The Director General, Budget Office of the Federation (BoF), Dr. Tanimu Yakubu, yesterday affirmed that the late former President Muhammadu Buhari, as Chairman, Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), upheld public trust, and ensured that “each naira stretched, each project vetted, each promise measured by the same ascetic yardstick by which he governed himself.”
The PTF was created by the government of the late General Sani Abacha, and funded from the revenue generated by the increase in price of petroleum products, to pursue developmental projects around the country.
In his tribute to the former president, Yakubu said during his time at the PTF, Buhari transformed his principles into policy, noting “that era was not an illusion. It was execution.”
According to DG Budget, “Not a culvert was built without cause. Not a contract was padded. And not a single project was left behind as a ghost.
“We did not manage a budget—we upheld a trust. There, in the modest offices of the PTF, we discovered that patriotism could be methodical, that spreadsheets could become acts of national healing, and that discipline, properly applied, could be more revolutionary than slogans.
“We knew him not as a myth, but as a man. Those of us who laboured with him in the quiet corridors of the Petroleum Trust Fund saw his principles sharpen into policy.
“That era was not an illusion. It was execution. Each naira stretched, each project vetted, each promise measured by the same ascetic yardstick by which he governed himself.”
He said Buhari’s legacy was “not in marble or gold, but in memory and example.”
Yakubu said the late former president “proved that when a leader leads with clean hands, even limited means can move a country forward.
“He believed, fiercely, stubbornly, that Nigeria deserved to be whole and honest, even if the world around her was not. He had no taste for the indulgences of power.
“No appetite for stolen wealth. No flair for personal enrichment. His only wealth was duty and perhaps that is why he never seemed poor in soul.”
He stressed that Buhari returned to Daura, “not to retire, but to rest. And in that rest, a question echoes louder than the elegy: who among us dares to live with such sparse grandeur again? Who will take up the cross of discipline, in a generation seduced by spectacle?
“Who will defend institutions, not for applause, but because it is right? Who will serve, not to eat, but to build?
“In a time when public virtue is often mocked, when the
state staggers under the weight of corruption, and when too many leaders think only of tenure and not of posterity.
“Muhammadu Buhari’s life stands like a lean, unyielding baobab, gnarled by storms, but never uprooted. He reminds us that austerity is not failure. That restraint is not weakness. That the quiet man, steady and sincere, may outlast the charlatan.
“He was not perfect, but he was rare. Let us not simply bury him. Let us exhume his example. Let us ask what it means to truly serve. Let us confront our cynicism with the discipline he practiced, not just preached.”
In the statement titled, ‘The Last Stoic of the Savannah: In Tribute to Muhammadu Buhari, General, Guardian, and Reluctant Revolutionary’, Yakubu said, “Let us revive institutions with the moral clarity he demanded. And let us measure ourselves, not by wealth accumulated or words spoken, but by work done, with clean hands and clear conscience.
“We do not grieve for him alone. We grieve for the ethic he embodied and for the silence his departure leaves in our national soul. But even in death, his life still points forward: toward integrity, toward sacrifice, toward a Nigeria still possible.”
