Nigeria’s Vice President, Senator Kashim Shettima, wore a look of innocence that easily draws pity as he spoke at a programme called the Public Wealth Management Conference, held in Abuja on Tuesday, last week. He spoke of economic saboteurs who, he said were hell-bent on undermining Nigeria, thus: “Forces are hell-bent on plunging this country into a state of anarchy, those that could not get into power through the ballot box. Instead of waiting for 2027, they are so desperate; that this country can fall apart as far as they are concerned. But we are going to visit them.”
In another breath, he also called the same forces “practitioners of violence,” as he heaped the blame for the recent skyrocketing prices of food on the possibly invisible forces.
Hear him: “Just a few nights ago, 45 trucks of maize were caught being transported into a neighbouring country. Just in that Ilela axis (Sokoto state), there are 32 illegal routes. At the moment when they were intercepted, the price of maize fell by N10,000, from N60,000 to N50,000. So there are forces that are hell-bent on undermining our nation, but this is the time for us to come together.”
And to cap it all, the vice president told his audience he was not speaking as the vice president of Nigeria but as a citizen like his listeners. Let me first resolve the confusion that claims attempt to pour on us by saying that I do not think that the Vice President, having taken the oath of office and oath of allegiance can benefit from any such luxury as relinquishing his title as the nation’s number two citizen during the pendency of the four-year tenure he won alongside President Bola Tinubu in February 2023. And that being the case, he is not permitted to speak like one of us.
Shettima spoke of forces that are bent on plunging Nigeria into chaos or said differently, undermining the peace and order in the Nigerian polity. He was not talking of the usual force as related to the Armed Forces or force as known to physics. He was practically talking about some unseen hands whose capacity for violence as he wants to put it has somewhat overwhelmed that of the Nigerian state. That would be strange to the ears. Especially to those of us who must have read a bit of government or taken courses in political science.
As the political scientists would have it, government or governance came about to end the state of nature as propounded by Thomas Hobbes, who, in the Leviathan had recorded that life without the state would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Government therefore came about in the form of a social contract that enabled the powerful to give up their powers to a sovereign, which then ended the survival of the fittest rule, which we believe only subsists in the jungle and the wild. In effect, the power of government over a territory it superintends is inimitable. It has the power of life and death because only the government can kill, legally. The government has the power to cage the worst amongst us and get them locked up for life behind bars or get them sentenced to death by hanging and whatever other means.
In our reality today, the President is the sovereign, and the Vice President, being the number two citizen in the land, shares that power as conferred on him and his boss.
If the claim about “forces” by Shettima were to be made during one of the numerous military regimes Nigeria had witnessed, it would have been easy to conclude that the government was aiming to raise some scapegoats and that some chopping-off of heads was about to take place.
But for a democratic government, one that has all the forces at its beck and call to sound helpless in the face of some unseen forces would be a strange find.
It is also difficult to understand whether the Vice President’s submission was appealing to pity or merely playing politics. In one breath, he said those who could not get to power through the ballot and who were not prepared to wait till 2027 were behind the travails of the nation. In another voice, he referred to them as “forces” who were hell-bent on plunging the nation into chaos.
If he had stayed with the first part of the claim without adding “practitioners of violence” to his claim, it would have been easy to identify the direction of his arrows. But many would say the dust over the 2023 election has since rested after the ruling of the Supreme Court. Staying on that would amount to what Shakespeare called taking vengeance further than death. Our number two man, however, compounded his claim when he added those innuendos. I do not think that the vice president was trying to raise our blood pressure because scaremongering is not one of the good leadership qualities the last time I checked.
Whatever he was driving at, the truth needed to be told that a hawk cannot answer its name if it cannot pick chickens with precision. A government cannot be so-called if all it would come to tell its citizens is that danger lurks. As the persons who have been handed the mantle of leadership, the leaders in Abuja must snuff out the danger and give us confidence. In the kingdoms of yore, the kings led from the war front; conquered territories, and took the spoils. No king stands by the city gate to lament being encircled by the enemy. When the family leader is down on the floor in front of a marauding crew, members of the family must know that the calabash has broken into pieces. That should not be the intent of our number two citizen when he uttered those words.
At this point, we need to tell the leaders in Abuja that the time is nigh for the cork to crow like its type and for humans to speak like their kind. It is time for the hawk to perfect the instinct that makes it a hell of an enemy to Mother Hen and for the government to take out the real enemies of the people, be they oil thieves, food hoarders, and the killers of the naira, who have made food and drugs almost disappear from the bans and the shelves. Action should speak louder than words, and that’s what we need at this time, Mr. VP, Sir.
