Nigeria’s Vice President, Alhaji Hashim Mohammed Shettima, is an orphan in the ‘emi lo kan’ presidency of Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And this is in spite of the Muslim – Muslim reality at the top of the country’s rulership. There were concerns ahead of the 2023 election when same faith presidential ticket was mooted, and subsequently actualised. Adherents of other faith, particularly Christians, were alarmed and took umbrage at the combination. They said it ran against the grain and political convention for pairing candidates for office at the topmost level in our country. They argued that the move was insensitive, coming at a time that the country was consumed and inflamed by allegations of a plot to Islamise Nigeria.
But the promoters of the combination, the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC] political party, dismissed such concerns, saying that the fear of domination of the country by Islam and Muslims was unfounded and a red herring. They pointed to 1993 when Moshood Abiola and Baba-Gana Kingibe ran on a Muslim – Muslim presidential ticket, and were coasting to victory before the ruling military junta headed by Gen.[rtd] Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida aborted the electoral process and arrested the results which announcements were almost completed. Now late Prof. Humphrey Nwosu was the chairman of the defunct National Electoral Commission [NEC] that conducted that election which is still widely regarded as the freest and most credible polls in the history of the country more than 30 years after. It’s instructive that since 1993, no fewer than seven national elections have been conducted by the successor ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission [INEC] but none had been acknowledged as free, fair and credible. But this is Nigeria. Life goes on.
Part of the argument of the advocates of the Muslim- Muslim ticket was that it would bring harmony to the presidency. But people knew that it was driven by the quest to harvest votes in all parts of the north which is alleged to harbour Muslim majority. However, there were some salient issues. In Nigeria we live with, and by labels, and we play identity politics. Shettima was [is] Kanuri, not the usually preferred Fulani. The Fulani are not the majority nation in the north but they dominate political offices in that part of the Nigerian divide. In reality they are minority of minorites, but through subterfuge and conquest, they dominate and control the commanding heights of the politics and economy of that part of our country. Probably, two things may have recommended his choice for the vice presidential candidate position- his Muslim bonafides and the fact that Tinubu would be more comfortable with a stooge as a running mate. In his first life as Lagos state governor from 1999-2007, Tinubu used no less than three deputy governors during his eight years tour of duty. He surely would not want a repeat of that in the presidency, and so had to settle for a malleable figure. Or so he thought. In any case, from the onset, Tinubu had declared even before he acceded to the office that the presidency was about him alone a section of his Yoruba nation. Any other persons would only be meddlesome interlopers, as lawyers would say. So Shettima was, ab initio, a necessary but inconvenient evil.
We said that much in this space last April 29th. Permit us to rehash excerpts from that intervention. We wrote: ‘Alhaji Mohammed Kashim Shettima is the nominal vice president of Nigeria… It will be immaterial to explain my use of ‘nominal’ for the current vice president. In this context, I really mean the everyday usage of the word. Nominal here means that Shettima as vice president is small and insignificant in amount and degree. He is a token and a symbol, neither substantial nor significant in the scheme of things in the regime of Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu and a section of the Yoruba nation. Shettima speaks well in the context of the low bar set for public speaking in our country… He is said to be intelligent and possibly a public intellectual… And the man, Shettima, who said [that] he would lead the war against insurgents, bandits and Islamist terrorists has become a ghost. He appears like a comet from outer space once in a while’ to do some menial jobs. Under the sole administratorship of Tinubu, Shettima does not count. In fact he does not exist.
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‘It’s a crying shame that this country spent about N20 billion recently to complete a vice president’s Mansion for a ghost worker. That’s who Shettima [has been]. The other day he strove very hard to dismiss media reports that he was shut out of the presidential villa. Who cares? What’s important is that ghosts are not allowed to roam around, and about freely. Shettima’s situation is pathetic. He is the nominal vice president who’s completely outside the power vortex. He’s an orphan. He is Kanuri. The Kanuri are said to be the creators of Boko Haram [the Islamist insurgent terrorists who have terrorised a swath of the northern region]. He is not part of Tinubu’s kitchen cabinet. He’s a pariah which explains why in spite of the frequent foreign travels of President Tinubu, he has never been allowed to act in the stead of the president. Shettima was even ignored in the innocuous ceremony of inaugurating one nondescript team on the population census when the president, as usual, was away in France’.
However, Shettima who appears to be bidding his time came back from the dead last week to speak at a book presentation by Mohammed Adoke, attorney -general and minister of justice in the President Goodluck Jonathan administration [2010-2015]. If he is intelligent, and we have no reason to believe otherwise and, if he is a public intellectual, again we have no obvious grounds to doubt his bonafides, then he must have been very conscious of the weight and implications of the words he spoke at the event. He was humorous but he dropped some words for maximum impact. Sometimes in the cause of the event, it would be difficult not to notice he was speaking over the heads of the personalities who were physically present. His audience was elsewhere, and that place was the Aso Rock Villa, the political class, his political party and Nigerians. There was a background to the Shettima fight back. About a month ago, APC stakeholders in Gombe state in the heart of Shettima’s north east region held a meeting where they endorsed Tinubu for a second term and left out Shettima. Hell broke loose. Shettima’s supporters would have none of it and a fight broke out. Days later the presidency confirmed that the exclusion of Shettima was in order. It said that Tinubu will pick his running mate for 2027 after the party’s nomination convention. In other words, Shettima’s place on the ticket is not guaranteed. With his alleged shutting out of the Villa, the non-endorsement in Gombe, the non-committal statement from the presidency which bothered on a disclaimer, the public begging for the retention of Shettima, and the very public lobbying for the position by ranking APC apparatchiks, it’s almost obvious that Shettima will sooner than later be out in the cold.
So if Shettima will go down as seems to be the case, then he will do so fighting, and on his feet. That probably explained his not too subtle attack on Tinubu last week. On no fewer than three occasions during his speech he threw barbs at his principal. He said no president has the constitutional power to remove an elected state governor, not even an elected local government councillor. Tinubu did that early this year when he suspended the governor of Rivers state and dismantled all democratic structures in that state for six months. He thanked the author and some other senior lawyers for telling then President Jonathan that it would be illegal for him to remove Shettima as then governor of Borno state as he had contemplated. That was also an indictment of Tinubu’s attorney general for allowing the sacking of the Rivers state governor. By the same token Shettima also condemned the national assembly for endorsing Tinubu’s illegal action. He reportedly referred to the Kogi state deputy governor as a ‘bloody deputy’, an inference to how he himself is being treated as vice president. In addition, Shettima categorically described Malam Nasir el-Rufai, a latter-day implacable enemy of Tinubu and an arrowhead of the opposition to Tinubu’s reelection bid, as ‘the game-changer’ [not a game-changer] in the unfolding political scenario. He said el-Rufai cannot be wished away.
Last Friday an aide to the vice president, Stanley Nkwocha, claimed that Shettima’s speech was misrepresented and mischaracterized by the media, insisting that there was no crack in the presidency. ‘It is disappointing that some media outlets have twisted the Vice President’s speech into a commentary on the recent suspension of Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers state. This is a deliberate misreading of Shettima’s remarks and a reckless attempt to stoke division. President Tinubu did not remove Governor Fubara. He was suspended, pending further resolution of the crisis, after due consultation and in strict accordance with constitutional provisions’, the statement read. Well, the journey to the elections of 2027 will be long and tedious for the gladiators.
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