Vice President Kashim Shettima has finally broken the silence about the circumstances behind a viral photograph showing him dining with a group of Fulani people.

Shettima addressed the issue during the 2025 International Press Institute Nigeria Conference and Annual General Meeting in Abuja.

He told participants at the event, which focused on addressing media repression and safeguarding democratic accountability, that the image had been misrepresented online by groups attempting to link him with bandits and Boko Haram.

According to him, the individuals in the photo were part of a larger community of displaced Fulanis who suffered severe hardship when Boko Haram forced them out of grazing areas in Sambisa forest and seized their livestock, leaving formerly wealthy herders in extreme poverty.

Shettima recounted how many of them later served as guards at schools built by the Borno State government when he was governor, noting that their situation reflected the deeper socioeconomic roots of insurgency.

He said he launched a wide-scale education initiative to break the cycle of poverty among the group, enrolling their children in school and providing food, clothing, and other incentives to win parents’ trust.

He added that he deliberately created a specialised learning environment for the children, complete with digital teaching tools, consistent meals, and transportation from their homes to encourage attendance.

According to him, his regular visits to the parents, during which he shared meals to build confidence, produced the viral photo now used by online actors to make false accusations.

Shettima stressed that the image resurfaced as part of a broader pattern of misinformation driven by what he described as anarchic elements on social media.

He maintained that mainstream media did not promote the misleading narrative and warned that unchecked social media falsehoods posed a growing threat to Nigeria’s democratic stability.

He also noted that public figures often become targets of such attacks, describing it as an unavoidable cost of leadership.

He said, “When Boko Haram moved to the Sambisa forest, they allowed the Fulanis to graze their livestock until war trickled down to them that the Fulanis were revealing information on the movements of the Boko Haram to the Nigerian military. So they drove them away, confiscated all their livestock.

“Very wealthy individuals became destitutes overnight. Most of them became my guards in the schools the government was building across Borno State because underneath the mayhem of Boko Haram, beneath it lies the real cause, which is extreme poverty. And education provides us the greatest tool of really addressing the root causes of insurgency and banditry.

“So we were crazily massively building educational facilities and most of these Fulanis were my guards in those facilities. I took it upon myself to break the intergenerational transfer of poverty, to reach out to those Fulanis and enroll their kids to school. I was even giving them rice, beans, clothing items, just to convince them to entrust their kids to me so that I can take them to school.

“And I was not keen on mixing them with the local people because they are the poorest of the poor. I even built a school, a special school. All the classrooms were air-conditioned, were using digital education aids, we were feeding them two times per day and we were bringing buses. Buses were conveying them from their homes to the school, just to encourage the parents.

“Regularly, whenever I go on visits, I used to sit down with the parents, eat, chat, just to win their confidence. One of those pictures recently went viral, ‘Shetima dining with Bandits and Boko Haram’ in Maiduguri.

“But I have developed a thick skin to such accusations, but none of the serious media houses took those stories. So the greatest threat to our democracy and our national survival is not the mainstream media. The anarchists in social media are the greatest threat.

“I know they will come after me. That’s the price of leadership. There are serious commentators and there are mischief mongers.

“Perhaps the most sacred duty of the media, as I said earlier, is the responsibility of saving democracy. And I understand that journalists and politicians sometimes enjoy the relationship of a cat and a mouse.” (TRIBUNE)