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Former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, during a meeting with Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in Belem Presidential Palace in Lisbon, Portugal at the beginning of his state visit to the country on June 30, 2022. (Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
By Mitchell McCluskey and Stephanie Busari, CNN
(CNN) — Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, a former military general who campaigned on rooting out government corruption, has died at age 82, the presidential press office said in a statement on Sunday.
He died in London at about 4:30 p.m. after a “prolonged illness,” according to the statement.
Nigeria’s current president Bola Ahmed Tinubu offered his condolences to Buhari’s wife and ordered his vice president to travel to the UK to accompany Buhari’s body back to Nigeria.
Buhari was elected president in 2015 after running unsuccessfully three times. He was re-elected for another four-year term in 2019.
A former general who first came to power in a 1983 military coup only to be overthrown by another military coup two years later, Buhari will be remembered for his strong anti-corruption agenda in a country famously described as “fantastically corrupt” by former British prime minister David Cameron. Others laud his tough stance against the Boko Haram insurgency and security issues that plagued the northeast of the country for years.
A Fulani Muslim, he was born in Daura, Katsina state in Nigeria’s northern province in December 1942 and completed military training in Kaduna state, Great Britain, India and the United States.
He first came into political prominence in 1975 after a military coup that overthrew then-ruler Yakubu Gowon. Buhari was made military governor of Borno state – a state plagued by Boko Haram.
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