Muslim-Muslim Ticket: Tinubu’s Running Mate Reveals Secret While Urging Northerners To Reject Atiku
The vice-presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji Kashim Shettima, who is a Muslim (north) running mate to a Muslim (South) presidential candidate of the party, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu may have revealed a secret behind Tinubu’s choice of a Muslim as a running mate.
Shettima had urged northerners ditch former Vice President and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, for opposing the enactment of Sharia rule, an Islamic legal system, across the region while he was in government.
While addressing party faithful at an APC local government conference in Abuja at the weekend, Shettima urged northern voters to reject Atiku Abubakar at the February 25 polls because he fought against the Islamic legal system in the North.
“This person you call your own says you should not call him ‘Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, but rather Atiku Abubakar,” Alhaji Shettima told his audience in the Hausa language.
He added, “Your person says he is the only person that fights against Sharia in the north. Is that your person?”
The APC vice presidential candidate’s remarks is his latest attempt to whip up ethno-religious rhetoric against PDP presidential candidate.
According to a recent report by the Peoples Gazette, Shettima, at Emir Palace in Daura, Katsina, publicly challenged Atiku Abubakar to come out and mention eight people he has mentored in the North; or the capital projects he executed in the North while he served as Nigeria’s vice president between 1999 to 2007.
Shettima told his audience that Atiku Abubakar’s presidency would not serve the North’s ethno-religious interests.
Atiku has repeatedly played up his moderate inclinations as a strength for his campaign, hoping to appeal to the country’s evenly-divided religious split for Muslims and Christians.
Recall that in 2022, Atiku Abubakar initially condemned in a tweet the lynching of Deborah Samuel, a Christian female university student in Sokoto by Islamic fundamentalists, who accused her of making blasphemous statements against Prophet Muhammad but he retracted by deleting the tweet.
However, most Nigerians, especially northern Christians and moderate Muslims across the country had expressed reservations at the announcement of Kashim Shettima, a North East Muslim who was governor of Borno State when the Chibok school girls were kidnapped while writing examinations.
