Former Presidential Candidate Obadiah Maliafia Dies, Aged 64

The former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and former Presidential candidate Dr. Obadiah Mailafia have been confirmed dead at the age of 64.

Mailafia who has over this year and last year consistently being in different run-ins with the Nigerian authorities was reported to have died at midnight of Saturday stroke Sunday morning after a brief illness.
READ ALSO: Buhari Has Scored F9 On Security, Economy And In His Anti-Graft Fight – Obadiah Mailafia

Obadiah was the Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress in 2019 election, he is a popular critic of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration and had 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.
READ ALSO: I Hope This Will Be The Last Time I Would Be Invited By The DSS – Obadiah Mailafia

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, he remained an ardent government critic and got into trouble with the regime of President Muhammadu Buhari, when he alleged that a northern governor was a Boko Haram commander.

This earned multiple invitations by the Nigeria Police Force, forcing him to recant his statement.

In his last interview with Mailafia said the refusal of the CBN to sell foreign exchange to bureau de change operators may not yield the expected result because corrupt bankers would frustrate it while the BDC operators were being shielded by a “Jigawa cabal”.

He had also lamented that Nigeria was operating a “dollarised” economy which was hampering economic growth.

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Photo Credit: Getty