Why Shettima insults Atiku

IN Vice President Kashim Shettima’s caustic barbs at former Vice President Atiku Abubakar during the inauguration of the APC Presidential Campaign Council in Abuja on October 14, many Nigerians see an aggressively disagreeable putdown of a political opponent. I see an opportunity to introduce Nigerians to a time-honored, culturally sanctioned, ritualised joking relationship in Islamicate cultures in West Africa.

I have tried several times in the past to have conversations with fellow Nigerians, particularly from the South, about the cultural institution of joking relationships between cross cousins, between grandparents and grandchildren, between granduncles and grandaunts and their grandnephews and grandnieces and between certain ethnic groups. I have had little success being understood. The idea that people can gleefully call one another fools, slaves or thieves and still feel a profound sense of kinship seems too counterintuitive to many people.

Hausa people call it wasanbarkwanci. In my Baatonum language, it’s called gonaru. The Kanuri call itnə́ngi, while the Fulani know it in some varieties of Fulfulde as denɗiraagal or denɗiraaku. They all refer to culturally sanctioned joking relationships that permit people to exchange insults and mockery without taking offense.

The Kanuri and the Fulani have an age-old joking relationship that gives wide cultural latitude for members of both groups to insult, tease, mock and belittle each other, irrespective of age and social status differentials, without taking offense. My ethnic group, the Baatonu (also called Bariba or Baruba) of Borgu, has a similar relationship most notably with the Zarma of Niger Republic and the Sabe of Benin Republic, among several examples.

This is the context of Shettima’s seemingly hostile public squelchers against Atiku. He was enacting the enduring joking relationship between the Kanuri and the Fulani in partisan political contest. Shettima himself has acknowledged this many times in the past.

The verbal hostilities began well before Shettima became vice president. On September 11, 2022, he dismissed Atiku as a “political tourist” whom the APC would retire to Dubai. On November 1, he mocked Atiku’s training at Kano School of Hygiene and said selling bottled water did not qualify him as an economic expert. He compared Atiku’s repeated presidential bids to Raila Odinga’s electoral travails in Kenya.

These were political putdowns delivered with the relish of a man who knows he can get away with a great deal.

Shettima offered his most explicit cultural explanation for these putdowns of Atiku on September 6, 2023, after the presidential election tribunal upheld Tinubu’s victory. He promised to retire Atiku to Fombina and buy him goats and chickens to rear. Then, invoking the traditional Kanuri-Fulani relationship, he explained that he had “the liberty to hurl all insults at him and he’d stoically bear.”

At a February 6, 2025, gathering to celebrate former Ekiti Governor Kayode Fayemi’s 60th birthday, Shettima, with Atiku present, described himself as an “agent provocateur” who had fired political shots at him and would do so again in 2027. He said he addressed Atiku as “Baba” in private. Reporters said Atiku smiled.

At the October 14, 2026, APC event, Shettima returned to the Odinga comparison, the Kano School of Hygiene dig and derided Atiku’s proposal for a targeted petrol-production subsidy as an “ideological wardrobe” change. He also took exception to Atiku’s habit of calling President Tinubu by his first name. The old repertoire of ritualised, culturally sanctioned mockery acquired fresh campaign material.

Obviously, Atiku has hardly reciprocated in kind. In his clearest direct personal response, during an April 12, 2026, interview, he described Shettima as “disrespectful,” invoked his own seniority in age and public service and refused to engage him.

The 20-year age gap matters to Atiku. He sees a younger political figure violating northern Nigerian conventions of elder reverence, but Shettima sees a Fulani joking cousin who should take his squelchers with good humour.

There are two problems here. Elder reverence is clashing with culturally sanctioned joking relationship. What gives? In cultures where joking relationships are institutionalised, such as most of Muslim West Africa, age is bracketed. Social status is bracketed. Restraint is thrown out the window. You are supposed to grin and bear it if you can’t retort in like manner.

Anthropologist Florian Köhler’s documentation of Kanuri-Fulani teasing in Niger, which is true of joking relationships everywhere in West Africa, shows that the recipient can respond with a counter-insult or stoically endure the teasing. The custom makes room for both responses.

READ ALSO: 2027: Atiku is Nigeria’s Odinga, he can never win – Shettima

But beneath the mutual or one-sided derisions of joking relationships lies a genuine search for peace and camaraderie. That was why social anthropologist Mark Davidheiser helpfully called the institution “joking for peace” in a 2006 journal article.

For example, my younger brother who lives in Lagos discovered that a Bureau de Change man he’d thought was Hausa was, in fact, Zarma from Niger. After the discovery, their relationship went from mutual cordiality to aggressive, ritualised insults and mockery, but beneath all the make-believe hostility was a genuine affiliational solidarity.

The man often extends favours to my brother, including better exchange rates than he gives others, and shares other kinds of privileged information. My brother reciprocates. Baatonu and Zarma people call each other bààsè, which is Zarma for cousin, specifically the kind of cousin with whom one has the cultural licence to joke.

In 2014, UNESCO placed the practices and expressions of joking relationships on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It described the institution as “a tool for reconciliation and peace-building.”

The institution can require people bound by an ancestral pact to assist one another and settle disputes peacefully. That is the moral economy behind the extravagant insults. For many communities, joking relationships also preserve memories of old wars, migrations and reconciliations.

This leads me to the second problem. Enacting ritualised teasing in the realm of partisan politics is largely uncharted territory in Nigeria. When this cultural institution took shape, our current style of adversarial party politics was beyond anyone’s imagination.

Plus, Nigeria is pluri-cultural, and the institution is almost unknown in southern Nigeria. Most southerners, and even many young northerners who are not deeply inserted into their culture, gasp when they hear Kashim taking the cultural licence of joking relationships to take potshots at Atiku.

Elsewhere in West Africa, however, politicians have carried this custom into public political life.

In Mali in February 2004, President Amadou Toumani Touré, National Assembly President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta and Culture Minister Cheick Oumar Sissoko, who were linked by joking relationships, exchanged calabashes of beans on national television. The symbolic insults elicited laughter and demonstrated that people in different political camps could remain brothers.

In Senegal in April 2005, Prime Minister Macky Sall joined regional political figures representing Serer and Joola communities in an exchange involving a sheep and a sack of beans, to the amusement of the crowd.

Anthropologists Cécile Canut and Étienne Smith documented these political enactments of joking kinship. The participants visibly shared the playfulness. Everybody knew the script and played along.

That is the missing ingredient in the Shettima-Atiku encounter. Atiku once smiled through the banter, but his April response suggests that repeated electoral putdowns have worn thin. Shettima is also the serving vice president and Atiku his political opponent. Whatever the traditional license, official stature gives Shettima’s words wider reach and makes his ridicule sting differently.

I am reminded of Waziri Ibrahim, the Second Republic Borno politician and presidential candidate of the Great Nigeria Peoples Party, whose watchword was “Politics without bitterness.”

There is something peculiarly apt about a political philosophy associated with a man from Borno finding a possible cultural vehicle in an old Borno-linked joking relationship. Waziri imagined political differences existing within a larger national family.

 I think the culturally sanctioned license to insult can help drain bitterness from political rivalry, such as we have seen in other West African countries with a similar tradition.

For example, Shettima has repeatedly joked that he will retire Atiku to a farm and buy him goats. Perhaps Atiku could one day retort that Shettima is his slave and should tend the animals himself. That would be perfectly intelligible within the cultural conventions Shettima invokes.