There is a particular irony in writing a tribute to a man who has asked not to be celebrated. Ahead of today, September 2, 2026, the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria requested — through his media aide, Stanley Nkwocha — that there be no birthday parties in his honour, no goodwill advertorials in the newspapers, no congratulatory jingles on radio or television.
He asked instead that whatever anyone intended to spend on him be given to a charity, a cause, or a person in need. He asked for prayers for the country rather than praise for himself.
In a political culture where milestones are measured in column inches purchased, it is not a small thing at all. And it is, on reflection, an unusually accurate summary of the man now turning sixty.
Kashim Shettima Mustapha was born in Maiduguri on September 2, 1966, into the Kanuri household of Shettima Mustapha Kuttayibe. He was a child of the Borno that existed before the word “insurgency” attached itself permanently to the name of his state — a Borno of the old Kanem-Borno civilisational memory, of trade routes and scholarship, of a settled confidence about its place in the Nigerian federation.
He attended Lamisula Primary School in Maiduguri from 1972, moved on to Government Community Secondary School, Biu, and completed his secondary education at Government Science Secondary School, Potiskum, in 1983.
Biu and Potiskum are not glamorous entries on a curriculum vitae. They are, however, the making of a man who would later have to govern a state whose people live far from the comfort of the capital, and who would need to know something real about them.
He read Agricultural Economics at the University of Maiduguri, graduating in 1989, and served his NYSC year at the old Nigerian Agricultural Cooperative Bank in Calabar — a Kanuri son of the Sahel posted to the Cross River, which is precisely the kind of national accident the Youth Service was designed to produce.
He took a master’s degree in the same discipline at the University of Ibadan. Then he taught which explains the intellectual side of him. Before politics, before the bank, Shettima stood in a lecture hall at the University of Maiduguri until 1993.
It is a detail worth pausing over, because the didactic instinct never left him. Anyone who has heard him speak — the long historical detours, the fondness for statistics deployed as moral argument, the habit of naming names in praise — is listening to a lecturer who simply changed venues.
Banking came next, and he climbed it methodically: Commercial Bank of Africa in Lagos, African International Bank in Kaduna as deputy manager and then manager, and from 2001, Zenith Bank, where he ran the Maiduguri branch before rising to General Manager and Zonal Head for the North-East.
He left the private sector in 2007 at the top of it, which is the only respectable way to leave. Governor Ali Modu Sheriff brought him into the Borno cabinet in 2007, and for four years he was moved through the ministries the way a promising officer is moved through commands: Finance and Economic Development, Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Education, Agriculture, Health.
Five portfolios in four years is either a sign of restlessness at the top or of unusual usefulness. In his case it was the latter, and it produced a man who understood the machinery of a state government from five angles before he was ever asked to run it.
He was elected Governor of Borno in 2011 and re-elected by a wider margin in 2015. History gave him the worst hand dealt to any Nigerian governor of his generation. The Boko Haram insurgency did not merely disrupt his administration; it competed with it. Schools were rebuilt and burnt down. Hospitals were commissioned and destroyed.
By the state’s own accounting, tens of thousands of women were widowed and more than fifty thousand children orphaned. Over two million people were displaced. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack recorded some nine hundred schools destroyed in Borno alone.
What he did in response is the heart of any honest tribute to him. Confronted by a movement whose founding proposition was that Western education is forbidden, Shettima chose to answer the argument rather than merely the guns. He built schools.
The Mega Schools programme begun as a plan for twenty-one institutions and expanded past fifty. It was designed to take in the orphans of the insurgency, feed them, and teach them.
He equipped classrooms with digital teaching aids and sent teachers abroad for training. He established Borno State University, the first state university since Borno’s creation in 1976, in the middle of a war.
There is a photograph from 2017 of Shettima receiving Malala Yousafzai in Maiduguri: the girl the insurgents’ ideological cousins shot for going to school, standing beside the governor of the state they had tried hardest to unschool. Whatever else is said about those eight years, that image was not an accident of protocol. It was policy.
He was not spared criticism, and a tribute that pretends otherwise is not a tribute but an advertisement. The management of the IDP camps drew sustained scrutiny. His public appeals over the arming of the Civilian JTF were contentious.
Governing a state under siege is an exercise in choosing between imperfect options at speed, and the record reflects that. What is not in dispute is that he stayed. He did not govern Borno from Abuja.
In 2019 he handed over to Professor Babagana Zulum — a man he had himself appointed Commissioner for Reconstruction, Rehabilitation and Resettlement. A leader is entitled to be judged by his successor, and few Nigerian governors have been so well served by that test.
He went to the Senate for Borno Central from 2019 to 2023, and in 2023 President Bola Ahmed Tinubu chose him as running mate — a decision taken against considerable political headwind, and vindicated since.
He was sworn in as Nigeria’s fifteenth Vice President on May 29, 2023, and holds the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger.
As Chairman of the National Economic Council, he has occupied the room where the states and the centre must argue their way to agreement — on subsidy transition, on the tax reforms, on food security, on the mechanics of a difficult economic adjustment. It is unglamorous work.
Much of what a Vice President does is unglamorous work, and the office is largely defined by whether its occupant is trusted. President Tinubu marked this birthday by describing him as a patriot whose life has been shaped by service and sacrifice, and as a partner rather than merely a colleague.
Loyalty is a currency that has been badly devalued in Nigerian politics. Shettima has kept his at par. He married Nana Usman Alkali in 1998; they have three children. He is a devout Muslim with a well-documented instinct for friendship across the country’s fault lines — the kind of man whose guest list has always been broader than his constituency.
He reads. He remembers. He is, by wide agreement, funnier in private than the gravity of his office allows in public. Sixty is the age at which a Nigerian public servant is conventionally asked to slow down and at which a Nigerian politician conventionally does not.
Shettima arrives at it as the second citizen of the republic, still working, and still — by the evidence of this week — allergic to fuss.
In his own statement ahead of today, he made a point that deserves to outlive the birthday: that nobody reaches sixty, or any station worth reaching, purely on their own strength. He named family, teachers, colleagues, well-wishers, and strangers with nothing to gain. And he wished, for those who wished him well, “the quiet joy of being useful.”
That is the whole man in five words. An agricultural economist knows that harvests are not owed to anyone; they are worked for, they take seasons, and they are meant to be shared. Sixty years in, the harvest is still coming in.
Happy birthday, Your Excellency. May the country you serve deserve the service.
Ahmad Sajoh, _a fellow of Nigerian Institute of Public Relations writes_ _from 35 Oran Street Wuse Zone 1 Abuja.