He might have, in the course of his life as a banker, public administrator and politician, shirked away from courting controversies. He has, in any case, been very effective and successful as a leader and manager of men and resources in all the places he has worked without any form of controversies trailing his conduct and relationship with all manner of men at all manner of levels.
The only time he, innocently made a statement which drew the ire of the powers that be was on the 17th of February 2014 when, on a visit to then President Goodluck Jonathan at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, then Borno state Governor Kashim Shettima repeated what everyone knew, that the Boko Haram insurgents were better armed and motivated than the troops of the Nigerian Army.
That statement which came on the spur of that moment when the Boko Haram were overrunning and taking over territories at will, ignited a chain of events which led to a threat from the President that he was going to withdraw soldiers from the security detail of the Governor, ostensibly to drive home the message that Kashim Shettima’s statements were without foundation. The facts of the statement of Kashim and the prevailing situation then, of a nation drifting dangerously towards anarchy were lost on the President and his sidekicks.
Since then, the former Borno state Governor had struck a balance in telling truth to power in a way that would not ruffle sensitive feathers on one hand and keeping the fire of the fight against insurgency aglow, on the other. It should be noted that shortly after that statement and despite their ill-advised denials, the fight took a rather more decisive dimension which led to many gains being made and territories hitherto captured by the insurgents to be liberated. We should also take into account that on his ascension to power shortly after that debacle between Kashim and Jonathan, President Muhammadu Buhari, acting on a groundswell of a nationwide angst against Jonathan’s mishandling of the fight, worked hard and upped the ante of the war and consolidated on those gains on the crest of high expectations that with his renewed vigor and push, the retired Army General was on the verge of a comprehensive win against terrorism.
We all know that the situation has, as it is now, not only deteriorated to the pre-Jonathan era but had assumed a more frightening dimension. The insurgents are not only gaining more confidence and becoming more emboldened but showing traits of expanding their tentacles to other geo-political zones of the North. It is feared that if the lackadaisical approach to the war is not checked, it will take a life of its own thereby complicating matters and gradually turn the north into a land where war-lords would whimsically, and at will carve out territories, administer taxes and run the show in the towns and bushes of the country.
Suddenly and perhaps worried stiff by the prospects of not just losing Borno to the insurgents but making the entire North ungovernable as evident by the spread of acts of terrorism and banditry everywhere, Kashim Shettima has, from all indication and going by his body language, ran back into the trenches and had began firing salvos at the direction of a federal government he has helped installed but which tended to be losing steam and direction. On the 1st of this month, the Senate passed a resolution calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to sack the service chiefs. This followed a motion raised by Senator Kashim Shettima detailing the failures of the security chiefs to end the war or even add any decisive value into its prosecution.
It was not in his character to raise dust, for the fun of it. For him to have suddenly come out of his shell to speak as straight and as unambiguous as he has done, the odds, from the point of superior perspectives, must have been staked so ominously and dangerously against both his people in Borno in particular and Nigerians in general. I think I personally understand these fears and what they portend for the future stability of both the North as a critical partner in the evolution of a viable nation and Nigeria as a country which is home to all of us as Nigerians. It is from this perspective that I situate the fire that spewed out of Kashim Shettima’s mouth when in an interview with Arise TV, the Senator said that although they respect, adore and love President Buhari, they will not run away from telling him the truth whenever desirable. He went memory lane and proved that from Shehu Shagari, all succeeding governments had tinkered with the composition of service chiefs at various times in order to reinvigorate and energize national security architecture and in response to exigencies of those moments.
He noted that since Buhari is not God and is therefore fallible, time has come for people of conscience to engage him and speak the truth at times like these when the nation was at its most critical in terms of its survival and security.
How anybody interprete these statements is not the point here. The most important aspect of it is for the president to read between the lines and decipher the underlying truths in them in order to work hard at coming up with solutions to the security challenges that have proved to be capable of destroying whatever legacy he thought he will bequeath.President Buhari will do well to, for once, listen to those who stand to benefit nothing from telling him the truth, than listen to the businessmen, profiteers and their sundry bloodsucking allies who stand to benefit, and have intact benefited from telling him cooked up stories.
Ahmed-BK writes from Gesse III, Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi state.
