ALHAJI Mohammed Kashim Shettima is the nominal vice president of Nigeria. He is one pair of the retrogressive Muslim – Muslim ticket that was awarded the Nigerian presidency two years ago, last March. It will be material 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’s 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. The bar is stunningly and embarrassingly low. He is said to be intelligent and possibly a public intellectual. He was a bank executive in his earlier incarnation and later became a two – term governor of Borno state.
He has some legacies to his credit. Many of them are not ennobling. And one of his legacies is that he was the sitting governor when Boko Haram, a violent and murderous Islamist group, drove thousands of kilometres into Chibok in the heart of Borno state, abducted about 300 mostly Christian female students, and vanished into thin air. Shettima was alleged to have been warned to relocate the students who were preparing for the West African School Certificate Examinations (WASCE) following intelligence reports about the activities of the insurgents. He ignored the intelligence and the girls were plucked off. This was in April 2014, eleven years ago. Almost 100 of the stolen girls are still not accounted for after a decade and one year. On the score of security of life, Shettima failed as a governor, and the punishment for his failure to secure his people whilst he was governor was to promote him to the position of vice president of the country. Indeed, one of the credentials he flaunted while campaigning for the vice presidential ticket was that he was battle-hardened because he had been in the theatre of war for years. We will come back to this shortly.
He was not remarkable as a surrogate to the then presidential candidate, Alhaji Tinubu, in the run up to the 2023 election. But he stood out like a sore thumb on at least three occasions. Maybe four. One such occasion was through his spoken words when he deprecated the incumbent vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, who is a professor of law. He said that Osinbajo would have been more successful as an ice cream vendor than seeking to be the president of Nigeria. The other remarkable occasion was when he represented Tinubu, his running mate, during the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) annual conference prior to the election. His sartorial inelegance was striking and befuddling. Ribs were cracked. He cut the image of a cartoon caricature in his ill-fitting off colour pair of trousers, a tieless shirt, a shriveled jacket, and a pair of trainers. He was probably not properly briefed that lawyers are generally conservative in their dress codes. But it should be a given that a man of Shettima’s assumed standing should know that. If he forgot the requirements of the occasion his handlers should have known better. They didn’t or they didn’t care. Well, Shettima had a soulmate in an inappropriate register on Saturday when the President of the United States, Donald Trump, appeared at the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome in a blue suit as against the dress code of black suits worn by other world leaders at the occasion.
The third event was at his public presentation to Nigerians as the vice presidential candidate. He also cut a sorry picture in the midst of emergency bishops’ and sundry ‘priests’ created overnight by the All Progressives Congress (APC) to reassure skeptical citizens, especially Christians, that the Muslim – Muslim (some referenced it as MuMu) ticket was not a prelude to something more sinister for the country by the pair, the so-called planned Islamisation of Nigeria. The APC bishops were handed their regalia at the precincts of the venue of the event, and their cash reward was paid immediately after the ceremony, also outside the venue of the unveiling. The perpetrators were captured on camera in spite of the best efforts of the schemers and scammers to blindside journalists and cameramen. The likelihood was that many of the APC bishops were not born when the inimitable Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, sang the prophetic and provocative “Uniform na cloth na tailor dey sew am” in 1973 or thereabouts. I believe the album was titled Alagbon Close, a notorious government security complex in the heart of Lagos island. If only Fela were to be alive to witness that desperation and charade in 2023, 50 years after the track was released. And the quest to capture political power by hook or crook.
While we are at it Shettima also in 2023 promised to lead the war on insecurity in the country from the front if their ticket was awarded the presidency. He said he had been baked in the furnace and oven of battling insurgency for years as Borno state governor, and that nobody was better suited and equipped for the job. He said his running mate or principal was a thoroughbred economist who would be saddled with reviving the national economy which had been run aground by their party, the APC and Tinubu’s man, Buhari. When Shettima appropriated the role of the head of the security arm, he apparently did not factor in the fact that the vice president is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces nor in-charge of the national security agencies and architecture. Two years on, next month, none of the self assigned roles have been delivered. If the truth be told, Nigeria’s security situation has almost completely collapsed. Nigeria has become a killing field, the type we have not witnessed in 65 years since independence. In spite of the established genocide committed by Nigerian troops against the Igbo during the civil war, including the Asaba Massacre of innocent civilians in 1967, at no other time had so much blood been shed in this seemingly benighted country. And the man, Shettima, who said 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 as in last week when he chaired the national economic council (NEC) meeting. That contraption is a talk shop where nothing of note is discussed. It was bad in the era of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), deteriorated under Muhammadu Buhari’s APC, and then became completely unfit for purpose in the extant regime of Nigeria’s Sole Administrator Tinubu.
Tinubu, the man that Shettima and other cheerleaders sold as an economic wizard, has since been demystified as an emperor without clothes. He has turned Nigeria’s bad economic situation into a nightmare. He removed the so-called petrol subsidy and ‘deregulated’ the Naira, and left the economy on a tailspin. The so-called deregulation of the economy was supposed to free up resources but the regime immediately embarked on aggressive borrowing from the domestic and international money and bond markets. Tinubu and his henchmen have been behaving in a manner that suggested to them and some onlookers that borrowing will soon go out of fashion. Even some of the lending institutions have started crying out that prudence is not in the DNA of the Tinubu band of rulers. Some weeks ago, Tinubu and his spin doctors tried to gaslight Nigerians by saying that the country’s past leaders had mindlessly frittered away the inheritance of the future generations of Nigerians. And his solution to that problem is to borrow from our children and children’s children, and leave the future generations of Nigerians in a certain debt peonage.
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 is. 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’s 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. He is not trusted. 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, and later London recently. But we are persuaded that Shettima is biding his time, playing the vulture, that patient bird. His marabouts may have assured him that the scenario in Ondo state about two years ago may yet play out on a bigger scale. Before Ondo it happened in Abuja. And it was widely expected to happen again in Abuja a second time during the immediate past regime. It failed to materialise. The Mahdi left the presidency looking younger instead. A suggestive newspaper advertisement taken out by a former governor of Ekiti state early in the life of that ancien regime came to nought. If the assurances of Shettima’s marabouts fell through, the expectation is that this ghostly vice president will not be on the ticket for the 2027 presidential contest. His ghost will be laid to rest. The joke will not be on that former vice president who Shettima said would be more useful as an ice cream vendor.