Vice President Kashim Shettima has revealed that former President Goodluck Jonathan once attempted to remove him from office as governor of Borno State during the final years of the Jonathan administration save for the intervention of two political officeholders at the time.
Speaking on Thursday in Abuja at the public presentation of a book titled ‘OPL 245: The Inside Story of the $1.3 Billion Oil Block’, a memoir by former Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Bello Adoke (SAN), Shettima disclosed that he was the “most demonised” public official under the Jonathan government.
“In the last four years of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, I was the most demonised person; I was the public enemy number one,” Shettima said to a hall of dignitaries and guests at the launch event.
The Vice President, who governed Borno State between 2011 and 2019, recounted how a secret plan was hatched at the highest levels of government to oust him from office amid the heightened insecurity and Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East region.
“There are two gentlemen seated here,” he said, referring to Adoke and former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal. “Certain decisions are taken in a very rare peace circle – the President, the Vice President, the Senate President and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
“In one of such conclaves, former President Goodluck Jonathan, with whom we have now sheathed the sword and recalibrated our relationship, was muting the idea of removing this Borno governor.”
According to Shettima, it took the intervention of Tambuwal and Adoke to halt the plan at the time. Speaker Tambuwal, he noted, boldly confronted the President with the constitutional limitations of his office.
“Aminu Tambuwal had the courage to tell the President: ‘Your Excellency, you don’t have the powers to remove an elected councillor,’” Shettima recalled.
Still unsatisfied, Jonathan reportedly escalated the matter to the Federal Executive Council (FEC). It was there that Adoke firmly stood his ground on the constitutionality of the issue.
“He (Adoke) told the then President, ‘Mr. President, you do not have the powers to remove a sitting governor, not even a councillor.’ They sought the opinion of another SAN in the cabinet, Kabiru Turaki, who concurred with Adoke. That was how the matter was laid to rest,” Vice President Shettima explained.
Shettima added that the incident cemented a lifelong bond between him, Adoke and Tambuwal, whom he praised for their courage and fidelity to democratic principles.
He also commended Adoke for the fortitude to write the memoir and forgive those who persecuted him during and after his time in office.
“I am proud to be here to honour Adoke – a man of courage, conviction, and capacity,” he said. “He stood for what was right, even when it was politically inconvenient.”
The book launch event drew senior political figures, legal minds, and stakeholders in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector, as it spotlighted the controversial 2011 Malabu deal, in which Royal Dutch Shell and Italy’s Eni paid $1.3 billion to acquire Nigeria’s OPL 245, a deep-water oil block believed to contain as much as nine billion barrels of crude.
Shettima, reflecting on the broader theme of justice and public service, remarked that public officials must be prepared for scrutiny and historical judgment.
“Life itself is litigation with no final adjournment in the pursuit of justice,” the VP said, quoting a phrase that drew applause from the audience.
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