DAKAR, Senegal — President Umaru Yar’Adua of Nigeria, whose chronic ill health sapped initial promises of reform and led to a constitutional crisis in his country, died Wednesday night, the information minister said in a brief interview. He was 58.

“He has died,” said the minister, Dora Akunyili, adding that Mr. Yar’Adua had expired at the presidential villa in the capital, Abuja.

Mr. Yar’Adua suffered from kidney and heart ailments, and his health had been one of the country’s top concerns for weeks, ever since he departed at the end of November for emergency treatment in Saudi Arabia.

He did not transfer power when he left. In the following months, Nigeria, already racked by low-level civil wars over oil and religion, was left in limbo. There was no center of authority, and a peace plan Mr. Yar’Adua had enacted for the violence-plagued oil-producing south seemed in danger of falling apart.

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Mr. Yar’Adua, shielded by his wife and other supporters, did not appear in public and made no statements, apart from a few faltering words to the BBC in January from his hospital room. As public anger over the power vacuum grew amid fears that the country would revert to military dictatorship, the National Assembly reluctantly acted in February, handing power over to Mr. Yar’Adua’s vice president, Goodluck Jonathan.

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Ever since, Mr. Jonathan has called himself merely the “acting president,” proceeding on the assumption — which few people among the country’s political class or media shared — that Mr. Yar’Adua would one day return to office. He was taken back to Nigeria in the middle of the night on Feb. 24, but was seen by no one outside his immediate circle. There were public demands that Mr. Jonathan meet with him, but there was no indication that he had done so.