When the ruling APC submitted Vice President Kashim Shettima’s form as the running mate to President Bola Tinubu, last week, a significant banana peel was swept off the route of the party’s political agenda for the 2027 elections. Party stalwarts across the country as well as the Nigerian people in general, had been left on tenterhooks by the manoeuvres of the past one year. The president’s candidacy was front loaded for all to see, yet there was the frightening gulf of a deafening silence around the position of Vice President Kashim Shettima.
I was inside the Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa last year when the endorsement campaign for President Tinubu was kick started. The assembled collection of party members, the nomenclatura, and sundry stakeholders, was left in a daze as every speaker underlined the qualities of the president whose second term agenda had been visible from his first day in office, without as much as a mention of, or a nod in the direction of the Vice President, Kashim Shettima, who was seated besides the president.
If the initial gathering inside the villa precincts felt like an unavoidable omission, the endorsement process around the geopolitical zones of the country, left no one in doubt that there was a method to the unfolding process. The party hacks at the behest of certain faceless forces were working according to a plan. Go everywhere, make it clear that it is all about the president. Never mention the sitting vice president, make no references to a running mate!
It took the arrival of the train of endorsement in the Northeast geopolitical zone, for the carefully inflated balloon to burst! On June 15th, 2025, at the gathering of stakeholders in Gombe, irate party members harassed and attempted to attack then National Chairman of the APC, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje and the National Vice Chairman, Mustapha Salihu. The argy-bargy occurred after a public endorsement of President Bola Tinubu for a second term, again without a mention of Vice President Kashim Shettima. The gathered delegates were incensed. Ganduje and Salihu were quickly spirited out of the venue of the event.
The insensitivity of the APC leadership surprised political observers. How did that leadership come to the conclusion that it could pull through a seamless endorsement of President Tinubu for a second term in the Northeast, and expect that party stalwarts there will not respond to a seeming snub of their own, the vice president? With hindsight, the anger of the Northeast party delegates in Gombe in June 2025, was going to cast a long shadow on the endorsement process over the following year, as we will soon discover.
There were salient issues that made the omission of the vice president from the spates of presidential endorsements frightening for stakeholders and observers. Many recall that President Tinubu had a troubling track record of dropping his deputies as happened during his tenure as Lagos State Governor. He had three deputies during his 8-year tenure. Was the silence around Vice President Kashim Shettima, a reprise of a personal tradition for President Tinubu?
Where there was no definitive explanation of a process, the space opens up for speculation. In the cloak-and-dagger world of Nigerian politics, no period offers spaces for speculation than the lead to electioneering.
One of the most persistent rumours was the alleged plan to upload a Northern Christian candidate as the presidential running mate for President Tinubu’s second term. This persistent claim is validated by references to the alleged interest of the “Born Again” Christian values of the presidential spouse, Mrs Oluremi Tinubu, on the one hand. On the other hand, it was also asserted that the president and his inner circle were worried that the Muslim majority in the North had become alienated as a result of the policy choices of the government. A Christian running mate will rally the Christian vote and let lose a cat amongst the pigeons in Northern Nigeria, thus potentially working to President Tinubu’s advantage.
The preferred Christian candidate in that persistent speculation had been Yakubu Dogara, former Speaker of the House of Representatives from Bauchi State. He had exited the APC because of anger against the Muslim-Muslim ticket in 2022, and subsequently, spent a considerable amount of time stoking Christian wrath against the APC in the lead to the 2023 elections, and in the process, deepening the religious divide in the North. Those who were rooting for his candidacy conveniently ignored the fact that he is actually a paperweight politician with very negligible political capital and no region wide network.
If the President had hearkened to those calling for his nomination as his running mate, he would have destroyed and lost the trust of the majority of APC supporters, as well as the majority of voters in Northern Nigeria. The former Speaker would have been an albatross, a representative of a divisive campaign which deepened mistrust in the North. He would also be profiting from a process that he never worked for, a process that he angrily exited the party to campaign against.
The second point that worked against any campaign or agenda to drop Vice President Kashim Shettima, was that such a move would have strengthened the opposition. They would have argued, with great veracity, that the APC administration of President Tinubu rewarded the loyalty, competence and fidelity of the Vice President, with a shocking drop from the ticket for a second term. There was likely to be no way for the President, his team, and the APC, to undo the damage they would have suffered with such a move.
Besides, the Muslim-Muslim ticket had actually exposed the limits of emotional appeals to identity as a basis for political action in our country. What have Christians lost with the ticket in the three years of the administration? And the next relevant question is to ask just what Muslims have gained by and from the ticket? All sides can equally point to their gains and losses, as members of the collective known as Nigerians. In the long run, government exists to provide the values for all citizens to realize their lawful aspirations in a country and within a political system that values every citizen, ir-respect of their identities.
Thirdly, the President must have also reckoned that his own vice president is a man with a formidable political constituency all over the North. It just makes sense to retain him on the ballot, to continue to harvest the goodwill of that political constituency. After all, why fix what’s not broken?
In the long run, President Tinubu and the APC decided that it was better to retain the status quo ante that has worked so well in the period since 2023. Kashim Shettima, as Vice President, has worked with uncommon commitment to the agenda of the administration. He has been the ultimate salesman of the government, and had spoken for, argued about, and competently endorsed the platforms of the president, in a way that no other person within the government has been able to match or outdo.
Kashim Shettima has been very loyal in a system that sometimes appears to disdain his loyalty, his competence, and charisma. He has won a lot of plaudits for the administration from his singleminded devotion to the president, even when the policies that he vigorously defends have often been very unpopular with the Nigerian people. Nevertheless, his honesty rings true and his intellect matches an emotional maturity that makes him such a formidable force for good within and for the administration.
It’s at this point that I return to the argy-bargy of June 2025 in Gombe. The response of stakeholders that day sent a shock into the system. It became clearer that strategy handlers around the second term agenda had either overlooked critical values of politics or had become too arrogant in their assumptions. Gombe showed the limits of such standpoints. In the long run something had to give.
It must be admitted that President Tinubu eventually voted for the head to rule the heart with the re-nomination of Vice President Kashim Shettima, as his running mate. By not overturning the applecart, he avoided a very unnecessarily divisive process that the selection of a different candidate would have amounted to. It is not often that I publicly applaud choices made by this administration, but in this case I believe the right choice was made.
Millions of people have waited anxiously for where the pendulum of choice of running mate will swing. Now that Vice President Kashim Shettima has been returned, it is clearer that many party stalwarts will certainly feel a “renewed hope” to work with greater dedication for the party in the 2027 elections. That is the reality of the influence that Vice President Kashim Shettima has carefully curated within the APC over the years. Within a few days, the situation of anxiety about the running mate for President Tinubu has, thankfully, dissolved into a most welcome surety.
Is’haq Modibbo Kawu, PhD, FNGE, writes from Abuja, can be reached at
kawumodibbo@gmail.com
