Sam Omatseye, the chairman of the editorial board of The Nation Newspaper, owned by Bola Tinubu, and an ally of the president, has written a critical tribute to former President Muhammadu Buhari, who died on Sunday. Mr Tinubu’s man Friday described Mr Buhari as a man “dead of ideas, selfish and hypocritical serial losers.”

In an article published on Monday, Mr Omatseye ripped through the late president as the man who “presided over a sometimes cranky and conservative government, dead of ideas.”

Mr Omatseye said, “He (Buhari) was a military leader, civilian bureaucrat, fighter for democracy as revenge rather than as ideologue, a presidential candidate as a supposedly repented autocrat, a serial loser with a Lincolnian strain, a president who developed a cult and fanatical following who bowed on the street and drank unclean water in his name.”

Condemning Mr Buhari for plunging Nigeria into a huge debt and mismanagement of the economy, Mr Omatseye said, “On the economy, he stood guard over a government that had no way to generate money except by printing and borrowing from China, among others. He gave us a debt of over N30 trillion in Ways and Means and several billions of dollars.

“He left the finances in chaos, and the nation’s morale was at the nadir. In one word, Buhari should have saved the economy from the Jonathan era, where the nation was in dire straits. Rather, he worsened the situation and created an economy that had to be saved from itself.”

Mr Omatseye condemned Mr Buhari for allegedly backing former Senate President Ahmad Lawan against Mr Tinubu as his successor.

“He dithered on his successor. He told the world he was not interested, but he tried to undercut the best man in his whole political career: Bola Tinubu. It was he who crafted an alliance that vaulted him to Aso Villa. Yet, he did not want him to succeed him. It was hypocritical that he did not even tell now President Tinubu that he did not want him as his successor,” Mr Omatseye said.

He added, “Rather, he put his weight behind former Senate president Ahmad Lawan. It reflected his lack of integrity and even blatant hypocrisy as a leader.”

A former military dictator and two-term democratically elected president between 2015 and 2023, Mr Buhari died in a hospital in London on Sunday.

Since his demise was announced, tributes have continued to pour in.