For nearly two months, our amiable Vice President, Senator Kashim Shettima (GCON), held his breath. His principal, President Bola Tinubu, had emerged as the sole candidate for the presidential ticket of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) on 25th May, 2026, scoring 10.9 million votes during the party’s nationwide direct primaries. Tinubu chose to keep his deputy, party members and Nigerians guessing as to whether he would retain Shettima or succumb to his infamous “Jagaban disease”. Now, he can breathe out.
Tinubu, as governor of Lagos State (1999–2007), set the record as the only governor in the history of Nigeria to serve his two terms with three deputies – Kofo Akerele-Bucknor, Femi Pedro and AbiodunOgunleye. Many of Shettima’s teeming supporters and friends had feared that the former high performing governor of Borno State and chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum might suffer the same fate as Tinubu’s erstwhile deputy governors. The situation was not helped by unseemly happenings at party events in the North East. On 20th January this year, Shettima’s name and photo were omitted in a programme at a North East APC event in Maiduguri. This sparked an angry reaction in the audience, and a fuming Speaker of the Borno State House of Assembly, Abdulkarim Lawan, described the omission as “provocative”. It did not stop a similar incident from taking place at a party event in Gombe State.
