“Even the lion protects himself against flies”— African proverb

Politics is notoriously challenging for those who look for particular degrees of certainty or control. Managing power in particular presents its own limitations, even where the obviously strong and the weak square off. Judging relative strength or weakness can be tricky when power dynamics tamper with strategy and goals. A number of recent developments in the country demonstrate how risky it is to draw lines around major political issues. Politicians find that they have crossed lines they did not know existed, or lines drawn in the sand get all smudged or relocated during skirmishes.

 This week, let us look at the hoopla over the non-mention of Vice President Kashim Shettima at the North East Zonal APC Stakeholders Meeting at Gombe last week. At the North West Meeting a few weeks ago, no mention of Kashim Shettima was made when the Summit endorsed President Bola Tinubu as the party’s sole candidate for the 2027 elections, with nearly two years of tough remedial work to be done. While they were at it, the elected representatives also endorsed themselves. This endorsement business long before the commencement of electoral processes is new to our democratic tradition. It was a line in wobbly sand, a poorly-contrived bravado.

 It would have been less of shooting its own foot if the APC had not had its doors opened wide to entice and welcome decampees looking for opportunities as members of a ruling party, not as refugees, but as equal stakeholders who are likely to jostle with older members for the spoils of governance and tickets. It says a lot about the APC’s thinking capacity that this foolhardy novelty was not nipped after the North West blunder. Perhaps it pleased President Tinubu that his party leaders from the region that gave him his largest vote in 2023 love him enough to tell citizens from the zone with the worst security situation that they should be so grateful for his record that no one should even contemplate a future without him as President. To be fair, voices were raised, mostly from outside the party, that this level of immodesty is self-defeating, but a party drunk with the seeming impotence of any opposition was too busy planning similar endorsements to listen.

 So the Gombe gathering drew its own line. It is difficult to believe that the Summit did not have a hint that Shettima will be a big issue in his backyard. In retrospect, it is also safe to say party leaders thought they could repeat the Sokoto summit and get away with it. As it turned out, they were wrong. Another line was drawn, and this one will take some effort to obliterate. Gombe brought to national attention what had been speculations and suspicions: that Tinubu plans to dump Shettima in 2027, in order to change support bases in the North. One day rocked the image of a party seemingly on an unassailable rise, and ended in a most embarrassing manner.

 The fiasco exposed the vulnerability of a party substantially reflecting the personality and worldview of Tinubu: everything is legitimate if it weakens resistance and opposition. The party’s soft underbelly was badly damaged by a loud and rude resistance, and its efforts at damage control just seemed to make matters worse. Gombe created only losers. The biggest, unfortunately, could be VP Shettima.  My knowledge of him and his relationship with the president suggests that he will not design or encourage an insurrection against Tinubu. Unfortunately, he will now be even more at the mercy of an unyielding and unforgiving President who views every challenge as a declaration of war he must win. It will be a miracle if Shettima survives damaging resistance and intrigues over his future as VP after 2027, but they say miracles do happen.

 Tinubu himself lost a lot in Gombe. Whether he had a hand in it or not,  Gombe drew a line which makes the North that much more difficult for 2027. The most damaging impression it will leave will be of a president who thinks he can choose the North’s highest citizen entirely at his pleasure and electoral calculations.

 There will be attempts to mend fences, of course, but Tinubu’s stranglehold on his party and his designs on the North, particularly the plan to ditch Northern Muslim clergy (and Muslim  voters for ditching him first)  in favour of Northern Christians will remain gaping holes. It will be a tall order if Northern Christian communities who were outraged by the Muslim-Muslim ticket in 2023, will embrace a president under whose leadership their security had also worsened and poverty levels had risen, because he had made one of them a Vice President. A few Muslim politicians are being mentioned as prospective replacements for Shettima.  Whoever it is, he is likely to be part of those designing Tinubu’s designs for the North. Northerners will have little respect for a Vice President that will have to walk on tip toes around Tinubu, (not famous for his fidelity) and invent new levels of subservience to him. That will not be the type of a Vice to Tinubu the North will want, in the event that he returns for a second term in spite of substantial Northern resistance.

 A friendly advise to President Tinubu will be not to decide his friends and enemies this early in the race. They say a week is a long time in politics. He said in Makurdi last week that “ they” hate him like hell, but he is still the President. An awareness of evolving friend and foe profiles is a very useful skill for politicians. So is timing. Together, they help you in avoiding the wrong places to draw lines, and the right places to blur them. There are efforts to cobble together an opposition that will seek to benefit from all his weak points and his records. His instincts have largely been useful in bringing him to his present station. Now he needs more than personal instinct. It is his presidency. He will pay dearly if he outsources it to cronies and poor judgement.