By Seyi Gesinde
July 17, 2026
History has always been kinder to virtue than to victory.
Victories belong to an era.
Character belongs to eternity.
The Roman historian Tacitus observed that the desire for power is itself the most consuming passion. Few leaders escape it. Fewer still remain untouched by it.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari built an uncommon public reputation over decades. He first assumed national leadership as a military Head of State in 1983 at the age of 41. More than three decades later, he returned as a democratically elected President in 2015 at the age of 72, and began a second term in 2019 at 76.
Through those years, admirers and critics disagreed on many things.
His economic choices.
His politics.
His appointments.
His style of governance.
Yet one reputation remained remarkably consistent, his personal frugality and his reputation for incorruptibility.
History will continue to debate his presidency.
It has far less to debate about his personal appetite for public wealth.
If they stole behind Buhari, then history presents us with a more interesting question.
What exactly did they steal?
Money?
Or trust?
James Madison famously reminded us that, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Perhaps the greater lesson is that no government should ever be built on the assumption that everyone wishes to become an angel simply because their leader is one.
There lies the tragedy of many idealists.
They mistake personal example for institutional control.
Buhari appeared to believe that integrity could inspire integrity.
History repeatedly warns that it rarely does.
Public office attracts patriots.
It also attracts opportunists.
The tragedy is that they often arrive wearing the same smile.
There is another dimension that history should not ignore.
Power demands presence.
For a significant period of his presidency, Buhari battled serious health challenges that required prolonged medical treatment abroad.
No nation is easily governed from a hospital room.
Health, as the old wisdom reminds us, is wealth.
A leader fighting for his own life cannot always devote the same physical energy to supervising every corridor of government as one in the fullness of strength.
That is not an excuse.
It is a human limitation.
The younger military ruler of 1983 and the older civilian President of 2015 were separated not merely by three decades.
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They were separated by age, by health, and by the very different demands of democratic governance.
Leadership changes.
The human body changes with it.
Edmund Burke warned that those who abuse power ultimately destroy the very trust upon which power depends.
If public officials exploited moments when vigilance was inevitably diminished, the first betrayal would not have been of government.
It would have been of confidence.
They would have mistaken trust for weakness.
They would have interpreted restraint as absence.
And they would have forgotten that trust is not permission.
It is responsibility.
Those who are found, through due process, to have abused public office should answer to the law.
That is where accountability belongs.
But history may reserve a different question for the leader himself.
Can personal integrity, however genuine, ever substitute for institutional vigilance?
José Ortega y Gasset argued that civilisation declines when responsibility is surrendered while privilege is retained.
Perhaps leadership declines for a similar reason.
When institutions begin depending too heavily on the goodness of one individual instead of the discipline of many.
Perhaps Buhari’s greatest political miscalculation was neither policy nor ideology.
Perhaps it was believing that the discipline which governed his own conscience would naturally govern the consciences of others.
History has always punished that assumption.
Not because virtue is weakness.
But because virtue without verification is vulnerable.
In the end, if anything was taken behind the back of an honourable man, the greatest loss may not have been counted in currency.
It may have been counted in trust.
For nothing diminishes a leader’s reputation more painfully than discovering that while he was striving to preserve his own honour, others were busy spending it.
On 13 July 2025, Muhammadu Buhari died in London at the age of 82 after a prolonged illness. Two days later, he was laid to rest in Daura, Katsina State, the same quiet soil from which he had risen decades earlier to occupy both Dodan Barracks and Aso Rock.
One year later, history continues its patient work.
Policies will be debated.
Decisions will be questioned.
Governments will be compared.
That is the duty of historians.
Yet time has also performed its oldest duty.
It has a discipline that politics does not possess.
It separates the transient from the permanent.
It gradually strips away rhetoric, slogans, and partisanship, leaving only character standing before history.
Diogenes the Cynic believed that the wealthiest man is not the one who possesses the most, but the one who needs the least.
That philosophy has found few disciples among rulers.
Power has always been accompanied by palaces.
By estates.
By convoys.
By monuments erected to the ego long before they are earned by history.
Lord Acton warned that power tends to corrupt.
He did not say it always does.
That distinction matters.
For history occasionally encounters men who passed through the corridors of immense power without allowing power to pass through them.
Yet one aspect of Buhari’s public life has remained remarkably consistent through decades of scrutiny, his reputation for personal discipline, simplicity, and incorruptibility.
Public office tested him for decades, first as a military Head of State, then as a democratically elected President.
Through changing governments, changing allies, and changing political seasons, that personal reputation endured.
He came to power with a reputation for personal austerity.
He left power with the same reputation.
He returned, not to a life of splendour, but to the familiar quiet of Daura.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
It is a lesson politics seldom learns.
The Chinese sage Lao Tzu wrote, “He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.”
In an age that often measures leaders by the size of their estates, the length of their motorcades, the fleets of luxury cars they accumulate, or the geography of their private residences around the world, Buhari’s personal life presented a different proposition.
History may dispute his policies.
It may continue to debate the successes and failures of his administration.
Those debates belong to politics.
Character belongs to history.
History will judge every administration.
It will also distinguish between the character of a leader and the character of those who served around him.
The Hebrew proverb teaches:
“A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches.”
Perhaps that is the final measure of a public life.
Wealth is inherited.
Offices are temporary.
Power passes from one generation to another.
But a good name must survive its owner.
The Greek biographer Plutarch observed that the measure of a life is found less in what a man possessed than in what he refused to become.
Perhaps that is the quieter legacy.
Public office offered him the opportunity to pursue personal luxury.
His public image never became defined by it.
The offices have changed occupants.
The motorcades have moved on.
The applause has faded.
But the old soldier rests where every ruler eventually must, beneath the same earth that receives the powerful and the powerless alike.
Marcus Aurelius, himself an emperor, wrote, “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
History will continue to argue about Muhammadu Buhari.
It may argue for generations.
That does not end every debate about his presidency.
Neither should it.
But it ensures that every honest debate begins from the same historical point, the distinction between the exercise of power and the character of the man who exercised it.
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But perhaps the more enduring question is not how much power he held.
It is how little of that power appeared to possess him.
For in the final audit of history, character remains the one possession that neither office, nor power, nor death can confiscate.
Whether one agreed with Muhammadu Buhari or opposed him, he left history with one possession that neither office, nor power, nor death could easily diminish, a widely acknowledged reputation for personal integrity.
In respectful memory of Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, 1942 to 2025.
