Kashim Shettima is smart. He knows there is a Jagaban side of Tinubu. He has carefully conditioned himself to fit into Tinubu’s shadow and is getting his reward for genuine loyalty. That is why Tinubu installed him in his new N22bn mansion and is about to buy him a brand-new aeroplane, among others. If Tinubu remains happy with Shettima, he can concede almost anything to his VP, including the ultimate prize after he is done with his emi l’okan tenure.
This article is not really my assessment of the “performance” of the leadership of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his Deputy, Vice President Kashim Shettima. There are only two major things to write home about this presidential pair: untold hardship for Nigerians and wasteful spending based on misplaced priorities.
Tinubu never enjoyed the usual “honeymoon” period. This owed to the controversial election that brought him to power and the four words he may regret for the rest of his life: “petrol subsidy is gone”. Coming on the day of his inauguration and the first hour of his presidency, Tinubu never enjoyed the initial approval rating that a new leader needs to set his government on firm footing as his predecessors did.
His situation was not helped by the largest cabinet in Nigerian history which he set up even while admitting “it is a dry well”. His huge bonanzas for the National Assembly and Judiciary, his release of N90bn “hajj subsidy”, N22bn for the Vice President’s mansion and N15trn Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway ego trip portray him as a leader who lives above the means of his country, unmoved by the mass hunger and hardship his policies brought about within his first year in office.
What really brought me to this topic was an utterance credited to one Salihu Lukman, a former National Vice Chairman of the president’s All Progressives Congress, APC, who recently wrote an “Open Letter to Northern Politicians”. He complained that very soon, hungry people will start breaking into people’s houses in the North to loot. He claimed that under Tinubu, Northern leaders are getting “weaker and more disorganised”, and that Northerners serving in Tinubu’s government have become a “choir group poorly singing ‘on your mandate we shall stand’”, not minding the gloomy situation that government has foisted.
According to him: “Even the Vice President, Senator Kashim Shettima, GCON, who is the highest officeholder and by virtue of that should have served as the needed rallying point of Northern politicians, is anything but a political leader…hardly any official of the current administration of President Asiwaju Tinubu from the North, including Senator Shettima, is willing and able to take the needed risk to defend the interest of the North”.
The writer of this Open Letter is obviously not a student of Nigerian history and politics. He does not understand what it means to be a Vice President or Deputy Governor in today’s Nigeria. This Lukman, despite having occupied a very high national office of the ruling party, thinks that a Vice President should be a regional activist in the government he serves. Nothing can be further from the truth! The President and Vice President’s calls of service have nothing to do with their tribal, religious or regional affiliations. They are there to serve the nation, defend its territorial integrity, protect the citizens, foster an enabling environment for growth and prosperity, and ensure that the Federal Character Principle in Section 14(3) of the Constitution is enforced to give all Nigerians equal sense of belonging and patriotism to build the nation.
The PDP presidents more or less conformed to these expectations due to their party’s power rotation and sharing formula, though some abused their office by unduly favouring their ethnic and regional bases. It was APC’s Muhammadu Buhari that primitively declared that he would favour his religious, regional and ethnic groups who voted for him and marginalise the Igbo and South-South groups who did not vote for him. He carried out this threat to the letter for eight years.
The likes of Lukman gluttonously enjoyed Buhari’s nepotism. To them, Buhari was a “defender” of Northern interests.
What are these “Northern interests”? Northerners have been defending them since independence and yet they continued to make Nigeria, especially The North, the “poverty capital of the world”. The North still has the largest out-of-school children in the world. It remains the hotbed of terrorism and insecurity being perpetrated by their own kith and kin. This is because “Northern interest” has been nothing more than servicing the individual stomachs of politicians like Salihu Lukman.
My question for Lukman and his cohorts is: where exactly did Buhari’s nepotism leave the North? Whatever Northern politicians ate under Buhari, they have passed out as faeces long ago, and the hunger is back!
Tinubu, the emi l’okan exponent, is doing exactly the same thing, flagrantly violating the Federal Character Principle by loading his government with his personal acolytes from Lagos and the South-West after picking a Muslim-Muslim ticket. In the minds of many of his tribesmen and supporters, he is defending Yoruba interest by abusing his power to the disadvantage of other groups. Still, the loudest cry of hunger under Tinubu is: ebi mpa wa!
Another area that Lukman showed his poor understanding of the presidential ticket is the assumption that Vice President Shettima should take what he calls “the needed risk”.
Lukman and his cohorts should know that a Vice President is never a counterpart of the President. He must fit squarely into the President’s shadow. Northern politicians have not learnt the truth that when power shifts to another region, the North becomes powerless. Atiku Abubakar as Olusegun Obasanjo’s VP, made the blunder of thinking he could upstage his boss’s second term ambition. Till today, 21 years later, he is still running from pillar to post for president.
Kashim Shettima is smart. He knows there is a Jagaban side of Tinubu. He has carefully conditioned himself to fit into Tinubu’s shadow and is getting his reward for genuine loyalty. That is why Tinubu installed him in his new N22bn mansion and is about to buy him a brand-new aeroplane, among others. If Tinubu remains happy with Shettima, he can concede almost anything to his VP, including the ultimate prize after he is done with his emi l’okan tenure.
VP Shettima is definitely wiser than VP Atiku.