There are politicians who speak because they have something to say, and there are those who speak because silence, to them, is an unacceptable interruption in the daily ritual of political visibility.
And then there is Kashim Shettima. Nigeria’s Vice President ordinarily should have been a literary god, somewhere behind a mahogany desk, churning out books of aphorisms, essays of philosophical reflections and volumes of literary lines to be savoured by lovers of deep-rooted words. Alas, destiny took a rather curious detour. Instead of becoming a full-time custodian of books, he became an administrator of human affairs, a manager of policies and, ultimately, the nation’s Vice President.
But the books never really left him. They seem to have followed him into politics.
For every word this Kanuri intellectual utters, there is often an unmistakable residue of a man who has read too many books to speak in ordinary sentences. His words arrive carrying the weight of digested pages, philosophical undertones and metaphors that sometimes ambush the listener long after the speech has ended.
To call Shettima a voracious reader may be an injustice to the potency of his literary consummation. He does not merely read books; he appears to metabolise them.
And occasionally, he coughs up a sentence that sounds less like political speech and more like a line rescued from the margins of an old philosophical manuscript.
At the first anniversary of the passing of my late life mentor, President Muhammadu Buhari, Shettima offered one such line. It was deceptively simple:
“Your friends know you when you are in power, but you know your friends when you are not in power.”
A harmless anecdote, perhaps. But within that seemingly modest sentence was an entire philosophy of human relationships.
When power resides with you, your world can suddenly become crowded with friends. Your telephone never sleeps. Your sitting room becomes a pilgrimage centre. Your name travels faster than your footsteps.
But power is also an excellent examiner of friendship. When the office disappears, the convoy vanishes, the phone calls diminish – apologies to Dr Rueben Abati and the doors that once opened before your arrival suddenly acquire locks, you discover something profound: some people were not friends with you; they were friends with what you represented.
Perhaps that was the haunting beauty of Shettima’s line at Buhari’s memorial. It was not merely about Buhari. It was about all of us.
Today, you may be the world to somebody. Tomorrow, the world may continue perfectly well without you.
At Buhari’s memorial, amid the solemnity of remembrance and the architecture of grief, Shettima did remind us that political power is ultimately an appointment with impermanence. The office expires. The title fades. The convoy moves elsewhere. What remains is memory — and, occasionally, the handful of people who remember you when there is nothing left to gain from remembering you.
This is one reason Shettima’s speeches often seem to echo long after the events at which they are delivered.
Typical Nigerian political speeches are sometimes born in the podium and buried with the applause. Shettima’s lines have a habit of escaping the venue.They travel.
They are quoted at dinner tables, reproduced on social media, dissected in newsrooms and remembered long after the microphones have been switched off.
His appeal is not just his intelligence. His distinction is the manner in which he packages intelligence.
He rarely says the ordinary thing in an ordinary way when a colourful metaphor is available.
He can take a political argument, wrap it in humour, garnish it with sarcasm, sprinkle it with history and serve it with the composure of a professor who knows exactly where the punchline is hiding.
