Nigeria president’s chief of staff dies of Covid-19

Abba Kyari, the trusted chief of staff to Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari, has died from complications related to Covid-19 after a nearly month-long battle with the virus.

Kyari had widely been seen as one of the three most powerful people in Africa’s largest economy and said to have the complete trust of Buhari.

Some had even described him as the defacto head of the government because in a country where the presidency holds an inordinate amount of centralized power and government funds, deciding who has access to the president accords immense power and influence.

And even with a political culture overweighted in outsized egos, Nigeria’s government ministers and state governors had to learn to work by going through Kyari before getting to the ultimate “oga”.

Despite his high profile role, the late chief of staff has not been one for the political limelight. There are few official public photographs of him and even his official age was not readily available in the early obituaries though he is guessed to be in his mid to late 60’s.

Kyari, who graduated from Cambridge and Warwick universities in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, was often described as an intellectual by those who dealt with him.


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