Three Volumes. One Life. A Nation's Reckoning.
Muhammadu Buhari was one of the most consequential figures in modern Nigerian history. Soldier, Head of State, prisoner, opposition leader, democratic President and national symbol, his life moved through war, command, defeat, endurance, return and power. Few Nigerians have occupied the public imagination with such force. Fewer still have carried, in one life, so much of the country's argument about discipline, integrity, authority, sacrifice, democracy, development and national destiny.
BUHARI: The Authorised Presidential Biography is the most comprehensive account yet of that life and presidency. Written with the authorisation and direct participation of President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, and based on extensive interviews, documentary research and third-party testimony, the work presents Buhari not as myth, slogan or partisan memory, but as a public life placed before history.
The biography is published in three volumes, tracing Buhari's formation, presidency and historical legacy through one of the most extensive documentary studies yet undertaken on a Nigerian Head of State.
The first volume follows Buhari from childhood in Daura through family, schooling, military formation, war, command, the 1983 coup, his period as military Head of State, overthrow, detention, return to private life, the PTF Years, and eventual emergence as a democratic opposition figure. It examines the making of the Buhari persona: the soldier of discipline, the austere public man, the national moral symbol, the defeated candidate who refused to disappear, and the political figure whose long quest for democratic power reshaped Nigeria's electoral landscape.
This is the story of formation, struggle and endurance. It is the account of the man before the presidency became his final national theatre.
The second volume enters the centre of power. It examines the Buhari administration from 2015 to 2023 through the machinery of governance, security, infrastructure, economy, social intervention, agriculture, petroleum reform, roads, bridges, rail, aviation, ports, water resources, digital transformation, regional development and the difficult business of statecraft in a country under pressure.
It follows the President's governing method: briefing before action, caution before appointment, trust in institutions, insistence on process, suspicion of loose money, preference for completion, and a stubborn belief that public office should serve the republic rather than private advantage.
This is the story of power exercised under strain: recession, insurgency, banditry, revenue collapse, subsidy pressure, COVID-19, political resistance and the unfinished expectations of change.
The final volume turns to the remaining burdens and arguments of the Buhari years. It examines fiscal statecraft, financial accountability, monetary scarcity and authority, health, education, corruption, the media, public protest, COVID-19, EndSARS, presidency politics, succession politics, national memory and the afterlife of power.
It is a reckoning in the fullest sense: an accounting of achievements, limits, crises, contradictions, unfinished work and historical consequence. It does not close the debate on Buhari. It gives the debate a record.
This work draws on more than the public record. It is grounded in repeated interviews with President Buhari himself, extensive conversations with ministers, advisers, military officers, civil servants, family members, associates, critics and witnesses, and a close reading of official records, speeches, policy documents, institutional reports and the lived memory of the period. Its witness base reaches the highest levels of Nigerian politics and governance. Former Heads of State, including General Yakubu Gowon, General Ibrahim Babangida and General Abdulsalami Abubakar, participated in the making of the work, bringing to the biography the perspective of men who had known the burdens of command, the pressures of national unity and the complicated afterlife of power. The project also carries forewords by His Excellency Mahamadou Issoufou, former President of the Republic of Niger, and General Yakubu Gowon of Nigeria, placing Buhari's life within both the Nigerian and wider West African field of leadership, memory and statecraft. The result is a biography of unusual scale: personal, political, institutional and national at once.
Buhari’s story cannot be reduced to praise or criticism. It belongs to the deeper history of Nigeria’s struggle with power, order, corruption, development, insecurity, poverty, public trust and democratic continuity. To understand Buhari is to enter many of the questions that have defined Nigeria since independence: the role of the military, the burden of federal unity, the moral claim of leadership, the weakness of institutions, the promise of reform and the cost of governing a difficult country. This biography preserves that story in full. It records the man, the method, the presidency and the argument around them.
BUHARI: The Authorised Presidential Biography
This three-volume biography is designed for libraries, universities, public institutions, policymakers, researchers, political historians, collectors, and readers seeking a serious account of one of Nigeria’s defining public lives.
It is a work of biography, governance history and national documentation. BUHARI is the life of a man. It is also the record of a country trying, again and again, to discipline power, survive crisis and imagine renewal. Enquire About Institutional Orders