By Shuaibu Shuaibu
Kashim Ibrahim Imam, a well-known political and business associate of President Bola Tinubu, has joined the ranks of the opposition seeking to oust the president from power in the 2027 general elections.
By his own admission, Imam has decided to put behind him 36 years of friendship with President Tinubu and instead support former Vice President Atiku Abubakar for the presidency next year.
There has been no reported business or political fallout between President Tinubu and Kashim Imam.
All that has been said came from a short social media post a few months ago by the Borno politician, who renounced his political alignment with Tinubu over what he termed “injustice” and admitted that there is an “abundance of wealth in Nigeria, hidden or seen”.
Media reports and presidential pronouncements indicate that Tinubu and Imam were still on friendly terms at the beginning of this administration.
Five months after the president took office, a public uproar followed an appointment he made.
Imam Kashim Imam, a 24-year-old recent mechanical engineering graduate and son of a political associate of the president, had been named board chairman of the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency.
The media reported that his father, Kashim Ibrahim Imam, campaigned vigorously and played a significant role in Tinubu’s emergence as president.
It was one of the earliest appointments the president would make. It had taken him almost three months to nominate the 45 ministers who made up his cabinet.
12 months to the end of his first term in office, dozens of ambassadorial positions remained unfilled. It is indicative of the high priority Tinubu gave to the appointment of the young Imam as FERMA chairman and the strong connection that would have led to that consideration in October 2023.
But the public uproar was loud enough for the president to withdraw the appointment the following week.
The older Imam, a one-time political rival of Ali Modu Sheriff, who twice contested against the former governor of Borno, was at the heart of the recent, late-April conference in Ibadan, Oyo State, by opposition parties.
The political parties sought to forge a common front and present a single presidential candidate to go against President Tinubu in January next year, and even made a declaration.
The alliance fell apart a week later after former Anambra governor, Peter Obi, and former governor of Kano, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, decamped from the African Democratic Congress to run on a joint ticket under the Nigeria Democratic Congress.
