ABUJA, Nigeria (AFP) — Former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari— who led his country first as a junta strongman and later as an elected democrat —  died Sunday at the age of 82, the presidency announced.

Current President Bola Tinubu said in a statement that his predecessor died in London at about 4:30 pm “following a prolonged illness”. He did not disclose the nature of the illness.

Buhari governed Nigeria with a strong hand as a military ruler in the 1980s before reinventing himself as a “converted democrat”, serving two terms from 2015 to 2023.

Tinubu described Buhari as “a patriot, a soldier, a statesman”.

“He stood firm through the most turbulent times, leading with quiet strength, profound integrity,” said Tinubu.

“He championed discipline in public service, confronted corruption head-on, and placed the country above personal interest at every turn,” he added.

Tinubu said he had ordered Vice President Kashim Shettima to go to England to accompany Buhari’s body back to Nigeria.

He also ordered flags to fly at half-staff in honour of Buhari, whose tenure was dogged by health rumours.

Buhari’s frequent visits for medical treatment during his presidency attracted criticism about the government’s transparency over his illness and worries about leadership during some of his longer absences.

Although the nature of his ailment has never been made public, Buhari confessed in one of the trips that he had “never been so ill” and that he had received several blood transfusions.

– ‘A failure of leadership’ –

Last week Buhari’s former spokesman Garba Shehu launched a book, titled “According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience”, in which according to local media he confessed to fabricating a 2017 story about rats’ invasions at the presidential office, to shift Nigerians focus away from concerns over the leader’s health.

Buhari had spent nearly three months away receiving treatment in Britain.

“When the surge in calls for explanation of why the president would be working from home, if truly he had recovered his health and fit for the office came, I said to the reporters that the office, which had been in disuse, needed renovation because rats may have eaten and damaged some cables,” he wrote in the book, according to local media.

The rake-thin 82-year-old Muslim from Nigeria’s far north made history as the first opposition candidate to defeat an incumbent leader at the ballot box in 2015.

His election victory in a country where re-election for the incumbent had been taken for granted was seen as a rare opportunity for Nigeria to change course.

But his time at the helm failed to halt the country’s long-standing issues of graft and insecurity, while the oil giant was further dogged by economic woes.

Despite concerns about his fragile health, his economic policies, the extent of his claims about better security, as well as the targets of his campaign against graft, he secured a second term in 2019.

In a 2020 opinion piece for The New York Times, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie charged that his tenure in office had shown “a failure of leadership”, writing that the “government of President Muhammadu Buhari has long been ineffectual, with a kind of wilful indifference.”

Buhari was born under British colonial rule in the town of Daura in northern Katsina state, whose state governor Dikko Umaru Radda described him a “the embodiment of the common man’s aspirations”.