. It is the fact that such pilgrimages remain relevant in Nigerian politics, that we still seek out strongmen in times of transition, and that we still define power not by competence or moral clarity but by access and proximity.
Nigerians must watch carefully as the 2027 elections approach. It is imperative that we ask hard questions of those who seek our votes: Where were you when Buhari was ruining the country? What did you say, and what did you do? Why are you now elevating him as a sage when his record proves otherwise?
We must preserve the memory. We cannot let propaganda triumph over truth. We must not allow the political class’s desperation to drag us back into the darkness we barely escaped.
Buhari is not a compass for the future. Therefore, permit him to remain what he is- a symbol of how not to be a president.
That phrase (How Not To Be A President) is, in fact, the title of my yet-to-be-published book—a critical examination of Buhari’s eight years in office, chronicling his administration’s many failures, missed opportunities, and the long shadow it cast over Nigeria’s future.
*Lemmy Ughegbe, PhD writes from Abuja
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