In the annals of Nigerian politics, loyalty is no doubt a rare currency. It is often tested by fire, traded for convenience, and often discarded when power shifts. However, once in a while, a story emerges that reminds us what conviction looks like. Therefore, the recent confirmation that President Bola Tinubu will retain Vice President Kashim Shettima as his running mate for 2027 poll is not just a political decision. It is a verdict.
A verdict on loyalty, strategy, and the long game. It closes two years of whispers, plots, and “poisonous enmity,” and opens a new chapter of trust that began long before 2023, writes Ismail Omipidan.
olitics is influenced by interests, sentiments, and emotions. According to the late Maxim Gorky, a Russian-Soviet writer and one of the proponents of Socialism, politics is “the soil in which the nettle of poisonous enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, slander, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual grows rapidly and luxuriantly. Name anything bad in man and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with particular liveliness and abundance.”
Gorky’s observation aptly captures what Nigerians have witnessed over the past two years regarding the intense speculation over whether President Bola Tinubu would retain Vice President Kashim Shettima as his running mate for the 2027 presidential election.
