I was cautioned by my wife not to insult Buhari when he died - Ayo Fayose

Former Governor of Ekiti State, Ayodele Fayose, has revealed that his wife cautioned him against publicly criticising the late former President Muhammadu Buhari following his death earlier in July 2025.

Fayose made the disclosure on Friday during an appearance on Politics Today, a Channels Television programme.

He said, “The people in Nigeria only praise the dead. When President Buhari died, I wanted to come out and abuse him, (but) my wife called me not to say so.”

A known critic of the Buhari administration, Fayose insisted that the former president did not perform creditably during his time in office.

“Would you say Buhari performed? I’m not among those praising the dead. Don’t honour me when I die. When I die, I’m gone,” he said.

The former governor contrasted Buhari’s leadership with that of the current president, Bola Tinubu, whom he defended as being more open and accessible.

“He (Tinubu) is accessible. Was the former president accessible? A lot of things happened in those days but do you still find them in the system? He is not a perfect man, but we are not where we were,” Fayose noted.

He argued that Tinubu inherited a severely weakened economy and should not be expected to fix the country’s challenges overnight.

“Nigeria is a sick country; it will take heaven to pull it out at once. What miracle can anybody do in two years? The situation is critical, wide and deep. Tinubu inherited a very bad economy,” he said.

Born in December 1942, Buhari ruled as a military head of state from 1984 to 1985 and returned as Nigeria’s elected president in 2015, serving two terms until May 2023.