You cannot miss the K when you see the Vice President.
Look closely the next time Kashim Shettima appears on your screen. You will find it there: woven around the circumference of his Zanna cap (the dense, hand-stitched northern cap) is a single recurring letter K for Kashim.
Like Joseph’s biblical coat, it comes in many colours: navy, cream, wine or charcoal. But the K always goes around and around the cap, and the style has spread across his harem of aides, too. But sometimes the K is not constant. The VP also sports a Tonak cap. At other times, he wears a Zanna without the K-pattern. But when the K is there, you cannot miss it.
I began noticing it about two years in. The cap fits him well, I must admit. Whoever pitched the idea to the Vice President (and I suspect it happened on one of his trips home to Borno, where the Zanna cap is practically a second skin) understood something about power that the rest of us only learn slowly.
The “pitcher” understood that if the principal wears the cap, an army of aides will follow. It was a flawless prediction. Today, you can hardly throw a stone in the Vice President’s wing of the Villa without it bouncing off a K cap.
