Shettima breathes again, for now

Long before Kashim Shettima became vice president to President Bola Tinubu in 2023, the office of vice president has been contending with travails. Actually, tribulations are inherent in the office of vice president. Ask Spiro Agnew, the 39th vice president of the United States of America who served under President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973. Agnew once noted with obvious frustration that “The office of Vice President has absolutely no power. It is what the President wants it to be”.

Many years down the line, George H.W. Bush, another vice president, this time to President Ronald Reagan, also in USA, noted with not a little tinge of deprecation that the office of vice president is essentially for representing the president at funerals. Mr. Bush who later became president was known to be a decent man. His first-hand experience of the redundancy of the office of vice president would have informed his disposition to his own vice president, Mr. Dick Cheney, who was known to have wielded tremendous power and influence in the government. Of course, not many presidents are that gracious.

A part of the calamity for the office of the vice president is not that it exists at the mercy of the president, what Spiro Agnew referred to as being whatever the president wants it to be. The real problem is that many presidents cannot seem to even make up their mind on what to do with the office occupied by a fellow ominously referred to as their running mate.

It is at once interesting and contradictory that the vice president is a breath away from the presidency while at the same time existing miles away from relevance. The First and Second Republic politician, Kingsley Mbadiwe referred to the office of the vice president as the booster station of a major station, a description that aptly captured the double-edged nature of the office. As the fortune of the design goes, if the major station develops a problem along the line of operation, the booster station comes alive and asserts its relevance. If the major station functions optimally all through, too bad for the booster station. It simply gathers dust.

Instructively, the office of the vice president is not just what the president wants it to be, its fortune is a statement on who the president is, his civility, his trust quotient and his inclination or lack thereof, to team spiritedness.

Last week, specifically on July 10,2026, vice president Kashim Shettima heaved a big sigh of relief. His principal, President Bola Tinubu, while having his filled nomination form for participation in the 2027 presidential election returned for him to the All Progressives Congress (APC) office, submitted Shettima’s name as his running mate. It was a big deal of sorts.

The vice president has been hanging on, literally, while permutations and considerations on who will replace him went on apace. The weighing of the variables to determine who will take Shettima’s place was not even a concealed project. The sacrificial bull was aware of the political clatter swirling around him.

Retention of Shettima in the ticket with Tinubu, contends with several challenges, a number of them cogent. In retaining him, Tinubu reaffirms his vote for a ticket of same religion. That remains an issue. In the Nigerian political space, littered with Januses and men with no abiding fidelity to truth, religion or even ethnicity are now presented as irrelevant variables in constructing national political tickets when that is convenient. There were and still are those who argue that Nigeria is already on its way to its Nirvana and so should not bother with acknowledging its religious diversity or the such. What matters, according to such insincere argument, should be competence.

Interestingly and instantly giving vent to the dishonesty of the self-serving argument of a religion-blind society, Shettima’s retention faced its major challenge from fellow Muslims. A reported major impediment to Tinubu retaining Shettima much earlier was the pressure from the Fulani ethnic group. They wanted one of their own in place of the Kanuri vice president. That is to say, the Fulani, largely fellow Muslims with Shettima, did not argue that ethnic diversity is inconsequential, as the embattled Nasir el Rufai gloated over undermining religious diversity in 2022. The vice president, of course, has few other issues running after him.

For the past three years, Shettima has been undergoing his share of the tribulations of the vice president. But then, he is a politician. He covets prime political stations, and so wants to keep his spacious office as the booster station of the major station.

Now, that Tinubu has eventually announced his retention as a part of their ticket for 2027 presidential election, expect to hear the VP talking again. But really, how does Kashim Shettima feel with his retention as Tinubu’s vice presidential candidate, knowing that he is actually an afterthought?; that after working with the president for about four years, within which period he must have strived to do his best, that he remained an expendable quantity whose place in the ticket was weighed and considered up till the eleventh hour?

Shettima knows for sure that he is in the ticket not because of the respect he has gained at the presidency or his inputs that they valued, but essentially because time was running out for them to come up with a replacement. That much could be surmised from the continuation of the almost open discussion about his replacement up till the eve of the deadline for the submission of the nominee.

From all indications, he retains his place in the ticket because picking another nominee would trigger off a flurry of political activities that may be challenged by time. The impression that has been created is that vice president Shettima is retained in the ticket with Tinubu not because of any value, strength or capacity he has manifested, but because it was cost effective to retain him. This must be a most confidence-deflating reality for anyone, even if a designated chief mourner, as vice presidents are known.

When Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso needled the vice president that Seyi Tinubu, the son of the president has wielded more power than him, he was obviously calling up a common impression in the political space. While the vice president appears often to exist in no man’s land, with the president unwilling to transmit power to him while travelling, the younger Tinubu is commonly known to liberally leverage the political powers around government. It is not as if Kashim Shettima does not know all that. He surely may not be too happy, too. For him, however, it is not bad to remain a breath away from the ultimate seat.