Vice President, Kashim Shettima, on Tuesday revealed a bizarre political intrigue, disclosing that barely three months after President Bola Tinubu assumed office, a delegation from Borno State warned the President to stop putting on a traditional attire gifted to him by Shettima during the 2023 campaign.
The delegation alleged that the garments had been spiritually “charmed” to cause the President’s death so that Shettima could succeed him.
According to the Vice President, Tinubu dismissed the conspiracy theory as a story that “did not add up,” given that the clothes were gifted long before they even secured the party’s tickets, and deliberately wore the clothing for an entire week as a public rebuke to the accusers.
Shettima shared this during his address at the public presentation of the autobiography of former Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon (retd), titled “My Life of Duty and Allegiance,” held in Abuja.
Representing the President at the event, Shettima used the incident to illustrate the dangerous and pervasive spread of suspicion currently undermining Nigerian public life.
He contrasted this modern paranoia with a historical account from the Sultan of Sokoto, who recalled how his family used to send gallons of fura weekly to Gen. Gowon at Dodan Barracks in Lagos—a gesture Gowon accepted with absolute trust, a spirit of unity that Shettima lamented has since been severely eroded.
Recalling the origin of the controversy, Shettima explained that during the 2023 presidential primaries, he had sourced the traditional Borno attire and cap to help Tinubu blend in with northern crowds during campaign stops.
The confrontation arose in October 2023 while Shettima was away representing the President at the 3rd Belt and Road Initiative Forum in Beijing, China.
Upon his return, Tinubu summoned him to laugh off the allegations, quoting the President as saying, “For one week, to prove to them that he is not a fetish, he wore those dresses.” Shettima decried these maneuvers as typical of the “gimmicks taking place in power circles in Nigeria nowadays.”
Turning his attention to the guest of honor, whom he described as “the last man standing” among Nigeria’s post-independence military generation, Shettima poured encomiums on Gen. Gowon for embodying a life free of sectarian suspicion.
He praised Gowon’s enduring legacies, including the establishment of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) as a tool for national reconciliation and his foundational role in ECOWAS.
Pointing to the presence of Plateau State Governor Caleb Mutfwang, the Vice President urged an end to local cycles of violence by remembering shared historical ties, closing with a poignant quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Let us learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
