Kashim Shettima’s response in kind to Atiku Abubakar, by Rotimi Fasan

It’s exactly a week ago today that the All Progressives Congress inaugurated its expanded Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) at the presidential villa in Abuja. It was an occasion for some chest-thumping as well as an opportunity for the APC to set out its agenda for the 2027 campaigns. As is to be expected, the inauguration of the APC’s PCC presented Nigerians, including opposition politicians and their supporters, yet another opportunity to scrutinise the APC-led Bola Tinubu administration. That scrutiny has appropriately come with criticisms of the government’s performance or the person of the president. The APC leadership had itself set the ball rolling by responding in kind to recent attacks on the party beginning with the ADC’s presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar’s ill-advised decision, to address President Bola Tinubu by his first name at formal public events.

It was a gesture that many Nigerians advised the former vice president to desist from. Not only is it a breach of protocol, it is also culturally distasteful. But since it appeared to be getting him the needed attention, no matter how negative, from a section of the public, Atiku chose to double down on it and recruited his surrogates into the Tinubu-baiting game. The likes of Paul Ibe and Phrank Shaibu thought they were being dutiful by joining their principal to go the street-fighter route forgetting that they did not own the patent for retailing insults to political opponents. It was therefore not surprising to see Vice President Kashim Shettima use the occasion of the inauguration of his party’s PCC to launch a number of broadsides at both Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi of the NDC.

In his words, ‘We have the capacity to respond to all sorts of innuendoes and outright lies that our political opponents are taking on’. This is precisely what Nigerians who cautioned Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and his co-travellers feared would happen. They were starting a fire they would not be able to put out. One that would downgrade the quality of the campaign and deflect attention from the type of issues the candidates should be addressing. Shettima’s verbal shots are not new. Some of them are old arrows seasoned with new baits. Apparently referencing Atiku Abubakar’s displeasure to similar verbal shots in the past, he started by asking those who come to equity to do so with clean hands. He then went on to tell his audience that President Bola Tinubu remained the President and Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria no matter what Atiku chose to call him.

Whether Bola or Adekunle, it made no difference he said. Atiku’s repeated contestation for the presidency, he argued, only made him a Raila Odinga, a former Prime Minister in Kenya, who repeatedly contested but failed to be president and not an Abraham Lincoln who eventually succeeded after several failed attempts at contesting to be president in America. Speaking rather tongue in cheek, he said he would not ‘follow suit with Lawal and call him Kachalla’ by which he recalled Babachir Lawal’s reference to Atiku as Kachalla, which is a word for a leader of bandits in the north. In Shettima’s attack on Atiku, Peter Obi of the Nigeria Democratic Congress suffered what one might call a collateral damage. Shettima called Obi ‘the master of bogus statistics and incoherent economic prescriptions’ from Bangladesh. Policies that worked in Bangladesh, he said quite correctly, would not automatically work in Nigeria with a demographic, economic and institutional structures that are vastly different.

I have called the damage Obi suffered from Shettima’s attack as collateral only because, unlike the attack on Atiku, it came unprovoked. At least not by anything Obi had said or done to the APC or its leadership in the immediate context of the point at issue. Obi is, however, as guilty as Atiku when it comes to such matters. The only difference is that as the master of performative morality and mob incitement, Peter Obi leaves the dirty work of rage baits and cussing to his Obidient followers. Some of them, like the shawl-wearing Edo-pretend, who contributes nothing aimed at intellectual or policy direction for her principal, cusses worse than an infidel. She is always invoking Ogun to ‘kpai’ her political opponents. What type of vote-canvassing is that?

Yet what rankles in all of this has been the response of supporters of Atiku Abubakar. Their latest criticism of Shettima’s attack of their principal is utterly hypocritical. It harks back to what Atiku himself had said in the past when Shettima took the verbal war to him. Atiku had said he would not respond to Shettima because he was older and more accomplished than him. Shettima’s utterances he said breached northern codes of respect for elders. Which again should tell Nigerians about the ADC’s presidential candidate’s style of politics which operates by appealing to religious and ethnic sentiments. He is a politician who wants Bola Tinubu’s job for himself and is bent on handing Shettima’s job to Rotimi Ameachi (in 2023 it was Ifeanyin Okowa), where does age much less regional or ethnic consideration come into the debate?

If Atiku ‘Tarkaed’ Shettima and Shettima ‘Dabohed’ him, should that offend God? You push me, I push you. Why should Alhaji Abubakar’s response be about northern solidarity? Why is he struggling to address the point raised by Shettima on its merit? Does it mean Tinubu is good target because he is from the south? Which Nigerian or foreign culture preaches outright the disrespect of elders? Nigerians should ask Atiku and his followers why they think it is appropriate for them to address the president by his first name at formal events but chafe at the ‘duba-gari’ tag that Shettima has foisted on him? Afterall, duba-gari is not a curse. It is the Hausa equivalent of ‘wole-wole’, the Yoruba word for a sanitary inspector.

As Phrank Shaibu asked Seun Okinbaloye if Bola is not the president’s name to justify their action of calling him by his first name, so can any Nigerian ask if Atiku did not train as a sanitary inspector? He did attend the Kano School of Hygiene! Should things like this be the talking point of the 2027 campaigns? Of course, no! But it’s the path Atiku chose to walk with his surrogates and it can’t be right for them and then be wrong for Shettima because he is of the APC. Taunts and puns are a critical part of political rhetoric. They could be a source of entertainment as well as education when rightly deployed. Thus, they have their place in politics and Nigeria has had past masters of the art like S.L.A. Akintola and K.O. Mbadiwe among others. At a time of grave economic and social disjunction, however, they should not constitute the main subject of national debate.

The post Kashim Shettima’s response in kind to Atiku Abubakar, by Rotimi Fasan appeared first on Vanguard News.