Recently, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced former Borno State governor Kashim Shettima as his vice-presidential candidate; a move that has been fiercely condemned by many Nigerians, particularly from the South and Middle Belt.
Many have commented on the insensitivity of such an action in a disunited country dealing with a significant Islamist terrorism problem that exploded with the Boko Haram sect that was incidentally founded in the Borno State from which Kashim Shettima hails.
There have been allegations about Kashim Shettima himself. The infamous Chibok girls’ tragedy of 2014 happened while he was governor in Borno State and the Supervising Minister of Education at the time, Nyesom Wike, accused Shettima of criminal negligence.
Wike, who had before the kidnap received unfavourable security reports concerning the Chibok school from security agencies, and the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Examination Council of Nigeria (NECO) had responded by formally asking Governor Shettima to move the examination to a different location in the more secure state capital, Maiduguri, but Shettima ignored the request.
A month later, Boko Haram attacked the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok and kidnapped 276 female students.
On another issue dear to people from the South, news articles from 2017 in which Kashim Shettima called the demand for devolution and restructuring ‘madness’ have surfaced. It is safe to say that he won’t be loved by a majority of Southern voters but we can assume that Bola Tinubu already knows that.
Why then was Shettima picked, and what are the possible implications of his candidature?
Ideally, having a Southern candidate on the APC’s ticket should be supported by the South especially with outgoing President Buhari being a Northerner, but Tinubu has spent almost a decade going against other Southern regions while trying to win the Northern political establishment’s favour.
As a result, he has become disliked like most parochial Northern figures are in the South, and even his popularity in his native South-West region is waning.
To compensate for his unpopularity in the South and Middle-Belt, Tinubu ignored any available Northern Christian and chose a Northern Muslim to hopefully get the support of Northern Muslim voters.
As bad as the idea of the Muslim-Muslim ticket is in today’s Nigeria, it is worse to have a possible future vice president who, in his own country, is suspected to be complicit in the actions of terrorists. This will definitely have a negative impact on how the country is perceived by the international community.
With the downturn of Nigeria’s economy, we cannot afford to flirt with the idea of having a government associated with state-sanctioned terrorism. For four straight years, Nigeria’s FDI inflows have constantly dropped. The African Development Bank said that Nigeria would need to spend $3 trillion over the next 30 years to satisfy its infrastructure needs and deal effectively with a 55 percent youth unemployment rate that is still rising.
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The National Bureau of Statistics reported that Nigeria got only an FDI inflow worth $698.7 million in 2021, an $89.5 billion shortfall from the $90 billion it should get annually. Need I talk about all of the joy with the Excess Crude Account?
The data is not surprising considering the kind of economically-weakening policies that the Buhari-led administration constantly pushed forward and stuck to even when they were clearly not working.
Policies like the closure of land borders and the cutting of trees in the federal capital to “strengthen the national currency” are examples of harebrained policies that have led Nigeria to the precarious state it is currently in, culminating in a letter on 22 July by the Emirates Airlines explicitly stating that our failure to fulfil our end of an agreement with them is leading to a reduction in flights between our countries.
All these add to the APC’s potential failure come 2023 and the current APC presidential candidate who also has a reputation for statist inclinations has chosen a cynical political calculation that has the potential to pour more petrol on the fire that currently engulfs the country, then to add insult to injury, there was the fiasco of fake bishops rented to give the impression of Christian support during Mr. Shettima’s unveiling.
All this at a time when Islamist terrorists are clearly gaining ground is nothing short of shortsighted and selfish. The very spectre of terrorism is harmful to economic growth. It fosters uncertainty which disrupts economic planning and investment decisions and forces potential investors to consider other economies that can provide a foundation of certainty.
Also, the scarce resources that should go to productive economic activity have to be diverted to military and security situations and the opportunity costs are high resulting in higher inflation rates, taxes, and public deficits.
Considering the diverse security problems Nigeria is currently facing, this is not a time to further polarise the country along religious lines. The idea of a Muslim-Muslim ticket should be dealt with ruthlessly at the polls and afterwards in the public sphere. It would be a dangerous precedent that must not be allowed to see the light of day.
Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence
