Datti Baba-Ahmed Tackles Kashim Shettima

Dialogue With Nigeria  AKIN OSUNTOKUN

“I Don’t Blame BAT, Whoever Knows What Shettima Did Won’t Keep Him Long, Airwaves Can’t Carry It”—Datti Baba-Ahmed

The pithy and cryptic line from Datti Baba Ahmed — veteran educator, businessman and former vice principal on the Labour Party presidential ticket — captures the kind of blunt, insinuating commentary that has become his trademark. The remark goes beyond personal invective; it reaches into core anxieties of Nigerian politics: the mistrust between principals and their deputies, the persistence of conspiracy narratives in the face of insecurity, and the widening gap between public perception and institutional accountability.

Datti Baba Ahmed is more than an occasional commentator. He is an education entrepreneur — proprietor of Baze University in Abuja and Baba Ahmed University in Kano — and a public intellectual whose investments in education stand out in a region where modern schooling has long lagged behind national averages. Education is a self-evident and indispensable precursor of socioeconomic development more so in the era of globalisation.

In Nigeria, where regional disparities shape political narratives, Baba Ahmed’s work in the North counters assumptions about the region’s resistance to modernisation. His standing gives weight to his interventions; when he offers an insinuation about a national figure, many listen.

It is a notorious fact that Nigeria has gotten quite the bad guy reputation for financial and drug related crimes in the international community. The beguiling paradox is the rating of Nigerians as the most educationally accomplished national demographic in the United States.

This is the latest review (from five years ago) of Fareed Zakaria’s (of CNN) observation that ‘Nigerians are some of the most educated immigrants in America’. Citing the reports of the Migration Policy Institute, 59% of Nigerian immigrants age 25 or older in the US hold at least a Bachelor’s degree, which is nearly double the proportion of the Americans born in the US (33%).

Zakaria further revealed that “Nigerian immigrants tend to work high skilled jobs, 54% are in largely white-collar positions in business, management, science and the art compared to the 39% of people born in the US,”. This positive profile is of immediate significance to the Nigerian economy whose contemporary economic sustenance is partly undergirded by billions of dollars in annual repatriation and remittances of Nigerians in the diaspora.

The sad commentary is that this good news is near exclusive to Nigerians of Southern Nigeria origin.The double jeopardy is the correlation of the deepening poverty with the raging security crisis ravaging the Northern region. It reinforces the emergent contrasting phenomenon of two Nigerias. Hence the uniqueness of the contributions of Baba Ahmed.

There has been increasing speculation of bad blood within the Nigerian presidency, specifically, the crisis of confidence between President Tinubu and Vice-president Kashim Shettima. Mindful of the wit of not believing any rumour until it is officially denied, a backhanded confirmation was provided by a media aide in the presidency who attributed the speculations to ‘spindoctors misleading the public into believing there is discord at the highest levels of government’.

Generally speaking, such a negative relationship between Presidents and Vice-presidents, Governors and deputy governors has become the rule rather than the exception in the politics of the fourth republic. In abstract terms, this tendency derives from the constitutional enactment in which the role of the Vice-president is reducible to filling the potential vacuum occasioned by the exit of the President.

In other words, the one who stands to benefit the most from the temporary or permanent incapacitation/indisposition of the President is the deputy. The latter is the prospective singular beneficiary of the eventuality of the former’s misfortune. The office of the Vice- President structurally incentivizes a zero sum logic. Because a deputy stands to gain from any misfortune befalling the president, the relationship can cultivate rivalry rather than partnership.

Those engaged in the amendment of the constitution may want to take it into cognisance that this recurring source of government instability is obviated in the parliamentary system of government.

There is no deputy prime minister waiting in situ to profit from the exit of his principal. In parliamentary systems, succession tends to be mediated by party institutions rather than embedded in a principal deputy dyad.

The Oyo empire had a peculiar antidote. The crown prince is made to have a vested interest in the longevity of the reign of his father, the Alaafin. At the death of the emperor, the former is ritually mandated to concurrently commit harakiri (suicide). Significantly, the proclamation of the edict banning this tradition by Alaafin Atiba precipitated a major civil war in the precolonial history of the Oyo empire.

In the paranoid consciousness of their vulnerability to the wiles of scheming deputies, Nigerian governors, especially, have come forth with the eligibility test of priorising a docile temperament in the choice of their running mates. It was probably the search for this elusive characteristic that was responsible for the record-setting turnover of three deputy governors to Tinubu (as Lagos state governor).

Much of the suspicion around Kashim Shettima stems from his tenure as governor of Borno State during the period when Boko Haram carried out some of its most notorious attacks. Having been hitherto warned of the danger of exposing secondary students to Boko Haram terrorist attacks and the subsequent reality of the calamitous abduction of the 276 female students in a Chibok secondary school on the night of 14th of April 2014, then governor Shettima refused to initiate a call to the President to brief him because “What happens in our unwritten protocol in Nigeria is that, in the event of major security problems, it is the president that summons a governor or calls him on phone or directs the Vice-president to call on his behalf for sympathy”.

To many, this rationale strained credulity: why would a state chief executive refrain from urgently alerting the country’s chief security officer when dozens of lives were at stake? Entwined with the coincidence of the residence of the Christmas day bomber, Kabiru Sokoto, in the Borno state governor’s lodge in Abuja, credibility of conspiracy theories linking Shettima with terrorism became unfettered.

Distinguishing proven culpability from speculation is crucial. The rule of law requires evidence and due process; politics driven by rumor corrodes institutions. Yet the persistence of these suspicions, and the willingness of notable figures to allude to them publicly, reflect deeper fragilities: an insecure electorate, weak oversight mechanisms, and a political culture in which innuendo often suffices to delegitimize a rival.

Baba did not adduce any evidence to substantiate his weighty allegation but it fits perfectly into the mold of the suspected collusion of the former Borno state governor in the Boko Haram rebellion. In the allegation of being a subversive deputy, Shettima will not be the first, nor will he be the last. One experience that I wish I do not have is being privy to the precedent of former Vice-president Atiku Abubakar

It was in the thick of this crisis that I was recruited as the Director and spokesperson of the 2003 reelection campaign. On my assumption of office, the first assignment I got was to ascertain the veracity of the suspicion that the Vice President’s press crew had a hand in the relentless barrage of bad press lavished on Obasanjo. I went back to Lagos to consult with the title editors and they all, without exception, confirmed the allegation. As a matter of fact, one of them offered to come back with me to Abuja to confirm the allegation in person.

A high- ranking member of the PDP equally shared this perspective “when you look at the latest statements credited to the Vice President and for which he had not denied, you can then begin to imagine what his boss, President Obasanjo had been going through all along …There was the issue of the presidential primaries of 2003 and which people were already beginning to overlook. But the truth of the matter is that when you look at recent statements credited to the Vice President, it would be very clear that what has been going on is a matter of clear and manifest disloyalty.” 

The incriminating statements (being cited) were contained in a published interview in which the Vice President vented his animus and bitterness with the president. The latter rallied to publicly respond to some of the issues raised in the Vice President’s interview. Responded Obasanjo “When there was a case of doubtful loyalty on the part of the Vice President, revealed Obasanjo, I took the Bible and the Koran and said between the two of us, I want you to swear to an oath of loyalty…but he refused to swear because there were proven cases of disloyalty on his part…it was bad…I read the interview by the Vice President in Thisday of August 22 and a couple of other statements he has made. I think they contain a lot of misinformation and misrepresentation. He said I swore to him, I did not swear. I did not swear to him. For what?” 

Two days before the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, presidential primaries, the BBC Hausa service sought clarifications from Abubakar on the speculation that he may not run with Obasanjo. Rather than employ the occasion to calm the waters, he chose to fan the embers of discord with his principal. He said he has not made up his mind on any of the three options he entertained.

The bad blood between the two would ultimately result in the theatre of the absurd in which a serving Vice President deserted the party ticket that brought him to office to pick up nomination as presidential candidate of another political party.

The irony was that President Obasanjo had quietly fashioned an eight year succession plan intended to make his vice president the natural successor. He justified the unusually broad authority he granted Abubakar over the economy and various local matters as deliberate preparation: in a second term he planned to turn over Nigeria’s foreign affairs to the deputy, thereby pairing hands on economic stewardship with diplomatic management. The media were quick to grasp the political significance of that empowerment, observing that “apart from letting the number two citizen run the economy, the president more or less conceded to the political sagacity of his deputy in getting complex problems solved.”

Education entrepreneurs like Datti Baba Ahmed are right to insist on competence and credibility. But transforming insinuation into investigation requires organized reforms: constitutional clarity about executive roles, robust intra party democracy, professionalised security protocols, independent oversight mechanisms, and long term investment in education and development across regions.