Shettima : When Brilliance Becomes Its Own Trap

Shettima : When Brilliance Becomes Its Own Trap

By Bagudu Mohammed

I just stumbled on the news attributed to Vice President Kashim Shettima, said to be clarifying his initial statement which he was quoted in Ilorin to have made that only 6 out of 19 northern governors believed in and supported Tinubu in 2023.

According to the Daily Trust of Thursday, 17 September, 2026, his clarification is thus: “…his comment about 6 Northern governors supporting President Tinubu referred only to political consultations before the APC presidential primary in June 2022, not to their support after he emerged as candidate or during the 2023 election. He said all Northern APC governors later rallied behind Tinubu to secure his victory and that he regrets any misinterpretation of his remarks.”

Kashim Shettima, Baba Ahmed Datti of Baze, former Minister of Sports Solomon Dalung, they all fall into the category of revered personalities I would like to call too intelligent, too smart, too expressive, that controversy hardly leaves them, because brilliance without restraint often becomes its own trap.

When I first read the statement attributed to Shettima, I was struggling to grasp the need or relevance of such a comment and how useful it was. Was he trying to be a historian chronicling who believed and who doubted, or simply trying to be a content creator who woos fans through jokes and dramatic revelations? The theatre of politics is seductive, but not every stage requires a performance.

Many people fail to understand that the true measure of the effectiveness of communication lies not in its grammar or its eloquence, but in its clarity, its ability to convince and to be understood without breeding controversy.

This is the heart of what communication scholars like Wilbur Schramm and Harold Lasswell described in the linear and transactional models of communication, that a message is only successful when the meaning encoded by the speaker is decoded by the listener exactly as intended, and research by Albert Mehrabian on the 7-38-55 rule shows that attitude, tone and emotion carry more weight than words themselves. If a public speaker or communicator is continuously being misunderstood or becomes a source of controversy through different meanings being read into his expression and creating wild speculations, he should take greater responsibility for the breakdown, rather than blaming the audience for mischief.

It is either we have not communicated effectively or we have not deployed the right attitude and emotions to achieve effectiveness of communication. Ironically, the three personalities mentioned have become notorious for failed communication, thereby creating a recurring need to explain, clarify and apologize or regret certain comments almost like a trait, like a signature they cannot shake off.

The fact that people write or express in a manner that makes them susceptible to misinterpretation and blackmail shows that they may not have chosen the right topic or expressed it effectively in a way that would successfully disarm the potential mischief makers or blackmailers and leave them with no weapon to deploy.

There is no need to revisit what they have said in the past that needed clarification or apology, since they eventually apologized. The argument however is that we should blame people less than ourselves when there is failure of communication, and the need to clarify messages frequently does not portray one as an effective communicator.

As George Bernard Shaw famously warned, the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place, and empirical findings in political communication show that leaders who frequently trigger controversies suffer what scholars call credibility erosion, where even truthful statements are filtered through suspicion.

While the art of understanding does not only depend on the speaker or writer because the decoder also needs the right attitude, emotions, psychology, physiology or biology to comprehend, becoming controversial about what one said and what one intended to say as a serial default is bad optics.

We all have a past and it is either we are teasing or catching cruise, if not it is utterly irrelevant to tell a spouse or remind her that you know you did not initially believe in me or like me when I toasted you. She has every right to ask you, what do you mean, whether you are still judging her. The past is a wound that should be allowed to heal, not reopened for applause. What is up Shettima?

Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com

Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575