President Muhammadu Buhari’s ardent critic and a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Dr. Obadiah Mailafia, has died at the age of 64.
Mailafia reportedly died at about midnight after a brief but undisclosed illness.
The former deputy governor, who was the Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress in the 2019 election, had in his lifetime, advocated for public sector and exchange rate reforms.
Mailafia was born on December 24, 1956, in the Sanga Local Government Area of Kaduna State.
He later graduated top of his class at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in 1978 with a B.Sc.
Honours Social Sciences degree (Politics, Economics and Sociology). He also has an M.Sc. from the same institution.
He subsequently won a French Government Scholarship to France, where he earned a Certificate in French Language and Civilisation from the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1985.
Mailafia later proceeded to the United Kingdom as a Foreign and Commonwealth Office Scholar at Oriel College, earning a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1995.
He joined partisan politics in 2018 amid the rising killings in southern Kaduna.
Despite losing the election, he remained an ardent government critic and got into trouble with the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari when he alleged that a northern governor was a Boko Haram commander.
This earned multiple invitations by the Nigeria Police and the DSS, forcing him to recant his statement.
