RIP to an elder Stateman, Former President Shehu Shagari.

Shehu Shagari, the former president of Nigeria who sought to revive democratic rule only to be deposed by military officers impatient with his seeming inability to confront endemic corruption and economic crisis, died on Friday in Abuja, the capital. He was 93.

Mr. Shagari died at the National Hospital after a brief illness, his grandson Bello Shagari said on Twitter.

It was a token of Nigeria’s long tug-of-war between the barracks and the ballot box that President Muhammadu Buhari — who, as an army general, removed Mr. Shagari from power in 1983 — returned to office in the 2015 elections, the first peaceful transfer of power between civilians of different political parties since Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960.

By then, Mr. Shagari, patrician and mild-mannered, had become what his followers called an elder statesman as his country grappled with challenges that had become familiar: an almost reflexive recourse to graft; an economic malaise relating to falling prices of oil, Nigeria’s dominant foreign-currency earner; and a fierce divide between its northern Muslims and southern Christians that became ever more stark with the rise of a bloodthirsty jihadist movement called .

Mr. Shagari was president for just over four years, winning two elections, both of them disputed by his opponents. He was criticized by his adversaries for his meekness in governing sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation. Indeed, with his scholarly manners, the undemonstrative Mr. Shagari, a former schoolteacher raised as a devout Sunni Muslim, sometimes seemed an unlikely figurehead for a nation that projected itself as Africa’s colossus.

He was the first civilian leader to take office under a constitution modeled on that of the United States, with an executive president, a bicameral legislature and significant powers given to the governors of the country’s 19 federal states.

While most post-independence rulers were high-ranking soldiers bent on enforcing their will with scant regard for consensus-building, Mr. Shagari, in his flowing Islamic robes and distinctive beaded headgear, described himself as a conciliator who operated above the daily joust of Nigeria’s politics.

Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari was born on Feb. 25, 1925, in a thatch-roofed house built of sunbaked clay in the village of Shagari, founded by his forebears near the city of Sokoto in northwest Nigeria, an area of broad, arid savanna, according to “President and Power in Nigeria” (1982), a biography by the British journalist David Williams.

In later years, the honorific Alhaji was added to his name to denote his participation in the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca beginning in 1960.

As permitted by Islamic law, Mr. Shagari was a polygamist, and he fathered numerous children. Nigerian news media said he had three wives, though Mr. Williams’s biography said he had four. Information about Mr. Shagari’s surviving family members was not immediately available.

He was the fifth child of Aliyu Shagari, who was a farmer and a trader before he became the village’s headman, and his wife, Mariamu. He studied at a Koranic school and an austere government boarding school before attending a teacher training college in Kaduna. He later returned to teach science at his old school in Sokoto.

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