The proclivity of Nigerians to shove mud, no matter how big, under the carpet in the name of politics has been a major source of the country’s afflictions. Once politics sets in, with all that it usually connotes in Nigeria, reason and logic fly out of the window, only to return after substantial damage has been done.
Election season has become the height of the season of anomie. When it comes to taking decisions by Nigerians during elections, for instance, experience hardly seems to be the best teacher any longer. In fact, it hardly matters. No experience of the past, not even that of the present, seems compelling enough to dissuade the people from walking down the same slippery road all over. As it seems in Nigeria, when it is time to make decisions during election, experiences are there to be ignored. That is what politicians, the meisters of emotional manipulation, seem to be telling the people when they return to campaigns for a new mandate. The contempt for the people in this message is often too blatant to miss. But then, politicians always believe in their capacity to pull the wool over the people’s eyes.
In 2014, for instance, when General Muhammadu Buhari was seeking the office of President for the fourth time, he was suddenly re-made and sold to Nigerians as what he was not – a democrat. The retired army general was well known then for who he was (and still is): a resolute and unbending personality, moulded in spirit and by career to have little patience for the ‘public thing’, otherwise known as principles of democracy. He paraded a commonly acclaimed aura of an unimpeached character, a profile reckoned to him as his most glittering epaulette. But Muhammadu Buhari was not, by any stretch of imagination, a democrat. As a matter of fact, it was commonly known that he had preference for a command structure.
All the same, the general was dressed up and lavishly sold to Nigerians as a new democrat. Nobody knew or was told when the radical conversion of the uncompromising soldier occurred. But then, it was the season of politicking and political campaign, a giddy period when the majority of Nigerians lose their cognitive ability. The marketers of the general deployed every tool in the book to sell their candidate. They succeeded. The rest is now history. Or about to be so. Whether General Buhari became a democrat after all, or whether his said conversion was a gimmick, is now moot. What does it matter anymore?
It is election season again. Once more, Nigerians are being presented a product, which, obviously, is not what it is being promoted as, a contrived package around which any person with eyes for detail will see the mark, “danger”. Yet this product, this man, in spite of persistent alarm about him, is being hawked by the same marketers as a viable product.
Senator Kashim Shettima, vice-presidential candidate of All Progressives congress (APC) is disquieting. His past is a source of serious worry. His present utterances offer no comfort either. Shettima is, by antecedent and by utterances, doubtfully the right type of man to be near the control lever in a troubled plural society like Nigeria of the moment.
Bola Tinubu’s bid for President in 2023 is already standing on a troubled foundation. He has issues with his personal records and profile, which cannot be wished away. The performance of APC, of which he rightly claims to be an eminent founder, provides no proud pedestal to mount an honest presidential bid from. Proceeding from here to add Shettima to the equation is either a sinister or cynical move. The issue here is not even about the ill-motivated same-faith ticket.
Last week, Shettima, Tinubu’s running mate, was in the news for another round of wrong reasons. Speaking at a 96th anniversary event of the elite Yoruba Tennis Club in Ikoyi, Lagos, Shettima said his principal had the key qualities required to lead Nigeria at this point in time. He proceeded to outline those qualities to include “a dose of the ruthlessness and taciturnity of General Sani Abacha”. He added for good measure that “nice men do not make leaders”.
A Freudian slip never emerged so jarring. Going by what is known of him and what he declared himself, it is obvious that Shettima is not a good man. He has never claimed to be one anyway.
For many Nigerian voters across the country, Shettima should be what they term ‘a person of interest’. His name has consistently been identified with disturbing circumstances. His utterances have always betrayed his troubling mindset. Instructively, he has never attempted to distance himself from these.
The scourge of Boko Haram remains a burden like no other for Nigeria. With Boko Haram, Nigeria found itself in the suffocating grip of terrorism. The cost in lives, material loss and environmental devastation brought upon the country by Boko Haram can never be quantified. While the very origin of that scourge depends on the source of the chilling account available to anyone, Shettima as governor of Borno State at the critical point in the evolution of the terrorist group is yet to tell the country what he did or did not do in response to the malignancy. So many stories abound.
In those heady days, too, Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was President. His government’s initiatives to combat Boko Haram were curiously seen in top quarters of the opposition APC as fighting the North. Shettima’s summary flouting of the President’s directive on securing schools around the Chibok area of Borno State, based on intelligence report, led eventually to the infamy of the kidnap of the girls from the Girls Secondary School, Chibok. The world was traumatized and Jonathan’s government carried the can. Till date, Shettima has shown neither remorse nor offered apologies for what transpired at Chibok. Some of those girls who were recently rescued came home with two, three children each, offspring of the damned.
This Shettima is still the same person captured on a viral recorded telephone conversation with Ibikunle Amusun, former governor of Ogun State, where Shettima expressed in a very cold tone, how he wished Jonathan did not accept his defeat at the 2015 election, so that mayhem will be visited on him and his people. He proceeded in the same conversation, to spill shocking level of bile and hate on the Igbo, for no apparent reason than their support for President Jonathan. Shettima is yet to publicly repudiate these reports.
Shettima’s recommendation of the ruthlessness of Sani Abacha should not strike anyone who has followed his antecedent as a surprise. That is who he is.
Nothing that is known till this moment of Kashim Shettima is inspiring or indicative of the type of an accommodating personality needed to heal a fractured Nigeria. Whatever those who have taken up the task of marketing Kashim Shettima may present him as, Nigerians simply need to read the bold inscription on him; buyer beware.