Just 18 minutes after it was posted online by a national paper last Friday, I saw a breaking news story saying that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had officially renominated Vice President Kashim Shettima as his running mate for the 2027 election.
The story was a pleasant surprise for me because I had earlier decided I was going to write about the same issue for my column this week under the title “Tinubu’s strategic ambiguity on Shettima.” I was going to use that established academic concept in American foreign policy studies to speculate on the electoral dangers of delaying Shettima’s re-nomination further, 42 days after Tinubu himself secured the APC ticket. I thought that for an incumbent president to leave the position of his deputy vacant weeks after securing his own nomination creates needless ambiguities that can be ultimately damaging. The news story of the renomination pleasantly upended that whole argument, however, and has now put all speculations to bed.
Since then, however, at least four people have shared with me a previous piece I wrote on the same issue in these pages just more than a year ago on 30 June 2025 under the title “Tinubu’s decision, Shettima’s indecision.” For this week, therefore, I am reproducing a slightly edited version of that previous piece. Please enjoy:
The events of the past few weeks appear to suggest that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu wants to replace Shettima with another running mate. The automatic endorsement of the President by APC without Shettima, the drama in Gombe, the gun-point removal of Ganduje, and the open jostling for
